Sukkot: Feast of Booths

"Have you shaken the lulav yet this year, my friend?" asked the man in the blue dress shirt, grey slacks, and black kippah. He wore tiny eyeglasses and sported a scraggly, uneven beard, and he held out to me the bundle of the Four Species as I approached his sukkah.

"I have not," I replied.

"Do you want to shake it?" he asked me, waving the Four Species back and forth, and then, before I could reply, he asked a second question: "Are you of the Jewish faith?"

Of course I am not of the Jewish faith, but I had been looking for a way to observe Sukkot this week, and because I have been busy, my observations have so far all been of the mental variety. However, yesterday, on Thursday, as I was walking to lunch with a colleague, I noticed that the National Synagogue, an Orthodox congregation, had erected a sukkah in the park a block from my office building, two blocks from the White House. I did not wish to stop and visit with my colleague in tow, and we did not have time to do so anyway, but I held out hope that the sukkah would be there the next day, which is to say Friday, which is to say today -- and indeed it was.

Sukkot is a weeklong holiday that began on Tuesday, so today places us right in the middle of the celebration. For Sukkot, the faithful are instructed by God to construct a temporary house, or “booth” -- a hutlike space with a thatch-style roof for entertaining guests and observing the holiday. As I understand it, the hut represents the temporary dwellings carried across the desert by the Israelites during their forty years of wandering after escaping slavery in Egypt. The hut reminds us of God's faithfulness during difficult times, and that all things are temporary.

I find the reminder of life’s impermanence compelling, and the symbol of the hut interesting, but in actual practice, the demands of Sukkot seem culturally out of place for me as an urban apartment dweller. Just as hauling a Christmas tree into the living room seems better suited for a rural Bavarian farmhouse next to a pine forest than for my Washington, DC apartment next to a national park, so too does the sukkah seem better suited for a long-ago village settlement somewhere in the Middle East, where there is space to build, and where the palm fronds for the roof of the hut are plentiful.

As the holiday approached, I considered building my own sukkah in the alley outside my bedroom window, from whatever I myself might be able to scavenge from my own surroundings -- cardboard boxes from behind the local supermarket, perhaps, or fallen branches from the park, but I knew my free time would be short this week, and I wasn't sure the hut idea was truly meaningful to me anyway. Perhaps, I thought, I could make some temporary art instead, and I fantasized about some improbable projects like maybe a salt sculpture that would be washed away by the rain, or a Zen-garden-style space that I would rearrange each day of Sukkot.

Interestingly, when I went to scope out the alley, whether for a hut or a Zen garden or who-knows-what, I discovered a sukkah of sorts already sitting in my intended space. The apartment building in which I live happens to have some structural integrity issues, with the hundred-year-old mortar between its bricks continually crumbling out. This causes leaks into the apartments (I had soggy walls in my bedroom for a year), and over the course of the past two years or so, the management company has been replacing the mortar one section of wall at a time, with a new section tackled every few months or so.

When I walked into the alley on the first day of Sukkot, I discovered that the workmen had returned to repair a new section. They had erected a scaffolding for this task, and over top of the scaffolding they had flung a tarp. It looked like a close approximation of an urban sukkah (though it violated the rule that the roof must be organic), but I stepped inside underneath the tarp anyway, happy to have my booth appear by magic.

I went about my week, reflecting on themes of impermanence, reading the book of Ecclesiastes (already my favorite book of the Bible, and a required Sukkot text), and making plans to attend synagogue this weekend (tomorrow).

When I saw the booth in the park yesterday, I decided I should make time to stop by today, and experience the ritual apart from the synagogue. So at midday today, I wandered on over, hoping to spend my lunch break in the sukkah.

I approached from the rear and then walked around to the front, so I could apprehend the booth’s construction. The roof was made of some kind of fronds, balanced on top of a metal frame. Attached to the frame, white plastic walls with a blue stripe at the bottom hung toward the ground. The back wall contained a clear plastic window, and there was no front wall. The structure’s shape was that of a rectangle with twice as much length as witdth, about the size of a large van or a small truck cab.

It was when I had walked around the sukkah to the front that the man with the glasses and beard asked me if I wanted to shake the lulav, and then asked me if I was Jewish.

He actually pulled back a bit when I answered, “No.”

I thought he might then be interested in explaining the lulav to a Gentile, but that's not where he went next. I knew already about the lulav, from reading about it, but I kind of wanted the explanation from a practitioner. The lulav is a bundle of "Four Species": a frond from a date-palm tree, a bough from a myrtle tree, a branch from a willow tree, and a fruit from the citron tree. Some say that each of the four Species represents a part of the human body, such that binding them together represents a total devotion to God. Others say that the binding represents bringing various types of worshippers together before God.

I was curious which explanation (or perhaps a different one altogether) this fellow might give me, but instead, after asking if I am Jewish, he asked a second personal question:

"Are you religious?"

"I do not practice a religion; no." I replied.

"That's not what I asked you -- if you 'practice' a religion," the man quibbled. "I asked if you are religious. Do you believe in God?"

"No," I said.

The man holding the lulav literally jumped. He stiffened and he sniffed and he put the lulav back down on a table. Next he said, "Well, then, you will not want to pray."

"I do not know if I want to pray," I said, "What is the prayer?"

The man seemed confused and remained silent.

"Is it for guidance, or something?" I prompted.

The man launched into a hasty explanation that I did not follow exactly, but which could be summed up, I am pretty sure, as essentially the same as the five daily Muslim prayers: Thanks and blessings to God just for being God, who is great and awesome and so on, and thanks for putting together this religion for us to follow, amen.

