Parashat Re'eh 2024/5784
How many of you grew up without air conditioning? Tell me - what was late afternoon/early evening like for you?
When people hear I’m from Florida, they usually give me a funny look, when they hear I was born here, they give me an even stranger look. How do you survive the summers?!? I said, “haven’t you heard of air conditioning?”
Most of my life is almost the reverse of the lives of people up north. During the winters, I’m outside, usually with short sleeves on and shades, and I am most tan from December - May, but when June comes around, I go indoors. It’s not like we never go outdoors…we go outdoors on our way from our air-conditioned house to our air-conditioned car, to our air-conditioned office and back again.
We don’t give it a lot of thought to it, but our very lives down here are dependent upon air conditioning. In 1940, fewer people lived in Florida than in Arkansas. About 8,000 people lived in Las Vegas, and Dallas and Houston were nowhere to be found on the list of the largest cities in America. Before air conditioning, few Americans lived in places where it was uncomfortable to control the temperature in some way. If it was too hot, people didn’t live there.
But what we gain in physical comfort, we lose out in other ways. First, buildings in the U.S. are responsible for about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, most of which are from cooling and heating our buildings. Second, we’ve become more insular as a society. Think back to those late afternoons and early summer evenings in the city. Was anyone indoors? Now we live with a loneliness epidemic, and I can’t help but wonder if things might be different if we couldn’t seal ourselves off in comfort.
It’s a real question: are we better off with AC or without?
To answer this question, I will examine a holiday mentioned in this week’s parashah, Re'eh: Sukkot.
That’s right, it’s Sukkot in August in Boca Raton!
But how about this, instead of building our Sukkot and going outside in 100 degree weather with afternoon thunderstorms everyday, let’s just stick to learning about Sukkot.
חַג הַסֻּכֹּת תַּעֲשֶׂה לְךָ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים בְּאסְפְּךָ מִגרְנְךָ וּמִיִּקְבֶךָ׃
After the ingathering from your threshing floor and your vat, you shall hold the Feast of Booths for seven days.
וְשָׂמַחְתָּ בְּחַגֶּךָ אַתָּה וּבִנְךָ וּבִתֶּךָ וְעַבְדְּךָ וַאֲמָתֶךָ וְהַלֵּוִי וְהַגֵּר וְהַיָּתוֹם וְהָאַלְמָנָה אֲשֶׁר בִּשְׁעָרֶיךָ׃
You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your communities.
שִׁבְעַת יָמִים תָּחֹג לַיהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בַּמָּקוֹם אֲשֶׁר־יִבְחַר יְהֹוָה כִּי יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכֹל תְּבוּאָתְךָ וּבְכֹל מַעֲשֵׂה יָדֶיךָ וְהָיִיתָ אַךְ שָׂמֵחַ׃
You shall hold a festival for the LORD your God seven days, in the place that the LORD will choose; for the LORD your God will bless all your crops and all your undertakings, and you shall have nothing but joy.
We observe the holiday by dwelling in Sukkot, temporary booths outdoors, to remind us of how God protected us during the forty years in the Wilderness after God freed us from Egypt, and by using the lulav and etrog, the four species of plants ritually used during Sukkot.
But Sukkot is most known for the Sukkah itself. We live in the Sukkah, a temporary booth with a roof made of vegetation called Skach (so it doesn’t block out the rain). We spend as much time as we can, eating every meal we can, sleeping if we can, and in the Sukkah. We are supposed to make our Sukkah our permanent dwelling place, and our home temporary during the seven days of Sukkot.
The experience makes us immediately aware of the following: we have a home. It’s not something to take for granted.
I was recently at a sermon seminar and learned from Gila Fine, author, and teacher of rabbinic literature at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies. She taught us about not taking architecture for granted in the Torah in her article, "A Sukkah of One’s Own"
For example, did Bnai Israel dwell in Sukkoth in the Wilderness? The prophet Bilaam did not say, “How goodly are your Sukkot O’Israel!” There are plenty of other examples, like after the Revelation, the people are told, “Return to your tents” (Deuteronomy 5:26); and when they complain about the manna, they “cry at the entrance of their tents” (Numbers 11:10).
