Succot is the time for Simchah, zeman simchatenu, the season of our joy. To the rabbis of the Talmud, Succot is the festival par excellence. The Mishnah describes how in Temple times the streets of Jerusalem were lit by torches all night and the whole city was one great carnival, culminating with the ceremony of water drawing in the sacred courtyards.

There is no reason why this joy should not be replicated in our communities. It starts with the building of the Succah itself. Some years ago Rabbi Marc Soloway gave a wonderful, humorous sermon about how at this time of year even the most impractical of Jews has to turn their hand to D.I.Y. and Home Base and B & Q see customers who rarely darken their doors on other occasions. But building a Succah can be simple (please see the short guide attached), especially when one bears in mind that one can use pre-existing walls and all that has to be new is the Sechach, the branches or matting of which the roof must be made. However, for those who like their life complicated, the Shulchan Aruch notes that you can build your Succah as a pentagon, or even an octagon, so long as it encloses the area of a square not less than seven handbreadths by seven handbreadths. You can also make your Succah in the round, with the same proviso; the Mishnah Berurah, which doesn’t refer to Pi, warns the ambitious builder that to satisfy the demands of the law such a Succah must have a circumference of not less twenty-nine handbreadths and two fifths.

 There are other leniencies also. If you are short of material for the walls (of which you only legally require two and a bit, or three to be sure of compliance, you can tie up your cow and use it as a partition, or even better your elephant, because if it suddenly chooses to lie down it will even then not lack the minimum height of ten handbreadths. If land is lacking and you don’t know where to locate your Succah, you are also allowed to construct it between the two humps of your dromedary. (I’m still eagerly awaiting my first invitation to such a structure.)

But the real joy of the Succah is its beauty, which is of several kinds. It is a tradition as old as the beginning of the period of the Mishnah (before the year zero) to decorate it with fruits and garlands from the year’s harvest in gratitude to God. To the gardeners in our family this is a great motivator; our vegetable crop may fail almost utterly, but that’s alright so long as there is one, just one, decent specimen to hang in the Succah.

A deeper beauty is the opportunity to share the Succah with guests. To the mystics, the Succah would be graced with the spiritual presence of Abraham, Sarah and our other illustrious ancestors, so long as friends and the poor were also part of the circle. We’ve found that even our less pro-canine acquaintances appreciate the dog on this occasion, so long as he lies on their feet and keeps them warm.

But perhaps the greatest joy of all is the simplest: to be able to look up at the stars and say to God, or to infinity, and to oneself, ‘I’m grateful for this life, this world; thank you for bringing us to this season’.

Petach Lanu Sha’ar – Open Us The Gate

A line from the Ne’ilah service haunts me, and not just because of its melody: ‘Open unto us the gates’, we plead, ‘at the hour of the closing of the gates’. This prayer sets out a challenge which lies at the core of our spiritual, communal and national lives.

The literal meaning of the prayer is that the great day is close to its end; the sun is in the treetops, Yom Kippur is almost over and the doors of the Templewill shortly be shut. We ask God not to let night fall or the gates be locked before our prayers and hearts have entered in. But if we treat the words as an image for life itself, their metaphorical meanings are endless.

There are always pressures urging us to close doors. One has only to think of the inner doors of the conscience and heart. That life is all but unbearable for the person who feels for the suffering of everybody else is a fact already acknowledged in the Talmud. The person who fails to protect their heart takes the constant risk of having it wounded. All too often cruelty, callousness or pain teaches us from childhood or early adult onwards that it may be best to hide one’s heart behind a thick skin. Tragically, we ourselves often end up losing touch with our own feelings as a result and become alienated from our truest sensitivities. Yet, with great courage, we pray ‘Open unto us the gates’: Open our hearts; teach us to feel the world, both the beauty, the love and the pain it proffers; teach us tenderness of heart; teach us to listen to conscience; teach us to be attentive and sensitive to others and to respond to all living beings as generously as we can. This openness is the true secret of the path of remorse, repentance and atonement.

There are also pressures to close the doors of our communities. The outside world is difficult, sometimes hostile. We want to feel safe, among our own, secure in our sense of commonality with those who pray on either side of us. Differences within our community challenge us and are prone to make us defensive. Yet we rightly find the courage to ask God to open our gates. Who do we want to come through them? This must surely be our answer: May those who have pain in their hearts feel at home here among us; may those who often bear in isolation their mourning, fears, or anguish for the health of those they love experience welcome and companionship amongst us and sense that their feelings are often paralleled in the privacy of other hearts. May they know that they quietly share from and contribute to the spiritual growth of us all. May our doors not just be open, but feel open, to those who are single, those who are married, those who are widowed, and those who are divorced; to those who have children and those who do not, and to those who suffer in their children’s struggles with illness; to those who are gay; to those who are fortunate to be able bodied, to those with disabilities, and to those who were once so fit they ran three times a week, but now have to walk with a frame. May the values and practice of our Judaism guide us all, purify us all and together bring us closer to God.

