First and foremost, I want to express my shock and sorrow at the appalling killings in Las Vegas. Like everyone else, I felt shaken just at the news. Heaven only knows how utterly terrifying it must have been to be there. Our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved, the wounded, the traumatised and their families.
President Trump rightly called the appalling massacre ‘an act of pure evil’. It leaves one with disturbing questions about the nature of evil, similar perhaps to those which troubled Hannah Arendt in the 1940’s. Is evil rooted in boiling, premeditated hatred, or in cold, untroubled indifference to human life, or in both? I don’t know what is more frightening.
The horror was perpetrated at a Harvest Festival concert. Now, 2 days later, we are about to celebrate Succot, our harvest festival.
For six weeks we’ve been reading Psalm 27 morning and evening. Its author tells us that ‘God will hide me in God’s Succah on the evil day’. But what good would a mere Succah have been to protect the people at Las Vegas, or in Manchester, or at the Bataclan? I’ve often thought: ‘God, can’t you do better than a flimsy, made-of-anything, covered-in-leaves, blown-away-by-a-strong-wind, harvester’s booth Succah? God, couldn’t you at least manage a castle? Or a shelter, far underground?’
But that’s the point. Ultimately, our protection doesn’t lie in the strength of the walls which surround us, necessary as they often are in times of war and terror. (Though, even then, castles didn’t save the Jews of the Rhineland from the brigands of the First Crusade.) I agree with President Trump when he called upon ‘the bonds that unite us: our faith, our family and our shared values’, our citizenship and common humanity (and I hope he calls for urgent gun control).
Succot is about faith. Indeed, the mystics call the Succah tsila de’Meheimanuta, ‘the shadow of faith’. To live for seven days in the Succah is to live out our faith, to put our trust in God’s protection. The Talmud explains that the Succah represents Ananei haKavod, the ‘Clouds of Glory’ with which God protected the Children of Israel against scorching winds and burning heat as well as the enmity of those whose lands they passed by on their forty years’ journey through the wilderness.
Clouds don’t stop missiles. Ultimately, our safety, even the very survival of humankind, does not depend on military defences alone. There are weapons enough across the world capable of destroying anything and everything. There are invisible, or semi-visible dangers to our planet, which, unless we limit them, can obliterate life on earth.
In the end, our protection does lie in faith. This is not a blind faith that God will defend us, whatever we do. Rather, it is the faith that we are God’s creatures, or at least that life is precious and wondrous. It is a faith which requires our active and pro-active participation in developing and maintaining relationships of sufficient trust with one another to enable us to survive. It is a faith rooted in the acute awareness of shared responsibilities, towards humanity, towards life itself.
The very openness of the Succah and our vulnerability as we dwell in it point to the sources from which our collective strength must come. These are: fellowship and communication with one another, since the Succah epitomises hospitality; respect and humility before the natural world, from which the defining feature of the Succah, its roof, must be composed; and faith in God, or – to put this in a manner more acceptable to an atheist or agnostic-, faith in the spirit and value of life itself, which unites us all.
Succot is a festival of joy. It is these simple, universal truths which we must honour and celebrate.