In the middle of a poem titled Ha-yehudim – The Jews – the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai gives a mini-course in the nature of Jewish memory. “A Jewish man remembers the sukkah in his grandfather’s home./ And the sukkah remembers for him.” Poised on the edge of nostalgia, we expect the poem to describe a childhood memory, long-ago festival celebrations and beloved grandparents. Instead, the poem plunges into the complexity of the Jewish experience. Meditating on what it is that “the sukkah remembers” for the unnamed Jewish man, the poem lists an enchainment of events, objects and sensations, each of which works as a memory-trigger for the next: desert wanderings, covenantal tablets, the Golden Calf, thirst, hunger and Egypt.
At first reading, it seems that Amichai is simply describing an example of how rituals and ritual objects function as symbols – evoking iconic moments in the shared Jewish past. The sukkah points to the temporary dwellings of the Israelite journey from the slavery of Egypt to the freedom of home, much as the objects on the Passover seder plate suggest other aspects of slavery and freedom. In participating in the ritual, we actively claim the memory and all that is attached to it.
But the “Jewish man” in Amichai’s poem is sorting through a complicated – one might even say strained – relationship to the Jewish past. He recollects his grandfather’s sukkah, but does not have one of his own. And rather than reminding this man of the collective Jewish past, the sukkah simply does the remembering for him. The phrase that is rendered in translation as “the sukkah remembers for him” reads, in the original Hebrew, vehasukkah zocheret bimkomo – the sukkah remembers in his place, or in his stead.
It is not an accident, I think, that the poem uses the sukkah to negotiate the tensions in modern Jewish identity. The sukkah is, after all, a paradox itself, standing for both wilderness and shelter, for both wandering and home. It is, in a way, a mixed symbol, contradictory and in tension with itself.
For us, rooted in permanence and the solidity of our homes, the sukkah pulls us a bit into wilderness. What does wilderness mean? Even in the densely populated cities of Canada, we can feel the freshness and also the scariness of the wilderness. In the urban forest of Toronto, for example, roam raccoons, coyotes, skunks and foxes. My suburban nephew sighted wild turkeys and a family of bears on his property. The night noises that troubled the sleep of our ancestors in flimsier dwellings than ours has the power to unsettle us, as well.
In Judaism, as in many cultures, wilderness becomes a potent metaphor for encountering something difficult and profound: facing oneself, facing deep truths, facing one’s demons, facing the Divine. Prophets, seers or ordinary folks in quest of something gravitate away from the familiar, the domestic and the protected. They enter into the desert wilderness and come out changed.
Even in our cities and in the midst of community, Sukkot draws us out into the wilderness – but immediately domesticates it. Or, to put it a different way, Sukkot creates a new kind of domestic space where the wilderness cannot be kept out. It reminds us that from time to time, at certain junctures in one’s life, one removes oneself from the ordinary, peeling back the social layers, to experience one’s existential aloneness. But this is not the kind of existence that can be sustained – nor should it be. In Judaism, the desert wilderness is not a place to remain. Human life is to be lived among others, with family, friends, community.
In Amichai’s poem, “The Jews” are defined by the bonds of family and shared history. Fragile and impermanent like human memory, the grandfather’s sukkah nonetheless insists on being remembered, and on remembering
