This time of the year – Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah – this is the time of circles. Of going round and round. We are satellites orbiting something of great gravity – the Divine, or Creation, or Destiny, or the weight of human experience. We walk circuits, we make a spiral of time, we complete a cycle of Torah.
The week that we are emerging from is a symphony of symbols and rituals and ancient texts – texts and symbols and rituals about impermanence. We build a wobbly hut, vulnerable to wind and rain. We enter it and pray for the very rain that will soak us right through the shaky sukkah roof. We look back in time, inviting ancestors to join us under the palm branches, and we look ahead to what comes next. We take the lulav and etrog and we wave them in the cardinal directions and also up and down, describing circles in three different planes.
This is harvest time. Our ancestors lived in these huts while they brought in the crops. And we are left with the tradition of the hut even when we are not farmers. We sit in the windblown structure, wondering what is ours to harvest, and trying to remember what it was we tried to plant. And if what we tried to plant is not what is ripening, we might wonder what better seeds to sow next time around.
In this frail time of year, fragility lives alongside abundance, or the hope of abundance. Hopefulness and anxiety do a circle dance, arms linked, spinning until they are a blur. In this moment, things could go any direction. At any moment things could go any direction, but here, on Sukkot, and Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah, we honor and uplift the uncertainty. We honor the cyclicality.
We are at a crux in the calendar, and from here things can go more than one way.
That becomes obvious to us as we wind up the year’s cycle of Torah reading. Our Five Books of Moses end with Moshe’s last vision, a view into the Promised Land, a look toward the future that he will not be allowed to participate in. We are told his eyes are still keen and his strength unabated. Nonetheless, he dies. His lifespan has been 120 years and God will not allow him to move forward beyond this border.
We reach the end of Deuteronomy and witness Moshe’s death, and leadership passing to Joshua who, Torah tells us, is filled with the spirit of chokhmah, the spirit of Wisdom: Wisdom, which we learn in the Book of Proverbs pre-existed Creation itself. (Chapter 8 et seq.) The spirit of Wisdom was God’s co-creator. So Joshua is filled with Wisdom of some deep and old sort, primordial Wisdom, a reminder of Creation’s earliest moments that Joshua is carrying into the future.
Moshe dies and the people mourn him for 30 days. And this is where we have a fork in the road. There are at least two ways to continue.
One is to follow the people ahead into the Book of Joshua, into the stories of conquest; into the emergence of a historical People of Israel out of our great myths of boundary-crossers and angel-wrestlers and desert-wanderers. This direction is the path into a Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. And then beyond – into wars and destructions and exile and the plentiful tears that pour down like rain.
The other fork follows not the people in Torah but the people who read Torah. Following this path, we join Moshe in seeing the Promised Land ahead, and like Moshe, we don’t enter it. We close our eyes as he closes his and in a heartbeat we are back at the Beginning, in the primordial darkness, catching our breath as it hovers over the deep water.
We are at such a crossroads right now. Where the road could split and go toward something that feels to us to be of great promise. A place or time where we imagine honey-sweetness and plenty for all on this earth. Or the road could throw us back into a time of darkness and chaos. And that is a frightening prospect. But in Torah, that chaos, that tohu vavohu as it is poetically called, only lasts for two lines and then already, Light is being called into Being.
Our companion text for Sukkot is the Book of Ecclesiastes, or Kohelet as it is called in Hebrew. Kohelet is a moody book, full of discouragement and angst. It embodies the fear that we will always be thrown back into darkness. That nothing of value that we build will endure. But Kohelet, even looking squarely at the fleetingness of wealth and position and safety, still says, “I found that Wisdom is better than folly, as light is better than utter darkness.”
Wisdom, chokhmah, is always available, even in times of setback.
I say all of this out of my own fear and anxiety about the setbacks that might be ahead. I am not predicting anything specific about this election. I feel the powerful determination all around me. But the fundraising texts and emails carry a direness designed to make me fear (and donate). But I think that no matter what happens in the election, there can and will be setbacks ahead. If the election doesn’t go the way we’d like, we know what we will be up against. And even if it does go the way we’d like, we will still be up against it! There will be backlash. And there is the painful knowing that half our country wants walls and deportations and no abortions and no transgender kids. And that will continue into the next election and the one after that. The cycle we are in is not a 4-year election cycle, but a much bigger one. We have spent decades arriving here and it will take decades to emerge. The cycles will continue, throughout history, from the distant past to the distant future that we can’t even imagine. As Kohelet says: “What is occurring occurred long since, and what is still to occur occurred long since.” (Ecc. 3:15).
And, Kohelet reminds us, joy is part of the cycle too. For everything there is a season: a time for planting and a time for uprooting; a time for tearing down and a time for building up; a time for weeping and a time for laughing; a time for wailing and a time for dancing.” (Kohelet 3:2-4)
We spin, we orbit, in these cycles, like the circuits Jews walked on Hoshanah Rabbah two days ago. We spin through the dry season and the rainy one. The coming of the light and the going of the light. Planting and harvest. Creation, emergence, enslavement, redemption, formation, wandering, and at last a crossroads. We spin on to a place of plenty or spin back to primordial darkness; and even there Wisdom is at our side and the light and the new begnning are only a few words away.
So today, let us breathe into the ride; confident – with Wisdom at our shoulder; ready at every moment to cross into the fulfillment of a promise, or to start up again out of the darkness with a clear-voiced “Let there be light.”