There are pressures too to close the gates of our peoples and countries. We may implicitly reject those whose different faith, nationality or colour is felt to challenge our own identity. The perceived foreignness of the ‘other’ is liable to make us want to retreat amongst ‘our own’. We may feel threatened. Sometimes threats are real; not every action or ideology is inoffensive to our own ideals of democracy, freedom, equality and peace. There is always a need for thoughtful judgment. Nevertheless we pray that the gates should be opened; the gates of understanding and co-operation between the faith and ethnic groups which compose our country and the gates of peace and justice between states; the gates of dialogue and debate between the denominations of each faith and the gates of good will, wisdom and compassion between different faiths. The shutting of any of these gates is the closure of a door of hope for humanity itself.

In the coming year may God give us the faith, courage and sensitivity to be among those who open gates: ‘Open unto us the gates at the hour of the closing of the gates’.

Click here for the sound file

Shema Kolenu

Hear our voice, Lord our God, have mercy and pity upon us…

Draw us back to you, God and we shall return; renew our days, as of old.

Do not cast us off from before you and do not take your holy spirit from us.

Do not cast us off in our old age; do not abandon us when our strength is at an end.

We do not know who put these four stirring verses from the Bible and the Siddur together, or who composed the music which makes this simple, beautiful prayer one of the most tender and heartfelt of the day. Thankfully, it is repeated in every service of Yom Kippur, except Ne’ilah, which has many uniquely moving passages of its own. My own associations with this prayer are forever touched by the memory of my father, close to the end of his life and when he could only just walk, being invited to open the Ark in the Selichot service and listening to the words in tears.

Those words go to the heart of the privilege and poignancy of human life. From the negative one learns the positive; we wouldn’t be asking God not to take the sacred spirit from us were that spirit not part of us in the first place. In our more secular hours we might call it the wonder of being alive, in our more spiritual moments the privileged gift from God, – to have a heart to feel, a conscience to know, a mind to think, senses to experience joy and awe. That life is a sacred privilege stands at the spiritual, emotional and moral centre of Judaism.

Yet at the same time we recognise that we are frail. There are two aspects to this frailty. The first is material; on Yom Kippur of all days, a day without eating and drinking, a day outside of normal time, we realise that our physical existence is limited, that life flows by ever faster, and that we are vulnerable to illness and chance in ways which we cannot ultimately control. We’ve all witnessed the reality that it’s hard to be ill, or grow old. That’s why caring for one another is the greatest thing we can do with our lives. But there are also gifts we need in times of struggle which no human being can bestow, – courage, love, generosity, wisdom and good grace in the centre of our heart. For these we turn to God and ask God to be with us and within us.

All the more, too, do we realise that we must not take either life’s blessings for granted, one of the greatest of which is the opportunity to cherish, appreciate and love one another.

Yom Kippur also reminds us that we are morally frail. Only at one’s peril does one think ‘There are no circumstances in which I could ever do that!’ Dishonesty, including with our own selves, greed, anger, meanness of spirit, bigotry, – so long as we engage in such behaviours they deprive us of our clarity of vision and purity of soul. They distort our vision and alienate God’s presence from us, until remorse and reparation restore us. That, too, is why we pray ‘God, don’t take your holy spirit from us’, but help us to become the people we are truly capable of being. Make those powers of truth, love and goodness which lie within us grow and thrive in our heart.

This prayer and its music have, in and of themselves, the power to open and purify the heart.

Click here for today’s sound file

‘O God, O God, God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, great in loving kindness and truth, forgiving, sin and transgression…

These much repeated words with their familiar melody form the chorus of Yom Kippur. They are first spoken by God to Moses to proclaim God’s forgiveness for the sin of the golden calf. The Talmud imagines God putting on a Tallit made of light and teaching the community how to pray: ‘Whenever Israel sins, let them perform this service before me and I will forgive them.’ (Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 17b) Following the traditional calculation, according to which Moses re-ascends Mount Sinai on the 1^st  of the month of Elul and remains there for forty days and forty nights, the date is the 10^th of Tishrei, – Yom Kippur.

