Rediscovering one’s Jewishness in midlife is an interesting and nostalgic affair — not least, becoming acquainted with all the festivals again. For sure, I hadn’t lost touch with everything: Pesach remained a family-dinner constant during my 30 wandering years, and I always had a moment’s pause every Yom Kippur, even if I didn’t fast, or go to shul.
But the minor festivals tended to go by the wayside, forgotten. Even now, only memories of Purim really stand out: I have a vague recollection of getting dressed up as Queen Esther in the early 70s (and winning some sort of competition in a Gants Hill converted-house synagogue) and enjoying the rattling and shouting to drown out the name of Haman (the Jewish version of Voldemort) during a jolly evening service.
Now I’ve been told that this week is Succot (or Succos, as we used to call it out here in Essex). I’m ashamed to admit that that Succot hasn’t loomed large for me over the decades. My recollections are mainly of a leafy canopy, and something that looked a bit like a knobbly grapefruit. So I decide to investigate: what is Succot, and why is it important?
Even before I begin my research, I feel a bit sorry for Succot — it seems a bit of an after-thought, tacked on in the week after Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when everyone has festival-fatigue and a bit of a hangover. Then I remember that Jews don’t really drink. Am I right?
David Woolf is a Queens-born rabbi who now resides in Netanya. I met him at my first Friday night dinner ‘back’, a couple of years ago, which I wrote about in this newspaper. “Every Jewish holiday exists on three levels,” he says. “The national history one, the religious/ spiritual — and the agricultural, to do with Eretz Yisrael. Succot is all about celebrating the main harvest —Thanksgiving in the USA is fashioned after Succot.’
Rabbi Woolf is certainly proud of the bounty of his adopted land: “Israeli cows produce five times the amount of milk as Australian cattle,” he says. “We have a crisis about what to do with all our leftover cucumbers, and our clementines.” But Succot — and the succah, the temporary structure in which we are supposed to eat and sleep (unless we are wussy north European Jews) — also, of course, has a deeper symbolism.
“The succah exists to recapture the experience of living a life in tents; to recapture 40 years of living in the desert after we left Egypt,” he says. “It serves to remind us of how things we have come to see as stable, are not as stable as we think they are.” Woolf calls to mind the catastrophic toll of the Covid year. “We think we are safe, and in control — and that we run the world,” he says. “But we don’t: God runs the world.”
Before I called Rabbi Woolf, I consulted with an observant local friend, who informed me that Succot is also about reaching out to those in need: the hungry, the homeless, and the stateless. “Jewish people have a duty to welcome strangers… to offer hospitality and support to people are new, or who otherwise may not feel like they belong,” she said. Both she and Rabbi Woolf emphasise the importance of taking care of our own: but Succot is also about looking outside our little worlds, and empathising with other people who have been uprooted from their own.
As I write, the world is reeling from the flight of Afghans, desperate to escape the tyranny of the Taliban’s second coming. I am cheered by images on the national news of a clothes of a collection for refugees at Bushey shul. It makes me feel proud. Says Rabbi Woolf: “Charity is in the Jewish DNA: we can’t help ourselves. It’s in the Gemara that those who survived Egypt and survived the Holocaust have the duty of rachamin or compassion.”
And so it seems that, this year in particular, hungover little Succot could turn out to be the most important festival of them all.
The Insomnia Diaries: How I Learned To Sleep Again (Aster, £9.99)
