Sukkot: The Festival of our Imagination

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006

In the Jewish tradition, we transmit our culture with law and lore, halakhah and aggada, norms, and narratives. The law unites the Jewish people with its four ells, but allows individualism in narrative. We observe the law as it stands, because where the law ends, freedom begins.

Stories and narratives express the values that are codified in law. But they provide for imagination, individuality, and personal Judaism. In paganisms, holy books are to be understood literally, even though laws are not taken literally. The stories are dogma; one believes even if the beliefs are absurd. Belief in the absurd is a condition of loyalty. Pagan leaders are above the law, which is suspended if it is inconvenient.

In the Jewish tradition, the laws are taken literally. What you see in the canonical documents of Judaism is the moral code that you get. But the narratives are open to interpretation. There is no official way in which the Torah narratives must be taken. When asked by R. Moshe Zeidel to address the conflict between the theory of evolution and the conventional understanding of Hebrew Scripture, Rav Kook argued that Biblical literalism is not a dogma. Rav Kook's reading is not original. When describing God's anger, Scripture presents God's nose becoming hot and the mouth of God is frothing with foam. God does not have a body; the imagery projects how humans in anger appear upon God.

This use of metaphor is part of the Jewish tradition's method of expressing emotion. There were rabbis who tried to abolish Kol Nidre because they took the passage at face value, as a legal declaration that nullifies vows and announces, to their mind, that Jews are not to be taken at their word. The ritual is really an expression of unburdening ourselves of words we did say but should, of commitments made that were not undertaken responsively, of regret that we said words that should not even have been thought. On Friday nights, we sing Shalom Aleichem, in which we pray that the ministering angels bless us for peace. According to our tradition, we pray to God, not to humans and not to angels. But very, very few people taken either Kol Nidre or Shalom Aleichem literally. We are addressing God in a prayer for peace, and direct the prayer to the angels, in whom we probably do not believe, and our thoughts are innocent. On Sukkot, many Jews celebrate the visit of the guests, or Ushpizin, a word related to hospice, auspices, and hospitals. Do we really believe that we are visited by holy ghosts? Does Elijah really visit us on Passover, and our patriarchs on Sukkot?

The religious imagination is expressing emotion; at sacred moments, we unite with our remembered history.

Sukkot 11 reports the debate between R. Aqiva, usually the imaginative mystic, and the usually literalist R. Yishmael. For R. Yishmael, the ancient Sukkah of the wilderness was not a hut but was, instead, the heavenly clouds. For R. Aqiva, the sukkot were actual, physical huts. The problem is that in the wilderness, the wood and thatch needed for huts for 600,000 plus would be hard to find. The rationalist R. Yishmael realized that the semantic field of "sukkah" means "covering" in a common sense fashion; the mystic R. Aqiba believes that miracles happened in the no-man's land of the Sinai wilderness.

Regardless of whether one reads Scripture literally or metaphorically, the narrative teaches a story that embodies the values of the law. The law structures the story, and the story animates the law. Together, law and lore anchor the imagination in reality. Imagination expresses our personal connection to God, Torah and Israel, while Torah law standardizes and unifies us into one people. May the shade of the Sukkah protect us with the shade of God's protective love, so that we have the confidence to probe and become religiously whole.

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