Torah: Exodus 33:12-34:26; Numbers 29:23-28

Haftarah: Ezekiel 38:18-39:16, Kohelet (Ecclesiastes)

In this week's Torah Sparks, you'll find a D'var Torah on the Parashah by Ilana Kurshan called "Gone With the Wind", Vered Hollander-Goldfarb poses questions titled "Be Present" and Bex Stern Rosenblatt writes about "Endings and Beginnings" in the Haftarah.

This coming Shabbat we will read the book of Kohelet, as we do every year on the Shabbat of Hol HaMoed Sukkot. The book of Kohelet, one of the five Megillot, is about the vanity and futility of all human pursuits. The author, traditionally thought to be King Solomon, writes about loneliness, the tears of the oppressed, the hollowness of wealth, the transience of life, and the similar fate that awaits the righteous and the wicked, and the wise and the foolish alike. The book’s images – which include snakebite, stillbirth, dead flies, and the relentless rising and falling of the sun – seem to have nothing to do with the holiday of Sukkot, which is at once a harvest festival in which we celebrate our bounty and a commemoration of God’s loving care for the Israelites during our wilderness wanderings. Why do we read such a depressing book on the holiday known as “the time of our rejoicing”? The Talmudic rabbis, amidst a discussion of the nature of the Sukkah, begin to hint at an answer to this question, offering insight into the meaning of Sukkot and its nuanced emotional valence.

The first chapter of the Talmudic tractate about Sukkot opens with a debate about the structure of the Sukkah and its architectural requirements. How tall may the walls of a Sukkah be? Must a Sukkah be strong enough to withstand heavy sea winds? What if a Sukkah is smaller than four square cubits in area, or can fit only one person not including the table where he or she eats? What if it’s built atop a wagon or a ship? As the rabbis demonstrate, the answer to all of these questions hinges on the extent to which the Sukkah is regarded as a temporary structure. Everyone agrees that the mitzvah to dwell in a Sukkah is for seven days alone, but how solid and stable must the Sukkah be? The Babylonian sage Abaye contends that the sages are divided about this matter – some hold that a Sukkah must be fit to last more permanently, while others maintain that the Sukkah should be an inherently temporary structure (Sukkah 7b).

Rabbi Eliezer is listed among those sages who argue that a Sukkah must be fit to be a permanent structure; in contrast, his student Rabbi Akiva maintains that a Sukkah is inherently temporary, and thus it need not be strong enough to withstand uncommonly strong winds (23a). Their disagreement is interesting in light of another debate between them, about the nature of the Sukkot we are commanded to dwell in on the holiday. Drawing on the verse in which God commands us to dwell in Sukkot “in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in Sukkot when I brought them out of Egypt” (Leviticus 23:43), Rabbi Akiva argues that the requirement is to dwell in leafy-roofed huts – actual Sukkot. But his teacher Rabbi Eliezer disagrees, insisting that Sukkot refer to the clouds of God’s glory which protected the Israelites in the wilderness (Sukkah 11b). And so Rabbi Akiva, who holds that the Sukkah is inherently temporary, also understands the Sukkah as a physical structure; whereas Rabbi Eliezer, who holds that the Sukkah must be fit to last more permanently, understands the Sukkah as a reference to God’s presence.

On Sukkot we realize that Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer are both right. The physical structures we build on Sukkot, like most anything human beings construct, will not last forever; only God’s protective presence endures eternally. It is for this reason that Kohelet is so appropriate to read on this holiday, as Rabbi Uri Brilliant and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks have noted. Kohelet teaches that everything material is temporary; a rich man hoards wealth only to find that it is suddenly lost in an unlikely venture. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers,” as Wordsworth put it. And yet God’s glory and God’s sheltering presence are permanent and enduring, as the book of Kohelet concludes: “The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere God and observe His commandments, for this is the whole of man” (12:14). On Sukkot a keen awareness of temporality intensifies our yearning to know the comfort of God’s eternal presence.

