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Oct
16
2024

Weekly Parshah Commentary
Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot

For the Torah reading on the Shabbat that falls within Chol HaMoed, or the intermediate days, of the weeklong festival of Sukkot, we revisit a segment of Parshat Ki Tissa in the book of Shemot. It’s a curious selection. The reading only mentions Sukkot itself (“the Festival of Ingathering”) offhandedly in a single verse; most of the narrative centers on Moses pleading with God to restore the divine presence to the Israelites after the sin of the Golden Calf, and for a more personal revelation. God accedes to both requests, passing before Moses as he hides in the cleft of a rock and declaring the 13 attributes of God’s mercy, then commanding the fashioning of a new set of tablets and establishing a renewed covenant. At first glance, this reading, with its focus on transgression and restoration, seems more suitable for Yom Kippur than Sukkot, which is known as zman simchateinu (the time of our rejoicing). Indeed, parts of these same chapters are read on fast days to mark God’s capacity to forgive even the greatest of sins. So what connects this narrative to our holiday?

A famous rabbinic debate makes the link clearer. In a discussion of the lines in Vayikra that mandate dwelling in “sukkot” during the holiday “so that your generations will know that I made the Israelites dwell in sukkot,” Rabbi Akiva holds that “sukkot,” which literally means “booths,” refers to the real, physical structures that the Israelites dwelt in while sojourning through the desert, while Rabbi Eliezer argues that the term is an allusion to the Clouds of Glory that traveled with the Israelites during this period in the wilderness as a manifestation of God’s presence. Following Rabbi Eliezer’s view, our holiday recalls and celebrates the intimate protection of God’s sheltering presence; accordingly, the Shabbat Chol HaMoed reading is a text concerned with the return of God’s presence, in the form of the Clouds of Glory, to the people of Israel. We commemorate this reconciliation, and recall what it means to dwell in such visceral proximity, in divine shelter.

While Rabbi Eliezer’s understanding of “sukkot” as referring to divine clouds emphasizes the aspect of intimate relationship with God, Rabbi Akiva’s more literal reading of the term calls our attention to the intrinsic holiness of another kind of intimate relation: that between human beings. The booths that Rabbi Akiva invokes, impermanent and open to the elements, are often held up homiletically as a paradigm of uncertainty and instability. For seven days, we are meant to inhabit a reality in which we are dependent upon, and vulnerable to, the physical world around us. This vulnerability is often characterized as an extreme embodiment of our ordinary and constant vulnerability that can only be overcome through reliance upon God—a discomfiting week in which insecurity prompts fear and thus devotion. But, as the philosopher Judith Butler argues in a number of works (including their 2020 book The Force of Nonviolence), vulnerability is not a state to transcend but an essential element of human life—a condition produced by a shared dependency on fellow living beings and on “those environmental and social structures that make our lives livable.” For Butler, vulnerability is not only inevitable but the basis for ethical relation itself: In recognizing our vulnerability and acknowledging our mutual interdependence, we also assume responsibility toward others. In this understanding, an awareness of our dependency and vulnerability becomes the foundation for intimacy and care.

Though the Torah’s mandate to dwell in sukkot is grounded in the past narrative of the Israelites wandering in the desert, the holiday of Sukkot also looks toward the future, and in fact becomes an idiom through which long-term, even messianic, longing is expressed. The special Sukkot addition to the blessing recited after meals draws on a verse from Amos, praising God for “raising up the fallen sukkah of David,” a reference to the messianic line descended from King David. And in the prayer recited upon leaving the sukkah on the final day of the holiday, we beseech God that we may “sit next year in a sukkah made out of the skin of Leviathan,” referencing a tradition that in the messianic era, God will prepare a sukkah for the righteous from the hide of the great sea monster. These texts present dwelling in sukkot not as a past experience to be overcome but rather as a model for the redeemed future, a future whose aim is not to move from instability to stability, from porosity to impenetrability. Instead, we pray to dwell indefinitely in the sukkah—the sukkah of David and the sukkah of God’s peace—and we dream not of invulnerability and self-sufficiency, but of the vulnerability of being intimately enmeshed with and dependent upon one another.

Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.