Making sense of the sedra: Sukkot

I am writing this at a moment of uncertainty and concern, when the Jewish people feel, once again, as though we are being asked to choose sides. In Israel, another election season sharpens old arguments and gives them new slogans. Here in the UK, a similar divide is becoming harder to ignore.

Conversations that ought to be held with concern are too often held with suspicion. Differences that might once have sat around the same Shabbat table now threaten to become separate tables altogether. It is obvious of course that these divisions are a direct by product of our sense of helplessness and anxiety, but if history has sadly taught us anything, it is that knowing something to be true doesn’t always change the outcome.

And then, within all this, comes Sukkot, almost stubbornly cheerful, asking us, in what seems a borderline comical display of naivety, not to be fractured by these insecurities, but instead to embrace them, symbolically and quite literally, by stepping outside our solid homes and sitting together under something deliberately fragile, a perfect mirror of the world in which we live.

There is a remarkable teaching in the Gemara that, in principle, all of Israel could sit in one sukkah. Not because it would be comfortable. Not because no one would argue about the lighting, the seating plan, the politics, the choice of songs, or whether the schach thatched canopy had been put up properly. But because a sukkah is not built around the illusion that everyone inside it is the same. Its holiness lies in the fact that there is room beneath it for the whole people.

This is not a sentimental idea added on to Judaism from the outside. It is a running theme through Jewish law and Jewish thought. The ketoret, the incense offered in the Temple, included the chelbenah, a spice remembered precisely because it did not smell pleasant. Yet without it, the incense was incomplete. The point is not that the chelbenah secretly smelled beautiful. It did not. Some things, and some people, are difficult for us. Some voices jar. Some opinions grate. Some fellow Jews leave us wondering how on earth we are meant to stand alongside them. But the ketoret teaches that a community made only of what I perceive as sweet fragrances is not the fragrance Hashem asked for.

The arba minim make the same point in our hands. The Midrash famously sees in them four kinds of Jews. The etrog has taste and fragrance, Torah and good deeds. The lulav has taste but no fragrance. The hadas has fragrance but no taste. And the aravah has neither taste nor fragrance. Yet the mitzvah cannot be fulfilled with three out of four. The aravah is not an optional extra, tolerated politely at the edge of the bundle. It is held together with the others, bound into the very act of rejoicing before Hashem.

Of course, the danger is that we always know exactly who the aravah is. Conveniently, it is usually the person with whom we disagree. They have no taste. They have no fragrance. They are the problem. But perhaps what seems tasteless to me may carry a fragrance I have failed to notice. Perhaps the person I call distant sees me as the one who is confused. Perhaps you look at me and see the rasha; perhaps I look at you and see the tzaddik; perhaps we are both wrong, and perhaps that is precisely why we need to be tied into one tzibbur – the Hebrew word for bundle or community.

After all, the very word tzibbur can be seen as an acronym for tzaddikim, beinonim and reshaim: the righteous, the ordinary and the wicked. A Jewish community is not a club for those who have passed an entrance exam in virtue. It is the impossible, sacred, sometimes infuriating gathering of all of us. The people who inspire us, the people who disappoint us, the people who vote differently, daven differently, speak differently, and understand the Jewish future differently.

This is not a call to blandness. Unity does not mean pretending that convictions do not matter, or that every argument is equally wise, or that every wound can be solved with a communal photograph and a plate of kugel in a damp sukkah. Sometimes the chelbenah still smells unpleasant. Sometimes the aravah still seems to have no taste. Sukkot does not ask us to abandon judgement. It asks us to abandon the fantasy that the Jewish people can survive by amputating whichever limbs currently offend us.

Our enemies have always understood this better than we do. They are rarely interested in the subtle distinctions by which we divide ourselves. To them, we are one people. Our unity is not a luxury for quieter times; it is the only tool we have strong enough to face the forces that wish us harm. And its absence is our kryptonite, the one weakness capable of breaking us from within.

Perhaps that is why Sukkot comes at the culmination of the Yamim Noraim. After judgement, repentance and forgiveness, we do not retreat into private righteousness. We build a sukkah, take the arba minim, and learn how to rejoice together. Sukkot carries overtones of the end of days, of the messianic horizon, when humanity will recognise Hashem and gather in peace. But Judaism rarely lets us leave its greatest visions safely in the future. It asks us to begin building them now, with palm branches, willow leaves, awkward conversations and enough humility to sit beside someone we do not understand.

We cannot wait one more minute to get on with it. This Sukkot, may we find the courage not merely to speak about unity, but to make room for it: under our sukkot, in our shuls, across our communities, and in the heart of our nation itself.

Chag Sameach.

Rabbi Elchonon Feldman is Chair of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue and Senior Rabbi of Bushey United Synagogue