Fragility and Gratitude

The festival-filled month of Tishrei is over, and we’ll sing in the new month of Cheshvan on the first Shabbat of November…during which we’ll celebrate the bar mitzvah of Josh Hoffman! And — a quick Mazel Tov to Saybel Shuster and her family on the occasion of her bat mitzvah (the last Shabbat in October)!

I mention these personal family milestones because we all can easily relate to these moments as important occasions for gratitude. Also in the sphere of the personal: When we’re in shul (physically present or on Zoom) we’re well-accustomed to the ritual of reciting names on the Mi Shebeirach list (prayers for healing and recovery); we know that names come and go…which means that some people recover from illness, that a crisis has passed, or that someone has passed away. This corner-of-the-mind reality hits home when the successful recovery or the person’s death is connected to us personally. A close friend of Marty Koplin just passed away, as did Anita Gouse, Joan Kent’s sister. We pass along our condolences and love to Marty and to Joan on the occasion of the passing of people who were so important in their lives. I mention these two examples to drive home the fragile nature of our lives.

It’s time for the sukkah to come down. Every year, when I put the sukkah up and when I take it down — each task of assembling or dismantling serves as a meditation upon the temporary dwelling which is our physical form; the temporary journeys which describe our lives. They go by quickly. There are the routines – football and track, plays, gymnastics, walking the dog, shopping, etc.

Out in the world beyond our homes, campaigns, voting, wars that occupy Page One, wars that linger off the headlines, grinding on.

And what do we make of it all, the personal, the other stuff? The writer of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) — the scroll we revisit each year on Sukkot — opens his discourse with the observation that the sum of all the coming and going is ‘hevel havalim,’ mere wind. It’s here for a minute, it’s gone. Yesterday’s news. Temporary. He also says “there’s nothing new under the sun.” Maybe that’s true as well. But I don’t think that the take-home of Kohelet is that it’s all meaningless. There’s a better question than ‘What does it all mean?’ The real question is: What does it all mean to you? And the reason this is a more compelling question is — the meaning of a moment in a life or the accumulation of all the bits that make up our lives — is not something inherently there; the meaning has everything to do with what we make of it all, within the poignant framework of a fragile sukkah. As Tishrei fades away, as we sing in Cheshvan, the take-home of the fragility and the gratitude (for so many things large and small) is about how we stitch it all together into a tapestry of meaning. It really is in the eye of the beholder.

Potential bonus: If fragility is in one hand and gratitude is in the other, while we may feel stretched (beyond our cherished comfort zone), we might discover a cherished companion who can help us through tough moments. The companion’s name is humility.