Last week I wrote about Yom Kippur as a quintessentially adult holiday. This week we arrive at Sukkot, a holiday very much made for children.
Aside from the assembly and decoration of the sukkah itself, which many kids love to do, there’s the basic notion of the sukkah that I find engages children. “You mean we build a hut and eat our meals in it? I have so many questions!” How many walls does it need, and what can they be made out of? How high can it be? How short? What if you can’t fit your whole body inside the sukkah–does it still count? What if you used an elephant for a wall? What counts as a “meal”–can I snack outside the sukkah? What if it rains? What if we built a sukkah on a wagon? Or what if–crazy idea, I know–but what if we built one sukkah on top of another sukkah?!
All of these and many more are questions we could imagine children asking–and all of them happen to be actual questions the Talmud takes up. They point up the playfulness of Sukkot: the way we create rules to delineate walls and boundaries and then poke and prod within, around, and perhaps just beyond that perimeter. Without those rules, the sukkah cannot exist. But once we state the basic rules–minimum 3 walls, between 10 handbreadths and 20 cubits high, roof made of organic material that’s no longer attached to the earth, and make it your dwelling place for 7 days–then we’re going to invite all sorts of questions. That’s what children do, and that’s where the adults of the Talmud go too.
To the point, one of the joys of my own parenting has been studying tractate Sukkah of the Mishnah with each of my children at around age 7 or 8. In my experience, there is something deliciously approachable for a child of that age in this subject matter. And we went a little further and extended the play by creating little home movies with legos to illustrate the teachings. For your viewing pleasure, here’s my favorite:
The 20th century German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes, “In being presented as play, what is emerges. It produces and brings to light what is otherwise constantly hidden and withdrawn.” He applies this observation to art: “What we experience in a work of art and what invites our attention is how true it is–i.e. to what extent one knows and recognizes something in oneself.” But, as Gadamer shows, the observation applies to any world created through shared acquiescence to the rules of play: a game, a poem, a song, a comedy sketch, a conversation, a Mishnah movie made on an iPhone.
And in that sense, of course, building and dwelling in the sukkah invite us to experience something much deeper about what is than we can experience through our regular everyday activity. Most fundamentally, perhaps, there are invitations in the sukkah to reveal for ourselves truths about permanence and impermanence: “All seven days one must make the sukkah their permanent residence and their house their temporary residence” (Sukkah 2:9). What do we experience as permanent, and what as temporary? It doesn’t get more real than that.
In this past year, I certainly have been profoundly challenged on that score: to really sense what seemingly permanent dwelling places I have created for myself, and to allow them to dissolve into a new reality–one in which things like borders and social contracts, the language and norms of public life, the weather and the coastline, can’t be taken for granted. Rather, these things are always being renewed–like our breath, like our lives. Which is no simple matter. It is affirmatively not child’s play.
And yet, on the heels of the confrontation with mortality and renewal that is Yom Kippur, here is Sukkot, with its rules and its games, to invite us deeper still. Hevel havalim–hakol havel–Everything is the merest breath, says Kohelet (1:2). After all the play of Sukkot, that perhaps is the essence at which we can arrive. In arriving there, with all the difficulty and loss that arrival entails, we might experience renewal and possibility. May it be so this year.
