Sukkah Grace

Rabbi Alan Lew writes: "Form is an inevitable part of our spiritual landscape. We can't live apart from it. But once a year, after several  months of reconnecting with the emptiness at the core of form, we leave the formal world behind. We sit in a house that is only the idea of a house, a house that calls attention to the illusory nature of all houses. And there is a joy in this, a joy born of the realization that nothing can protect us...."   This "house that is only an idea of a house" is call a sukkah. In Jewish tradition, the sukkah calls to mind the tenuous existence of the Israelite people during their long desert sojourn after leaving the slave houses of Egypt. But more likely, the original sukkot were huts erected in the fields to provide temporary shade and shelter during the harvest season, after the Israelite peoples had settled into agricultural rhythms in the land of Canaan.  Today, the rickety walls and hole-y roof (s'khakh) of sukkot--set up  in backyards, on urban rooftops, and in synagogue parking lots, and in which people eat, pray, study, and even sleep for eight days--invite us to reap the bounty of gladness and abundance following the solemn self-examination and fervent prayers of the ten Days of Awe. My first attempt ever, last year, to build a sukkah on my patio put me in touch, in a way I'd never experienced, with Sukkot's particular flavor of joy--a joy tinged with urgency and frustration, a joy born of the whimsical power of serendipity--call it grace, call it God--and made more poignant by the pain of  inevitable loss. 


Sukkah Grace

God's grace bubbled up
in my desire for a sukkah.
Grace flowed over us in Ross's offer
of an old, dirt-encrusted PVC sukkah frame,
stored unused in his garage
for 15 years,
and God's kindness stuttered through
the spark plug, which caused my car's engine
to pull alarmingly as I drove back
from the Yom Kippur retreat
at Mt. Madonna.
God's mercy spawned Ross's offer
to deliver the frame, which meant
that he was here to unload it
and spend a good hour-and-a-half
on the evening after Yom Kippur
trying to help me set it up
(which, if my car hadn't broken
down, he would not have been).
God's wisdom spurred the realization
that some pieces were too long
for our little patio, and therefore
God sent Ross's PVC cutter,
though I had to drive over
the next day--in Burt's car, which I
had to borrow since mine
was in the shop--to Ross
and Hannah's house to
pick it up, along with the
five palm fronds
that Hannah set aside for me
as s'khakh.
God flexed God's muscle
in the joints of the
frame that never fit together
properly. God danced on the bias
in the patterned water-resistant
fabric I bought from the
Chinese couple in the fabric
store at the foot of
Appian Way, which flapped
loose or stayed put,
depending upon how hard
God's gracious wind blew up
the hillside and over our fence.
God held faithfully firm
in the duck tape that
secured the fabric to the
PVC pipes of the frame,
even when the 
frame fell apart,
which it did repeatedly,
spilling the sharp,
rustly palm fronds onto
the bricks below.
God's light nevertheless
danced in the candle
flames that we lit on
the first evening of
Sukkot, well after dark, 
and shone in the face
of my beloved Burt,
so surprised to be
sitting out in the evening
wind, eating tasty
marinated chicken thighs,
rice and salad, khallah bread
and sweet wine,
in the graceful shelter of
the sukkah.

        --Diane Elliot, Sukkot 2014