“.. to take refuge from the fiery stream and rain, when You rain coals upon the wicked”
“May it be Your Will”- Prayer said in the succah
Yahya Sinwar orchestrated the October 7 massacre by Hamas to inflict maximum pain on Israel and Jews.
Whether he timed it for Simchat Torah, the most joyous religious holiday on the Jewish calendar, may never be known, but our enemies always know us better than we do ourselves, and Sinwar was an assiduous, if evil, student of Jews and Israel.
Almost certainly he also knew about the Nova Festival of Peace, a wonderfully soft target on the Gaza border that week. The festival organizers did schedule Nova deliberately for the last days of Sukkot because it is an Israeli national holiday. Maybe they and all the festival goers consciously intended it as an alternative Simchat Torah, a secular celebration of the religion of music, peace, sensuality, drugs, sex, and indulgence. In any case, the targets were ripe. Israel was caught off-guard. Hamas went on a rampage. They raped, murdered, beheaded, burnt, and tortured unspeakably any Israeli they could get their hands on. They took almost 250 hostages to the hell tunnels of Gaza.
On the first day of Sukkot the next year, 2024, Israeli troops assassinated Sinwar in Rafah, where they long suspected he hid.
I’m writing this sitting in my succah, sunlight streaming through the straw roof. It’s the one time of the Jewish year when the mitzvah surrounds us, envelops us, shelters us: we are in the mitzvah as opposed to the mitzvah being in us. And so it’s hard in this placid moment staring at the calendar not to reflect on the coincidence of dates: Sinwar’s terror the day after Sukkot; his assassination a year later on the first day the next year. It opens a space on the calendar, a temporary parenthesis that alters consciousness, a week that happens to be Sukkot, when we live as if we just fled Egypt and dwelled in temporary wilderness huts 3200 years ago. In the succah we dwell in the temporary, the temporal. History accordions in on itself. What does it mean?
Of course, if you see the world filled with miracles, there are no coincidences. God is talking to us through His time, His calendar. In His time, infinite opposing currents can be true, tumbling into and flowing over each other in dense layers of meaning. Past and future collapse into one unifying vision of truth. Looked at this way, the signs are explosive, hard to ignore, like reports of gunfire around the corner. Maybe we can read His mind about the week:
Enter My space, the canopy of peace. My soldier’s rifle is nearby. Bullet holes riddle the wall outside the window. Light halos him. This is a temporary if holy peace. The succah roof is makeshift, gerryrigged over destruction, yet My light streams in. My soldier summons seven heroes from the Jewish past. They faced horror and survived disasters and are now his guests. He has carved out a bittersweet moment of peace on the battlefield. It is fleeting. That’s the nature of human time, but it looks forward to a future of permanent and perfect peace.
Telepathy 
You must be logged in to post a comment.