Finding the Joy · Parashat Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot
What Passes By
What Passes By
Tuesday morning I was at shul for Sukkot services, picking up our lulavim and etrogim. The same crowd as last year, the usual melodies, the weight of the citron in my hand for the first time this year. That evening I was standing in a Chabad sukkah eating hors d’oeuvres with strangers.
Not a dinner. A drop-in. The kind of thing Chabad does — a sukkah outside the building, a folding table with wine and cookies and somebody’s homemade kugel, a line of people ducking in to make a bracha, eat something under the schach, fulfill the mitzvah, move on. Five minutes, maybe ten if you stayed for a l’chaim.
Last year I ate under my rabbi’s sukkah. His backyard, the October air in Atlanta doing that thing where it can’t decide between summer and fall, a long table of congregants passing dishes, a roof of palm fronds with stars showing through. I had a seat. I had a place setting. That was one kind of meaningful. This year I stood with a paper plate, said the bracha for dwelling in the sukkah, and watched a man I’d never met teach his daughter how to shake a lulav. That was a different kind of meaningful.
There’s a halachic detail about sukkot — the structures, not the holiday — that I find quietly radical. You don’t have to own one. The mitzvah is to dwell in one. If yours isn’t standing, you sit in someone else’s. You drop in. The obligation doesn’t disappear because your circumstances changed. It travels.
The Torah reading for Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot is not a regular parsha. It’s drawn from Ki Tisa — Exodus 33 and 34 — and it picks up in the aftermath of the golden calf. The worst thing that could happen has happened. The people built an idol forty days after Sinai. The tablets are shattered. The covenant looks finished.
And Moses, standing in the wreckage, makes a request:
וַיֹּאמַ֑ר הַרְאֵ֥נִי נָ֖א אֶת־כְּבֹדֶֽךָ׃ He said, “Oh, let me behold Your Presence!”
Show me. After everything — the calf, the rage, the broken stone — show me who You are.
God’s answer is one of the strangest moments in the Torah. I will make all My goodness pass before you. But you cannot see My face. No one can see My face and live. I will place you in a cleft in the rock, shield you with My hand as I pass, and then:
וַהֲסִרֹתִי֙ אֶת־כַּפִּ֔י וְרָאִ֖יתָ אֶת־אֲחֹרָ֑י וּפָנַ֖י לֹ֥א יֵרָאֽוּ׃ Then I will take My hand away and you will see My back; but My face must not be seen.“
You will see My back. Not My face. The Sforno reads this as a statement about how human beings experience goodness: you recognize it after it has passed. While it’s happening, you’re sheltered in the rock with a hand over your eyes. You feel the tremor, the warmth, the weight of something moving. You don’t know what it is until you turn around.
And then what follows the cleft in the rock is the revelation of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy — the words Jews repeat on Yom Kippur, on fast days, whenever the ark is opened and the congregation needs to invoke divine compassion:
וַיַּעֲבֹ֨ר יְהֹוָ֥ה ׀ עַל־פָּנָיו֮ וַיִּקְרָא֒ יְהֹוָ֣ה ׀ יְהֹוָ֔ה אֵ֥ל רַח֖וּם וְחַנּ֑וּן אֶ֥רֶךְ אַפַּ֖יִם וְרַב־חֶ֥סֶד וֶאֱמֶֽת׃ The ETERNAL passed before him and proclaimed: “GOD! GOD! a Deity compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness,
Rachum v’chanun. Compassionate and gracious.
This is what God chooses to show Moses after the golden calf. Not wrath. Not the ledger of sins. The first thing revealed after the worst betrayal is the capacity for mercy.
Thursday morning the hostage deal was announced. All forty-eight remaining captives, living and dead. During Sukkot — zman simchateinu, the time of our joy.
The news broke while tens of thousands were gathered at the Kotel for birkat kohanim. Ex-hostages stood among the worshippers. Families who had spent seven hundred and thirty-three days at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv — holding signs, counting hours, lighting candles every Thursday — were dancing. A man named Misha Nataf had driven from Haifa to the square every week for two years, except the weeks around his son’s birth. A woman named Rachel Shani Stopper found herself, for the first time in all those Thursday nights, singing out loud.
We read Kohelet — Ecclesiastes — on Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot. The book that opens by calling everything hevel — vapor, breath, a mist that burns off by morning — and then spends twelve chapters figuring out what’s worth doing anyway.
לַכֹּ֖ל זְמָ֑ן וְעֵ֥ת לְכׇל־חֵ֖פֶץ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃ A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven:
A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. Kohelet doesn’t say the weeping ends when the dancing starts. It says they each have their season. At Hostages Square, the families of the living danced while the families of the dead stood nearby, holding photos of sons and brothers whose bodies are still in Gaza. Both things, in the same plaza, under the same sky. Eighteen bodies still held. The joy broke through anyway.
The sukkah is the only structure the Torah commands us to build that is meant to come down. The schach — the roof — has to be open enough to see the stars. Seal it tight and it doesn’t count. You sit in something fragile and eat and bless and, if the week has given you reason, you rejoice. The vulnerability is the requirement.
This week gave reason. Not clean reason. Not resolved or finished. But the goodness passed, and for a moment — in a plaza in Tel Aviv, at the ancient stones in Jerusalem, under temporary roofs across the Jewish world — we could see where it had been.
Tuesday night I stood in someone else’s sukkah and said the bracha. Leishev basukkah. Five minutes under borrowed schach. The mitzvah doesn’t require your own roof. It requires you to show up.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham