The Home Our Ancestors Recognize

Erev Sukkot 5787

I have some bad news about our sukkah.

Actually, I have some bad news about all of our sukkot.

There is a nor'easter coming this weekend. And apparently the weather gods have decided that the appropriate way to begin Sukkot this year is by conducting an experiment in the structural integrity of Jewish temporary dwellings. We have spent all this time building the sukkah — the walls, the schach, the decorations. We made it beautiful.

And now the wind is coming.

There is something almost too perfect about beginning Sukkot this way. We build a house. And then the wind comes.

And the sukkah reminds us that the house is not the point. We have spent these High Holy Days talking about what it means to belong to one another, what it means to inherit a tradition, what it means to bring our inner values into the world. And then, on Sukkot, Judaism gives us a physical structure and says: okay, now build something. But make it temporary. Build something vulnerable, with an open roof;  something that lets you hear the wind, something that may not survive the week.

And then — layshev ba'sukkah — dwell in it. 

Don't visit it. Don't just admire it or take a picture of it. Dwell in it. Because there is something Judaism wants us to learn from a home that cannot quite protect us.

A few days ago I came across a beautiful reflection on Sukkot by Rabbi Tali Adler. She begins, "For thousands of years, we have left homes behind." And then she writes: "Our ancestors' bones are buried in places we've never seen. Their houses are inhabited by strangers. We live in places our ancestors never knew."

That is an extraordinary description of Jewish history. Our ancestors lived in places we have never seen, spoke languages we don't speak, ate foods we may never have tasted, prayed in rooms we cannot find. Their homes are gone. Their synagogues have become museums, ruins, apartments, parking lots. And even when their buildings remain, the people who built them are gone.

And then Adler says: "Once a year though, we leave our homes for the sukkah, and all that changes." Because once a year, we step out of whatever home we happen to inhabit now and enter a home built according to ancient Jewish instructions. We build walls. We put branches on top. We make a temporary dwelling. We sit around a table. And suddenly, for a moment, we are doing something that Jews have been doing for thousands of years.

Rabbi Adler writes: "Maybe it's here that our ancestors can recognize us best."

Not because our ancestors would necessarily recognize our lives; they probably wouldn't. Imagine bringing one of your ancestors here tonight — showing them the Berkshires, our cars, our phones, our electricity, our supermarkets, our Hebrew school, our music, our families, our lives. They might look around and think: what happened to you people?

And they might not recognize our Judaism either. 

They might not understand exactly what we're doing, might not recognize the melodies or the way we pray, the questions we ask or some of the choices we make. But perhaps they would recognize something deeper; some ikar— some indestructible essence that connects their Jewish lives to ours. That we still gather, still tell stories, still argue about Torah, still invite people in, still make a home for Jewish life.

Built into our celebration of Sukkot is a kind of spiritual imagination exercise: we're told to invite in ushpizin, treasured guests whose spirit might be felt, but we'd probably fall over in shock if they walked in in body. Our tradition tells us: imagine what it would be like to dwell in your sukkah with Abraham and Sarah, or with your great-great-grandfather Yitzhak, or your great-great-great-grandmother Sura.

A story: 

Moses goes up to heaven. And while he is there, he sees God doing something strange — adding little crowns to the letters of the Torah, tiny marks, tiny flourishes. Moses asks God “why?” And God tells him that someday there will be a great teacher named Rabbi Akiva who will derive entire worlds of Torah from those tiny marks. Moses says, “show me this man”. 

So God transports Moses — not to the future in some grand, cinematic way, but into the back of Rabbi Akiva's beit midrash. And Moses sits there, and listens. He has absolutely no idea what anyone is talking about. The students are arguing. Rabbi Akiva is teaching. There are layers and layers of interpretation. And Moses, the person who received the Torah, is completely lost. He doesn't recognize his own tradition. He becomes discouraged.

Until one of the students asks Rabbi Akiva: “where does this teaching come from?” And Rabbi Akiva answers: Halakhah le-Moshe mi-Sinai — this is a teaching given to Moses at Sinai. And Moses is reassured, because suddenly he understands: oh, that's me. I don't understand everything happening here. This Torah has become something I never could have imagined. But somehow, underneath all of this change, I am still here.

I love that story because it tells us something important about what Jewish continuity actually means. Continuity does not mean sameness. Moses doesn't walk into Rabbi Akiva's beit midrash and say, "Excellent. Everything looks exactly the way I left it." It doesn't. It's completely different. And yet it is still Torah. It is still his inheritance. It is still connected to Sinai. Moses can recognize himself in something he doesn't understand. And perhaps that's what it means to be part of a tradition: we don't preserve a museum piece, we inherit something and then we have to make it live.