In her teaching, she said to understand the nature of Sukkot truly, we have to look at the history of human-made dwelling places in the Torah. The first one is a tent, Yaval, “Adam’s seventh-generation grandson, is, we are told, “the first to live in tents and raise cattle”
(Genesis 4:20). Several generations later we find the infamous tent in which Noah uncovers himself in a drunken stupor, and shortly after that, the more respectable tents of Shem. With Abraham's arrival on the scene, we witness an interesting transition. Humankind evolves and people now live in homes, and yet our patriarchs continue to dwell in tents.
The first house in the Bible is found in Sodom. Lot, who grew up with Abraham in tents, takes the angels into his “house and... shut[s] the door after him” (Genesis 19:3-6). But just on chapter earlier, Abraham runs to greet the angels “from the opening of his tent” (Genesis 18:2).
It’s quite interesting to see how tents and homes are used in the Torah in different places. In most places, tents are places of intimacy, places where people invited others in and made room for them; while houses serve to separate and keep others out. But houses also offer a sort of protection that cannot be found in tents.
The interesting things is, the patriarch and matriarchs continue to dwell in tents even though others around them lived in houses. Perhaps this is because tents remain open and connected to the world, while houses shuts the world out.
To quote a friend, Rabbi Amy Grossblatt Pessah, Sukkot serve as the middle ground between the tent/ohel and the home/bayit.
“The first biblical sukkah is constructed, again not coincidentally, by the very first Hebrew to build himself a house. Upon his return to Canaan, Jacob “built a house for himself, and made sukkot for his livestock; therefore, the place was named Sukkot” (Genesis 33:17).” But, he is also famously known in Genesis 25:27 as Ish Tam, Yoshev Ohalim, Jacob – “a simple man who dwelled in tents” (Genesis 25:27.
If we look at all instances of the word Sukkot in the Torah, we see it denotes a safe place, a place of refuge and shelter provided by another.
If the house is a space where we shut the other out, and the tent where we invite others in, then the sukkah is a space we create for the other. It is a place in which the other can dwell, not as a guest, an object of hospitality, but as a master of his own home.
What’s interesting is how those who are most insecure, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, the widow, are such an integral part of the festival. And they celebrate with you, your spouse, your son and daughter, your male and female slave; everyone in your household. For that week, you’re all family.
I think it was Moshe’s way of telling the people, “When you enter the land, you’ll build houses just like everyone else, but never forget, you came from tents. And to ensure that you always feel connected to not just your family, but to the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow. I think this ethos is baked into Israeli society.
We saw it this week, in the freeing of Qaid Farhan Alkadi, a Bedouin-Israeli father of 11 taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7th, was freed from captivity on Tuesday by the IDF.
In the Israeli news, the initial reports did not say Israeli-Arab, they said, Israeli hostage rescued. Obviously, it is unique that he is a Bedoin-Israeli, but it made me happy to see that Israeli society, and the Jewish world, rejoiced at his liberation just as much as we would have had he been Jewish.
Alissa was able to hear from one of the Bedouin families who had relatives who Hamas took hostage. They reported that, in the beginning, people forgot about them, and they seemed to be ignored. But after some of the Bedouin families spoke up, Israeli society listened and embraced them just as much as the Jewish families.
We’ve all changed during this war, and Israel has as well. The rockets and terrorists did not treat Arab-Israelis any better than Jewish Israelis. What I saw in Israel was an Arab minority population that is incredibly diverse, and some feel more and more a part of the Israeli story, even though they are ‘strangers’. I think it will take time to heal, but I do think that all of Israel, including her minorities, will be stronger after the war.
For all the bad press Israel receives, we cannot forget that our people never forgot what it was like to live in tents, even after we went into houses. Every year on Sukkoth, we are reminded of where we came from when we leave our homes and live in our temporary booths, and yes, that means living without air conditioning. But maybe a bit of discomfort is what we need to live a sustainable life. The Sukkah reminds us that we don’t live in hermetically sealed containers. When we go into our Sukkoth, we remember that we are a part of this natural world, we can’t hide from it, and we must welcome our fellow human who needs to feel the shelter of the Shechinah into our Sukkah with us.
Sources used for this Dvar Torah
"A Sukkah of One’s Own" - Gila Fine
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