The true art of memory is the art of attention” - Samuel Johnson
We live in an attention economy. This phrase, coined by the economist Herbert Simon in the 1960s, has taken on new meaning in an age of copious amounts of freely available digital information.
At this moment, the Jewish community has more stimuli than ever competing for our attention, both online and off. The High Holy Days call us to contemplate Divine judgment, and the shofar calls us to rethink our actions and rework our habits, while the tragedies of the past year, the ongoing war in Israel and the uptick in global antisemitism all demand our focus as well.
Suddenly, Succot is upon us, and it just might be the holiday that most needs our attention.
The Hebrew word kavanah is often defined as intention, but I would define it as “focused attention”. Kavanah determines how and how intensely you direct your mind to attend to a particular thought or action.
Classical Jewish sources debate the extent to which one needs this focused attention in fulfilling mitzvot, or commanded acts. Does a mitzvah still “count” — and is it still meaningful — if you do it without kavanah?
Some level of intentionality is necessary, but beyond the most basic level of intention — ie the intention to sit in a succah and fulfil a mitzvah — any more focused attention requires deciding what to focus on.
The central mitzvah of Succot is sitting in the succah for seven days, “in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths (succot) when I brought them out of the land of Egypt — I, your God” (Leviticus 23:42-43).
As with the rituals of Passover, these verses indicate that this mitzvah is a vehicle for a story that must be transmitted. “In order that future generations may know” implies that fulfilling the mitzvah of sitting in the succah is contingent on understanding something fundamental about the symbolism.
Rabbi Yoel Sirkes, an early 17th-century legal scholar, emphasises that this verse is making a strong claim on our attention. It isn’t enough to just sit there, argues Rabbi Sirkes: you have to know something about the meaning of the succah.
But unlike the words of the Haggadah, which immediately conjure up images of slaves and pyramids, this verse paints only a murky picture of the past. What do you imagine when you think about the booths? Truth be told, this is the first time in the Bible that we hear about these booths, so it may be hard to conjure up any particular kavanah.
The Talmud presents two different explanations for the deeper significance of the succot. “I made the children of Israel live in succot”; these booths were clouds of glory — this is the statement of Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Akiva says: “They established for themselves actual succot.” (Tractate Succah 11b)
These different explanations provide two strikingly divergent visions of the proper kavanah to hold in our hearts while we sit in the succah.
To Rabbi Eliezer, the fragile structures that we build are a symbol of the Divine protection the Israelites experienced as they wandered through the wilderness on their way to the promised land.
Rabbi Akiva’s position is less clear at first glance: why have a mitzvah to commemorate this ancient hut-building practice?
Rabbi Samuel ben Meir, a 12th-century Bible commentator and talmudist, explains that Rabbi Akiva’s words emphasise the precariousness of the Israelite’s existence before they entered the land of Israel.
We build huts now precisely because we are grateful that we no longer need them, and we remember a time when we had no land and no significant structures to call our own. In other words, if Rabbi Eliezer’s opinion is about being grateful for the shelter we had in the wilderness, Rabbi Akiva’s opinion is about gratitude for what we have today.
On a practical level, the act of sitting in the succah is the same act, no matter whose position you follow. The talmudic dispute is a question of attention: what is the deeper meaning of the succah that
we should contemplate as we sit under the stars?
The Talmud offers two possibilities, each inherent in this mitzvah. This theoretical dispute invites us to attend deeply to two truths simultaneously.
The succah reminds us to appreciate the gifts of our past; we have a rich history of survival that we can tap into for strength in our moments of need. And, we are also blessed in this moment. We’ve come a long way since our desert wanderings; we have challenges, but we also have structures, physical and communal, that scaffold our Jewish lives and give us much to be grateful for.
Paying attention to both where we’ve been and what we’ve built together will shape the way we experience this holiday, and prepare us to grapple with all that lies ahead in the new year.
Rabbanit Wolkenfeld is the chief learning officer of sefaria.org
