The ‘really real’ world
Sukkot

by Rabbi Neil Gillman
professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and author of The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought and The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism.

Religion is “(t)he relatively modest dogma that God is not mad.” I had been searching for definitions of religion and came across that rather colorful definition by Salvador de Madariaga, a 20th-century Spanish historian and diplomat, in a much more conventional paper on that topic by renowned American anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

Geertz’s own version of that definition views religion as a way of ordering our experience of the world, where the key word is “order.” At the heart of religion, Geertz suggests, is the tension between cosmos and chaos, order and anarchy. Our everyday experience of reality suggests that much of it is ordered and predictable, but much is unpredictable. The sun does rise every morning, spring does follow winter, and a ball thrown in the air will fall. But then there are also those unanticipated, traumatic events brought about by the inherent perversities of human beings and the capriciousness of nature: airplane crashes, tsunamis, and the like.

The function of religion, Geertz suggests, is to posit the existence of another, subliminal reality, a “really real” world that corrects and perfects the world in which we conduct our day-to-day lives. Religious ritual helps us cope with the chaos by infusing our real world and its anarchic moments with the perfected world of the religious vision where everything is in its proper place and time. Hence the notion that religion claims that “God is not mad,” where “mad” does not mean “angry” but rather “unpredictable.”

By that definition, Sukkot is Judaism’s most “religious” festival. At the heart of the festival of Sukkot is the tension between order and anarchy, between security and vulnerability. The overarching theme of the festival serves both to heighten our sense of the precariousness of life and at the same time, paradoxically, to reassure us that in the “really real” world, the world in which God abides, we are secure.

The sukka itself says it all. On one hand, what makes it a sukka is its very fragility. It is supposed to be a “dirat aria,” a temporary dwelling open to the skies and the elements, and within it, shade overwhelms sunlight. On the other hand, in our daily liturgy, we pray that God spread over us God’s sukkat shalom, the sukka of peace, suggesting that the sukka has the power to shield us. On this festival, we leave our permanent homes of bricks and steel and dwell in fragile booths. Our true security comes not from towers of steel but from this flimsy booth.

Living in the sukka highlights our existential vulnerability. We are totally exposed to the capriciousness of nature, which of course is what we are, life-long. But at the same time, we are reassured that in the “really real” world of the liturgy where order reigns, this fragile booth keeps us safe.

The tension is recapitulated in the festival liturgy. Sukkot, we recite again and again, is “the festival of our rejoicing.” But in that same daily liturgy, we also recite the Hoshana prayers, asking God to “save us,” every day of the festival. And we read Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes, arguably the bleakest book in the entire Torah, which opens with the words “Utter futility! All is futile!” and reminds us that the day of death is better than the day of birth. Yet this is “the festival of our rejoicing!”

As Sukkot merges imperceptibly into the festival of the eighth day, Shemini Atzeret, technically a separate festival in its own right, the dark mood prevails; we pray for rain and we recite Yizkor. All of this prepares us for celebrating Simhat Torah, when we dance around the Torah in unbridled joy, while, in the Torah reading for the day, we read of the death of Moses. What an emotional roller-coaster!

Sukkot heightens the tension between the world in which we conduct our day-to-day lives, and a second world, a “really real” world, which is perfectly ordered and where security reigns.

In our tradition, that perfectly ordered world emerged at the climax of the six days of creation symbolized by the first Shabbat. God rested on that day because the world that God had created was “very good.” That perfectly ordered world will reappear at the end of time, in an age that our tradition refers to as an eternal Shabbat. Between the Shabbat that was and the Shabbat that will be, we live in a world where order and anarchy are intermingled. But weekly, we are given a Shabbat that reminds us of the perfection that was and the perfection that will be.

Sukkot reassures us that though we may live in a world in which madness seems to reign, God, at least, is not mad.