Returning to Love (Shabbat Ha'azinu)
Over the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with a few of you who were looking forward to High Holidays, but also looking forward to them being over with! We thought last year would be the only year we would need to celebrate the holidays during pandemic.
Though many of us were grateful to have the option to attend services here in person, wearing masks, though essential, made it hard to sing together and see each other’s smiles. On top of that, as I shared in my Rosh Hashanah sermon, the metaphors our tradition uses for God during High Holidays: father, king, judge - sometimes make us feel estranged, distant, from our Source.
Today, we come back into a sense of closeness with the divine presence. This Shabbat before Sukkot, we begin to see God not as transcendent king, but as immanent nurturer: We take refuge in God’s sheltering presence. Find protection and support - in the words we prayed earlier - in the sukkat shalom, the Holy One’s shelter of peace.
Parashat Ha’azinu, the last parasha we read on Shabbat before we turn back to the book of Genesis once again, summarizes Israel’s journey through the wilderness imagining God as an eagle bearing us on God’s wings:
Yimtza’ehu b’eretz midbar
Uv’tohu yileil yishimon
[God] found [Israel] in a desert region,
In an empty howling waste.yisov’venhu yivon’nehu
Yitzrenhu k’ishon eino.
[God] engirded [our people], watched over them,
Guarded them as the pupil of God’s eye. (Deut. 32:10)
This beautiful image of nurturing and protection reminds us of the shelter we are to dwell in next week. Rashi makes this connection explicit when he unpacks what this verse means when it says God watched over and “engirded” our people in the wilderness: “there [God] surrounded them and encompassed them with the ‘clouds of Glory…’” (Rashi on Deut. 32:10).
What is the connection between clouds of glory and sukkot? While the Torah tells us our ancestors dwelt in Sukkot during their 40 years in the wilderness, it does not tell us what Sukkot actually are! This leads to a dispute amongst the rabbis. According to a midrash, R. Eliezer says: They were literal booths. R. Akiba says: The sukkot were the clouds of glory.
For R. Eliezer, the Israelites dwelt in literal booths in the desert. But R. Akiba believes they didn’t dwell in actual structures (afterall they wouldn’t have had branches and leaves to build them with in the desert!). Rather, they dwelt amidst the “clouds of glory,” visual markers of God’s radiant presence that are described throughout Torah as it tells of our people’s time in the wilderness. This, R. Akiba’s opinion becomes the majority interpretation - the leafy sukkot we build symbolize those clouds!
A midrash says each side of the Sukkah represent’s a different side of the Holy One’s care for us: one side is the anan, the cloud that guides Israel through the wilderness by day. The second, Divine protection, the tzel canfecha the shadow of God’s wings we describe in our Hashkiveinu. The third side represents the continuous presence of the Holy One as kavod, God’s tangible presence in our midst. The fourth, Divine love: the midrash compares the clouds of glory to a wedding canopy under which God weds the people despite their complaints and misbehavior in the wilderness.
We have lived through a challenging year and a half in the howling wilderness of pandemic - far from what is familiar, from the ease and closeness we once knew. As we spend time in our Sukkah here at Orchard Cove - this sacred space gives us a felt experience of a God who protects, accompanies, and loves us. As we begin the new year, and hopefully spend some time in the Sukkah, I pray we truly sense ourselves held, supported, and protected within the embrace of community and the natural world; encompassed by our ancestors, and the very Source of Life.
Amen.