Sukkot, like the book of Kohelet, is about the relationship between the temporal and the eternal, reminding us of what truly endures. All year we can delude ourselves into thinking that our houses and possessions will be ours forever, but on Sukkot we realize the vanity of that assumption. Nothing we own is truly ours; we are at best custodians for a world God created and entrusted to our care. Our time on this earth, too, is inherently temporary – one generation comes and another goes, like the abundant harvest of the fall that dwindles in the winter months, and like the leafy branches that adorn our Sukkah but will soon wither and crumble to dust. “We live on this vast earth for such a short while,” writes poet Edward Hirsch, “that we must mourn and celebrate right now.” On Sukkot we rejoice at the knowledge that through the very precariousness of our temporary structures, we can find shelter and shade, beauty and bounty and blessing.

1To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2A time to give birth, and a time to die;

3A time to kill, and a time to heal;

4A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

5A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

6A time to seek, and a time to lose;

7A time to rend, and a time to sew;

8A time to love, and a time to hate;

…11He has made every thing beautiful in its time; …yet man cannot find out the work that God has done from the beginning to the end.

A time to give birth - When a child is born to a person, he is happy, and he rejoices with others. But if he were to think during the party and happiness that this child born to him will eventually die, he would not rejoice over him; ….Similarly all of these “times”: sometimes he brings things that start with happiness and end with sorrow, and sometimes things that start in sorrow but end in happiness… and the end explains that the Holy One, blessed by He, withheld the future from his creations: man cannot find out from the beginning to the end (v.11). For if a person knew what would be in the end, he would not rejoice at a time of joy, nor feel sorrow at a the time of mourning.

The Tanakh has a pretty specific idea of how the apocalypse and its aftermath is going to play out. Using language and imagery that are similar to the ways it described the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, the Tanakh describes an epic final battle and truly gruesome casualties. This is the content of our Haftarah portion, Ezekiel 38-39, which we read over Hol HaMoed Sukkot. It is hard to read and hard to know what tone or mood to read it in. 

The end of days happens in parts. First, God uses Gog as God’s instrument, to wreck destruction on Israel and on the earth. As Robert Alter translates:

“And you shall come up against My people Israel; like a cloud to cover the land, in the days afterward, you shall be. And I will bring you against My land so that the nations may know Me as I am hallowed through you, O Gog. … And the fish in the sea and the fowl in the heavens shall quake before Me, and the beasts of the field and every crawling thing that crawls on the earth, and every human who is on the face of the earth.… Each man’s sword shall be against his brother.”

We do not know exactly who Gog is. But in this first stage, God uses Gog to undo creation, to undo the order of life made in the beginning of Genesis. But even as the world falls to pieces, the purpose is not total destruction. Rather, “And I will be magnified and hallowed, and I will become known before the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the LORD.” God wants the world to know who God is. Destruction becomes a tool for the spread of knowledge. Just as we have interpreted every defeat of Israel as a theological lesson in God’s might in punishing Israel and bringing Israel back onto the correct path, here too defeat is a learning experience. 

The next stage of the apocalypse is the destruction of God. We read God telling Ezekiel to tell Gog of his coming destruction: “On the mountains of Israel you shall fall, and all your divisions and the people that are with you. I will make you food for carrion birds, every winged thing, and for beasts of the field. On the surface of the field you shall fall, for I have spoken, said the Master, the LORD.” Those very animals which had seemed to be undone in the undoing of creation now rise up to feast on the one who tried to destroy them. 

Moreover, after the animals are through, Israel rises up to purify the land from this desecration. It is in the seventh month that the land will finally be purified. Of course, the seventh month, as the Tanakh often counts, is Tishrei, this month in which Sukkot falls. And the haftarah portion for the first day of Sukkot, Zechariah 14, explicitly connects Gog and Sukkot. This holiday we are living now is the final stage. As we dwell in our sukkot, we can imagine ourselves in a post-apocalyptic world. Whereas the Tanakh imagines Gog as the incarnation of all evil and the tool with which to excise it, during this past month, we have seen the evil in ourselves and gone through the powerful process of teshuvah. Now, let us sit in our sukkot and enjoy the beauty of the world, created anew through our new eyes. 

Do you love Torah Sparks? It's brought to you by The Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center and we rely on your contributions to keep the learning going. Support Torah Sparks by making a donation to FJC or by selecting a subscription below:

For more information about the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center, please sign up for our weekly FJC Newsletter, visit our website or contact us at [email protected].