Leap of faith: Sukkot is a reminder of our unpredictable world

As an avid swimmer in Kenwood Ladies Pond, I know well that the season has turned. Water temperatures that a mere fortnight ago were a relatively comfortable 16.5C are now down to 12C and steadily dropping.

And as a Jew, I am acutely aware that a fortnight ago was Rosh Hashanah during, as it so often is, the last warm days of the dying summer. Succot, by contrast, is forecast to be quite wet and cool – a hard time to motivate oneself either to swim or, as we traditionally do on Succot, dine outdoors.

This changeable time of year is reflected in the precariousness of Succot’s origins. We recall the journeys of the Israelites in the desert through recreating their very temporary dwelling, the Succah, and then eating and even perhaps residing in one ourselves. Succot is a festival where we are reminded at every turn that the world is unpredictable, sometimes beautiful and bountiful, yet also too often brutal. And as the autumn harvest festival, we are reminded that agriculturally based societies live or die on the strength of their autumn harvest.

The book of Kohelet, which we read on Succot, only serves to heighten this sense of uncertainty.

“Havel havalim amar Kohelet havel havalim hakkol havel.” Translated famously by the King James Bible as “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity”, [Kohelet 3:1] the word havel in contemporary English means something much more like ‘absurdity’ (as in the technical terminology of the Existentialists) or ‘ephemerality’. All is fleeting, like vapours rising from water on an autumn morning, disappearing before a swimmer’s eyes.

Again, in the well-known poem that begins chapter three, Kohelet says that there is a time for everything. He counterpoints birth and death, laughter and tears, seeking and loosing, and much else, but the sentiment portrayed is not as comforting as we may view it at first glance. The cycle that Kohelet describes is endless. We humans cannot stop any of these things from happening.

Life will turn to death as surely as summer turns to autumn. So, too, with war and peace. Indeed, Kohelet’s concern is not, as Pete Seeger would have had us believe, that there is “ time for peace, I swear it’s not too late”, but rather as Kohelet asks us in the end: “What value, then, can those who labour get from what they earn?” [Kohelet 3:9].

What value, indeed? If the world is ephemeral, what can we hold onto?

For many of us, we are living through most unstable period which we have ever known. That we are rapidly cycling through life and death, weeping and laughing, wailing and dancing, silence and speaking is now blindingly evident. A succah provides little protection from the ravages of either the elements or world events.

Yet Succot asks us to hold onto these temporary structures like wisps of meaning that we build to protect ourselves “before… the clouds come back again after the rain”. [Kohelet 12:2]