It’s September, and in the Jewish holiday calendar, we are now at Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. Sukkot is a time when we re-enact our agrarian roots – building a flimsy shelter outside our homes (in warm places, people actually sleep there – we are lucky if we can eat all of our meals in there), waving an atavistic bundle of branches reminiscent of a rain stick, singing Hosannas, and at the end of the holiday, beating a bunch of willow branches until there are no leaves left.

To me, the most fascinating part about it is that our liturgy calls Sukkot zman simchatenu, the time of our rejoicing. The other two pilgrimage holidays, Passover and Shavu’ot, are named by what they commemorate – the Exodus from Egypt and the Giving of the Torah, respectively. But on Sukkot, we are simply commanded to rejoice.

As postmodern people, what are we to make of all this? It’s certainly fun and exciting to do with kids, and it’s a great way to celebrate community in non-pandemic times. People have sukkah-decorating contests, and it’s considered a great honour to have people over to your sukkah. Probably not too much of that happening this year, alas, and that brings me to my main point.

What does it mean to be commanded to rejoice, especially in a time when our hearts are so heavy? One can argue about the policies that led to this situation, but the fact remains that millions of people, worldwide, were alive in February 2020 and are now gone. How are we supposed to rejoice?

I’m no rabbi, but my heart takes me back to that flimsy shelter we just built. It’s a reminder of times when life was just more uncertain than we think it is now. Here in the wealthy Western world, built on colonisation, we like to think that we can control our destiny. Science and technology have given us a great illusion of control – and indeed, compared to the plagues of other times, we do have the miracle of a vaccine and other medications. But the fact remains that we can’t control who will live and who will die. Yom Kippur, which just passed, reminded us of that vividly. In these days of climate emergency, the words “who by fire and who by water” are no longer metaphorical, if they ever were.

So what’s left? We can be depressed and fearful, or we can accept that many things are out of our hands, and rejoice in the life that we have right here, right now, in the loved ones we can hug, in the food we can share safely with a few friends, in the sunshine and the rain and opening our eyes every morning. It’s all the shelter we have, open to the wind and the rain, but still a place we can love and be loved.

Cliché? Maybe. But every cliché has a grain of truth. Try it on and let me know what you think.

Wishing you much joy every day!