Sukkot: Seeking strength

“I just can’t do this anymore.”

“I don’t have the strength to keep on going.”

“I am at the end of my rope.”

I hear these voices everywhere. From friends whose husbands are, yet again, in miluim (reserve duty). From mothers of soldiers who haven’t slept for weeks, months. A year, really. From people who have spent the past year in a hotel room with their children. From people like me, who are not affected in the same direct ways, but suffer, nonetheless, under the constant strain of dread and loss and trauma.

Who am I kidding? I hear these voices inside my own head, too.

We have lived through a year of war and the end is not in sight yet. A year of sacrifices. A year of losses. A year of heartaches. We don’t need the holiday of Sukkot to remind us of life’s fragility, of the impermanence of material reality this year. Why would we, when we are keenly aware of how life can be overturned in a moment, how every phone call might herald an impossible loss, how every message might summon a loved on into reserve duty, how every news alert can drop the floor underneath our feet?

Our lives are awash with instability. Yet we can’t afford to let this instability sap our strength away. Not when we are fighting for our very existence. Not when we don’t have a choice but to find the strength to carry on.

What can we grasp to give us a sense of steadiness in a world that is, as we’ve discovered, as temporary and fragile as a sukkah at all times?

At different times this year, I found different answers to this question.

On October 7th, I grasped my children — and my responsibility to help them through this crisis.

In subsequent months, I grasped duty, and what I could do to ease other people’s lives.

As we stood in the streets to honor too many fallen soldiers, I held onto my neighbors’ hands.

And today, as airplanes make the air tremble and my heart cries with exhaustion, I hold onto the four minim, species of plants, that we purchased for Sukkot, and find within them yet another well of strength.

The etrog, citron, reminds me of citrus orchards on the sea board of Israel, of the young men and women who immigrated to Israel in the first aliyot, dried the swamps and built thriving communities. They had to fight and sacrifice for every small achievement. But they found the strength to do so.

And here we are today.

The lulav (closed frond of date tree) reminds me of the date trees that were smuggled into Israel in the 1930s and grown in Kvutzat Kinneret, reviving the date industry in the land of Israel and strengthening our ability to survive here, on this land. Each of those trees — and their descendants throughout Israel — bears witness to the ingenuity, creativity, and dedication of the generations that came before us, the men and women who worked tirelessly, over decades, to revive, not only the date industry, but us as a nation who lives upon its land. They faced enmity and opposition. They were repeatedly attacked and terrorized, as the gravestones in Kinneret’s graveyard testify to this day. But they persevered. They went on planting and defending.

And here we are today.

Kvutzat Kinneret’s graveyard, overlooking the Kinneret. (courtesy)

The hadas, myrtle, reminds me of the old man in the story about Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. Upon leaving the cave for the second time, Rabbi Shimon, whose disdain towards people who were engaged in non-holly pursuits led him to burn them but a year earlier, noted an old man holding two myrtle branches in his hands. Instead of hurting him, Rabbi Shimon asked the man to explain his actions. The man explained that he was carrying them home for Shabbat, and that he carried two because Shabbat was given us in two commandments — to remember and to keep.

The old man taught Rabbi Shimon that our engagement with the land is deeply connected to our spiritual journey, and taught us all that our covenant with God happens, first and foremost, in the exhausting and sometimes frustrating grind of our daily work. Many generations toiled and maintained this covenant, in good and bad times.

And here we are today.

And last but not least, the aravah (willow) reminds me of the ancient exiles who hung their musical instruments on willow trees by Babylon’s rivers, and refused to play the songs of Zion for their captors, for how could they play God’s music in a foreign land? They swore to remember Jerusalem, and they kept their promise. For even after years — decades — millennia of exile and persecution, each generation passed its memories forward, wove an yearning for Zion into their children’s minds and hearts.

This yearning swelled into a new song of action and return in the past few generations. Notes of loss and sacrifice are embedded in this song, but so are notes of courage, and homecoming, and belonging.

And though this song requires work and resolve and painful sacrifices, here we are, still singing it, today.

Our moment in time is incredibly difficult. The costs we pay are unfathomable. The burden, especially on the heroic families of our soldiers, is unlike any other challenge I’ve experienced.

But in my hands, in the four species I will carry into my sukkah tomorrow, lie the remembrance of the journeys that brought us here. And in this journey, in our ancestors’ miraculous perseverance, I too find the strength to carry on.

Rachel is a Jerusalem-born writer and educator who's in love with her city's vibrant human scene. She writes about Judaism, history, and life in Israel for the Times of Israel and other online venues, and explores storytelling in the Hebrew bible as a teacher in Matan, Maayan, Torah in Motion, and Pardes.