Then the man told me he liked my beard, and said, "Good day to you; nice to meet you, my friend."

The words were spoken in kindness, but were clearly phrased as my dismissal. I wanted to talk more about Sukkot and what it means, and I wanted to understand the prayer more clearly, and most of all I wanted to be invited into the sukkah to sit on the chairs and maybe chat. I'm not always that willing to just talk with strangers, but the sukkah had a sign on it that said "welcome," and since they were in a public park, I assumed that the organizers wanted to talk to people about their religion. I assumed the non-Jewish and non-religious were being invited to learn more.

Also, a woman with a stack of six pizzas had arrived at almost the same moment I did, and she placed them on a table inside the sukkah, alongside several two-liter bottles of soda, some paper plates and cups, and a large, orange water cooler.

I did not really want any pizza (and I avoid drinking soda), but on my initial approach I had thought the man might welcome me into the sukkah for lunch.

Alas, I was wrong, so instead I just popped into a coffee shop for an afternoon pick-me-up and walked back to the carrots and dip waiting at my office.

Ramadan, part three (community)

As the ten of us sat in our silent Quaker-meeting circle in the Agatha-Christie-style parlor on Sunday, I did not find it difficult to sit still, but I did find it difficult, in my mind, to tamp down my desire to interact with the others. This was quite the surprise because I consider myself far more naturally introverted than extroverted.

And yet, there I was, scanning the room, feeling a bit amused and frustrated by the lack of connection I felt between the ten adult humans sharing this space together. Most of the others in the room had their eyes closed, and as I scanned the room, and met each face, I realized that I would probably feel a twinge of shame for my lack of inwardness, if I should meet another pair of eyes. But I did not meet another pair of eyes. All eyes were closed or downcast.

At points, I closed mine too, but they would not stay that way.

I wanted to ask the man sitting across from me if it was hard to hold his hands they way he did, curved upward in front of him, knuckles facing each other and almost touching, hands elevated off his lap. I wondered whether the older woman in the red armchair would appreciate a nudge when she fell asleep and began softly to snore. I felt moved to bond over a love of the nearby farmers' market with the two women who came late and tucked their vegetable-filled shopping bags underneath their chairs.

After about thirty minutes of silent thought, I was surprised that more than anything I found myself wanting to treat the meeting room as a space for performance art. I've been taking some acting workshops over the past nine months or so, and have found the rehearsal space to be space of (for lack of a better word) magic. I began to feel as if gathering ten people into a rehearsal space might make for a more transcendent Sunday morning than this hour of shared silence, and I felt a wholly inappropriate desire to burst out and confront the Quakers with a bold gesture or advance, just to see what reaction they might give, to which I might then react myself.

I was reminded of a question that emerged with an actor/director friend of mine once over a late-night bottle of vodka: "If we have art, why do we need religion?" Neither of us could provide an answer.

As I left the meeting, somewhat disappointed that my old housemate was too busy to go have a chat and reflect on the morning, I wondered how it might have been a different experience if I already had a sense of community with the others in the room. If some of us had been serving soup to homeless people together the Saturday before, or served together on the finance committee for the meetinghouse, or something, would silent "worship" (as my housemate pointedly called it) in the parlor have felt different?

Similarly, I realized that a sense of community is the dominant lack in my experience of Ramadan right now.

So far, I have broken each of my fasts alone, or with friends who were not fasting and did not know that I was. Each night this week was a repetition of that theme, until Thursday night -- last night -- when I broke the fast with my friend Mohammed.

A refugee from a religious Islamic upbringing, Mohammed had decided to observe Ramadan this month again for the first time in many years. Earlier this week, we discovered that we are both observing, and so decided to take iftar together at a West African restaurant located midway between our two apartments.

I asked Mohammed if he had a take on how I might make the five prayers meaningful, and he did not, but seemed approving of the yoga-substitution for the Fajr. I asked him to tell me about celebrating Ramadan growing up in Saudi Arabia, and he told me he did not always participate growing up, because children are not always expected to fast. He compared the first Ramadan fast for a Muslim child to a bar mitzvah or a First Communion, and told me about how children at his school would compete to be the most holy -- and tear each other down for their lack of piety.

"Other kids would make you stick out your tongue," he said, reflecting on the beginning of a schoolyard challenge, which would be followed by a bogus claim that the tongue showed proof of sneaking food on the fast. Then the instigator would run to a teacher or other grown-up shrieking: "Mohammed ate! Mohammed ate! Mohammed ate!"

"Was there that same type of competition to be most holy in your Christian upbringing?" he asked me.

It was a good question that I had not been asked before, and I gave an honest answer.

"There was not, at my church," I said. "Maybe sometimes at church camp there was, when everybody was new and jockeying for position. But in my own church, I have to admit to feeling piously confident that I WAS the most holy child there, and I probably just felt that I did not have competition. I knew my Bible, could quote it from memory, and followed all the rules. I knew how much I loved Jesus, and as a child, it was probably inconceivable that anyone could love Jesus more than me. So, no competition."

I smiled, a little embarrassed at the answer that had tumbled out.

"I mean, I suppose I was insufferable," I said. "If I had grown up to be the logical outcome of my childhood, we would not be having dinner right now, and you'd probably hate my guts."

Mohammed laughed, and we moved on to comparing the Koran and the Bible, talking about the role of money in religion, and pondering what a fractured Islam would look like if it had been split into as many different brands as American Christianity has in the 21st century.

I continue to search for more observers with whom to break fast over the next 19 days of the holiday, but in the meantime, tonight, I am invited to Shabbat services with a friend, where I will break fast at the vegetarian potluck afterward -- the largest community I will have been amongst at mealtime since the start of Ramadan.