I've been thinking about this in relation to the idea we've been exploring throughout these High Holy Days: we are ancestors in the making. Every one of us is going to become somebody else's ancestor — not necessarily biologically, but every one of us is leaving something behind. A story, a practice, a melody, a value, a way of welcoming someone, a way of arguing, a way of forgiving, a way of being Jewish. Someone will inherit something from us, and we have no idea what they will do with it.

We don't know what Judaism will look like fifty years from now, or a hundred. We don't know what our descendants will find familiar. They may live in places we never imagined, pray in ways we wouldn't recognize, have Jewish lives that would surprise us. And that's okay. Because our job isn't to make the future look like the present. Our job is to give the future enough that it can make something of it.

And this is where the ushpizin become so powerful. Traditionally, on Sukkot, we invite our ancestors into the sukkah — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, David, and in many contemporary traditions, Sarah, Miriam, Ruth, Esther, and others. But perhaps we should ask why. 

Why do we invite our ancestors into a temporary little hut? 

Why do we imagine Abraham and Sarah sitting with us under a roof of branches? 

Why would we want our ancestors here?

Maybe it is because the sukkah is the one place where the generations can recognize one another. The sukkah is not our permanent home. It is a home built according to ancient instructions. We step outside the homes our ancestors could never have imagined and enter a structure they would understand. And for seven days, time gets strangely folded. The person who lived thousands of years ago and the person sitting here tonight can inhabit the same kind of space. And maybe, just maybe, they can recognize us.

But there's another way of thinking about it. Maybe the ushpizin aren't just people we invite into our sukkah. Maybe we are building the sukkah for them. R’ Tali Adler puts it beautifully: "Maybe somehow in this dwelling of transience, shared across generations, we create a place our ancestors can come home."

I love that reversal. We usually think of ourselves as inheritors of our ancestors. But on Sukkot, perhaps we become their hosts. We say to Abraham and Sarah: come see what happened to your inheritance. Come see where we live, what we have made, how your Torah traveled, the people who came after you. And maybe they'll be surprised. Maybe they won't understand everything. Maybe, like Moses in Akiva's beit midrash, they'll sit in the back and wonder what on earth we're doing. But perhaps, every once in a while, they'll hear something that makes them say: oh, that's us.

So — back to that nor'easter. Because we may spend all this time building our sukkah, and the wind may come, and the walls may fall down, and the schach may blow into somebody else's yard. And we'll stand there and think: well, that didn't work.

But maybe it did. Because perhaps the mitzvah was never to build a house that could withstand every storm. The sukkah is deliberately teaching us that we cannot build that house. We cannot build a structure that protects us from everything, a life in which nothing breaks, a community in which everyone agrees, a Judaism that never changes, a home that will last forever. What we can do is build, and welcome, and dwell, and repair, and rebuild.

Our ancestors knew something about this. They knew what it meant to leave homes behind, what it meant to arrive somewhere they had never been, what it meant to build and rebuild. They knew that the places we inhabit are temporary, that sometimes the walls come down. And what they passed to us was not a guarantee that our walls would stand. They passed to us something else: the knowledge of how to build again.

That may be the deeper meaning of being an ushpizin — of inviting our ancestors into our lives. They aren't just looking backward at us. They're accompanying us forward. And perhaps someday, when we are the ancestors, someone will build a sukkah and invite us in. And we may not understand it. We may not recognize the music or the language, and we may wonder why they are doing things so differently. But maybe we'll recognize something — that they are still gathering, still arguing about Torah, still feeding people, still telling stories, still trying to make meaning, still building a Jewish home. And we'll think: oh, that's ours.

So this Sukkot, I want to suggest that we pay attention to the strange homes we build — the physical sukkah, the synagogue, our families, our friendships, our Jewish communities, the traditions we inherit and the traditions we change, the things we decide are worth carrying forward. Because all of these are temporary. All of them are vulnerable. All of them will change. And that doesn't make them meaningless. It makes them ours to tend.

And if the wind comes this weekend — if our sukkah falls — we'll be disappointed. We'll pick up the pieces, find the branches, straighten the walls, repair what can be repaired. And we'll build again. And perhaps, as we do, we can imagine our ushpizin sitting nearby: Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Ruth and David, the people whose names we know, and the countless people whose names we don't. Our grandparents. Our great-grandparents. The people who carried Judaism through places and circumstances we can barely imagine — the people whose houses are gone, whose bones are buried in places we've never seen, who handed us something fragile and unfinished and said: here, now you carry it.

And perhaps they are not asking us to preserve exactly what they gave us. Perhaps they are asking us to make a home for it — a home that they might not recognize at first, a home that may look completely different from theirs, a home that might even blow over in the wind. But a home where, somehow, across all the generations, they can come home.

And maybe, when they arrive, they'll look around at this strange, temporary, beautiful thing we've built — and they'll recognize us. Oh. That's them. That's what they did with what we gave them.

And maybe that is enough.

Chag sameach.