Sukkot and Saying Goodbye: Shabbat Chol Hamoed Sukkot 5783

I have always hated goodbyes, and I have always been terrible at them. When something in my life is coming to an end, I have a tendency to deny it, to reject the reality that things are changing. I’ve always considered myself a fairly flexible and open person, but maybe my difficulty with goodbyes really does mean that I don’t manage change very well. That I’m more afraid of change than I thought. And in my desire to stave off the inevitable, I actually make it harder. I linger just a little too long. I tell myself that things will stay the same, even though everything around me has changed. I struggled a lot with this when I graduated from Rabbinical school and we were getting ready to leave New York. Of course, we left during the pandemic, and so, many of the usual ways we would have said goodbye to our friends, to the city, to the life that we had built together and individually over the course of six years, were no longer available to us. So we improvised, and muddled our way through closing one chapter of our lives and beginning the next. 

Right now, on Shabbat Chol Hamoed Sukkot, we are similarly preparing to say goodbye. Soon, we will say goodbye to this precious High Holiday season, to that unique, once-a-year closeness we feel with the Divine. On Tuesday evening, we will close this chapter, and turn back to the dog-eared pages of the rest of our lives. So this time of year for me, has always been bittersweet. It’s Z'man Simchateinu, the time of our Joy! We are elated, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah bring out a kind of joy and celebration that we long for on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. On Monday evening we will dance and sing and rejoice with our community and our Torahs. We will do what we do best– celebrate the moment with unbridled joy. But then comes the inevitable, the goodbye, the change back to the way things were. 

So in its way, Sukkot is a long-goodbye. A week of preparing ourselves to reenter the rest of the year. To say goodbye to the Divine presence we feel so palpably during this season. And Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, those final days of Sukkot, on those days, we express our desire to stay in this moment, to linger in this sacred and precious space, for just one more day. On these final days, we exclaim that we are not quite ready to say goodbye, not quite ready to go it alone. 

In our Torah reading for today, which actually takes us off course and back into the book of Exodus, to Parshat Ki Tissa, we see Moshe grappling with a similar sort of goodbye, or more precisely, he grapples with his own discomfort and fear of change. Just after the incident of the Golden Calf, as Moses pleads with G-d not to abandon or destroy the Israelites, we read:

Moses said to יהוה, “See, You say to me, ‘Lead this people forward,’ but You have not made known to me whom You will send with me. Further, You have said, ‘I have singled you out by name, and you have, indeed, gained My favor.’ Now, if I have truly gained Your favor, pray let me know Your ways, that I may know You and continue in Your favor. Consider, too, that this nation is Your people.” And [God] said, “I will go in the lead and I will lighten your burden.”

Here, Moshe expresses a fear that he may have to lead the people alone. That he won’t have a partner, that G-d will be forever distant, unavailable, and inaccessible. That G-d won’t help carry the weight. But G-d responds in a remarkable way: I will lead you, and I will lighten your burden. Even though things have fundamentally changed, the sin of the Golden, a near irreversible event for the people and G-d alike, G-d affirms G-d’s desire to be close, and to share Moshe’s burden. 

On this promise that G-d makes, Rashi points us to the Targum, the aramaic translation of the Bible– which here reads, My Shechinah will go — I will no more send an angel with you, but I Myself will go with you. G-d comes down to earth, perhaps in perpetuity, to guide Moshe, to walk alongside him. G-d doesn’t send an angel, or a proxy, because G-d also desires to be among G-d’s people.

Moshe continues:

Unless You go in the lead, do not make us leave this place.

Do not make me, do not make us, go it alone. 

Moshe and G-d have a beautiful and complicated relationship, which ebbs and flows, and reveals a great deal of vulnerability. In this particular moment, G-d is angry, hurt, disappointed and so let down by G-d’s people. And Moshe is afraid, insecure, as always, wondering if he is truly up to the job. And in this relationship, and through the very public way that it plays out through our texts, we learn so much about how to be in relationship with G-d. Here, Moshe models for us something essential, that I think we often forget: that maybe if we just asked G-d to stay a little longer, if we asked G-d to come down to earth, to meet us where we are, to walk alongside us, that maybe G-d would. 

I always feel close to G-d when I’m outside. Especially at this time of year. When it’s crisp, when the leaves are changing color, when there is sound and movement and music in the breeze. Everything seems to come alive in the fall. Yes, I feel whispers of Divine encounter here in the sanctuary, and I feel G-d’s presence when we are gathered in the social hall for Kiddush lunch. And I feel it too, on Zoom. But those feelings of closeness and connection are amplified when I am outside, and especially when I am  in the Sukkah. A sanctuary, a sacred space that is out in the world, unencumbered by plaster or cement or opaque ceilings. It’s as if we build our Sukkot so that we may dwell outside, in G-d’s house. So that we can be just a little bit closer, even if only for what sometimes feels like the shortest week of the year. 

While the High Holiday season spans nearly a full month, it always seems to come and go in an instant. We spend so much time preparing physically, spiritually, and communally for the chagim. We put in a tremendous amount of work to find and achieve the kind of experience we seek on these special days. But we are nearing the end.

This morning, we read the first chapter of the Megillat Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes. A text that is all about the challenges and futility and quotidian nature of life. It’s a difficult text to read, simply because it seems to fly in the face of the very thing we are commanded to do right now– feel great, unrestrained joy! I like to think that we read Kohelet, because we know what comes next, that soon, we will come down from the spiritual high of the High Holidays, and we will shift back into real life. Maybe we read Kohelet to help us prepare, to gently bring us out of this safe, and protective reverie that we’ve inhabited for the better part of a month. Maybe we read Kohelet so that the blunt edges of goodbye and the sting of change is softened just a little. Kohelet forces us to accept the realities and challenges of everyday life, so that come Tuesday night, we are not so jarred when we make the final blessing at Havdalah. 

Throughout the week of Sukkot, we are reminded of the joy that comes from living. We celebrate the lives we have been gifted, after so viscerally contending with our mortality on Yom Kippur. We rejoice for this final week of holiday because we have earned it, we have earned the right to celebrate– we have earned the right to find and feel and embody joy despite the futility that Kohelet speaks of. 

Our task in these final days of Sukkot, is to linger in this special kind of joy so that we may bring as much of it as possible into the days and weeks ahead. To sit in the sukkah a little bit longer– maybe you stay outside in the sukkah even though it’s a little bit chilly. Maybe you dance with a Torah on Simchat Torah more wildly than you ever have before. Maybe you sit quietly in the sanctuary, and peacefully take it all in. The final verse of Kohelet reminds us what to do:

The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere G-d and observe G-d’s commandments! 

All we can do, Kohelet reminds us, is to live a life of service and practice reverence for G-d and other human beings. In other words, just stay close. 

In this bittersweet time of year, as I struggle to let go, I like to imagine that G-d struggles too. That G-d is lingering, just like us, in these final precious moments of the season. That G-d isn’t ready to say goodbye, that G-d fears the distance and disconnect that might come next. G-d is sitting in G-d’s Sukkah, hoping we won’t ever go inside. 

Shabbat Shalom and Moadim L’Simcha!