But is God merciful and gracious? Many atheists reject religion not only because they hold the notion of a God of any kind to be incredible and untenable, but also because, considering the role ascribed to God in so many of the bloodiest wars in history, they find it immoral. I have much sympathy for Yehudah Amichai’s wry reflection in his poem based on the title of the well-known memorial prayer, which opens

God full of mercy:

Were it not for that God full of mercy

There would be mercy here on earth, not just in him.

How then can we be so brazen as to claim that God is loving and forgiving? It may be that the future of our planet turns on how we respond to this question. The issue isn’t God, but how God is understood and (ab)used. This is where the teaching of Yom Kippur is so important.

God, we are told repeatedly, is the God of life, who loves life and delights in life. I do not think it is too free an interpretation to find our God in the very power of life itself, in the process which causes the leaf to unfurl from the bud in spring and turn amber and fall in autumn, or in the slow growth of the heart from conception to the compassion we hope to have garnered by the time, if we are fortunate, that we reach old age.

God is not love alone. Be careful, cautions the Talmud, of saying in your prayers ‘God’s mercies descend to the bird’s nest’, for what will you say when cruel things come to pass? God brings death as well as life; God is in the wind which lays the forest bare.

But on Yom Kippur we focus mainly on the love. Who gave us the capacity to feel love in the heart, and to give it to others through generosity, tenderness and awareness? From where does the beauty come which causes joy to sing in the soul, sustaining kindness and goodness? What nurtures the capacity to stop brooding over anger and to refrain from nursing every hurt until it turns into bitterness inside us, because life is too short, too poignant, too wonderful and too important? From life, one might say; and to the spiritually inclined person that very life is the spirit of God.

Whose responsibility is it, then, to turn that love into deeds, into realities on earth, both where there is pain, hunger, cruelty and need, and where there is leisure and plenty? Whose, if not our own, you and me, privileged to be alive at this moment?

The moon is still high in the sky, waning as the month of Elul draws to its end and the New Year approaches. There are many foxes about this dawn; I can vouch for that because the dog just woke me for the second time and I’ve decided there’s no point trying to get back to sleep. Besides, a thought is bothering me, as it happens, a thought about thought itself.

We learnt yesterday in my Talmud class that hirhur, just thinking thoughts, is not considered the same as speech; it’s certainly not the equivalent to an actual deed. We therefore don’t ‘thought police’, or legislate over what may flit through, or even dwell, in a person’s mind.

This makes every sense, legally. Yet at another level the nature of our thoughts, the flavour of our consciousness minute by minute, whether it’s sweet or sour, its taste within our skull, determines the quality of our life. The Baal Shem Tov, the guiding spirit of Hasidic mysticism, said: ‘Where one’s thoughts are, there one is’. 

The quality of our consciousness doesn’t have the same practical significance as whether we have plentiful food and drink, or none, or whether our family are healthy or sick. But our consciousness is with us all our wakeful hours. We can’t evade it, and there may be times in our life when it’s virtually all we have for occupation, distraction and companionship.

I think of Terry Waite saying how he decided almost from the moment of his capture that there would be no self pity. I wonder how Gilad Shalit coped, all those isolated, terrifying years. But one needn’t travel so far; what about when we are ill, or old, and cannot spend our days running away from whatever it is that’s within ourselves? Or when we simply lie awake, preventing the sleep we seek, worrying about everything, unravelling our days and our ideas?

Can I clean my consciousness out? Can I put something in it to neutralise its fears? Can I filter out its angers? Can I fill it with more love? What makes it what it is? What’s there?

These questions go to the core of spiritual life. Maybe this, at least partly, is what prayer is for when it’s real: ‘I expose myself to you; flow into me, greater life; be with me, God’. One wants some mountain wind to blow away the mental boundaries created by ceaseless preoccupation with preoccupations, and bring the sweet scents of trees. 

And then? Then, at best, there is wonder, compassion, fellowship with all the varied fates of living beings, a momentary feeling of the reality for which we come to feel a profound, inexpressible respect which has the power to humble us and purify our life.

What further can we do? We can set good memories, good thoughts of those who love of us and whom we love, thoughts of loving deeds we’ve witnessed, and ancient words, like healing patches against our minds in meditation: ‘God is my light’; ‘Be merciful, for God is merciful’. We can’t patrol, but we can guide, our mind.

Beyond that, can we not also trust? ‘The soul you have given me is pure’, say the early morning prayers. If we only allow it, won’t more of that purity, of all the goodness and love, of all the wisdom and beauty that exists in people and the world and so much of which we’ve been given, come to reside more deeply within us too?