Murmuring Hallel in the early morning light, before everyone around me is awake, feels sweeter than at any other time, especially wrapped in the loving embrace of my favorite holiday ever.
Whispering a "livri'ut" to a neighbor's sneeze, listening to another neighbor calming a crying child, hearing another singing to her children a morning niggun, smiling at a late hammer, as someone repairs or adds to an already completed sukkah...
The occasional car seems as if it is from another time, a time in the future or the past.
I imagine all of us, the several families around me I can hear as if they were just in the next tent, which in fact they are, as if we were traveling in the desert together.
An unwilling voyeur, I am offered a mashal of how little we say and do is really private. I don't listen but hear with acceptance and joy that I am surrounded by loving parents and children, talking and guiding and laughing together.
My sukkah, my portable yearly Clouds of Glory dwelling, surrounds me with memory.
The coffee mug, given by my dear children. The bentcher, a recent gift from Norm and Gail, who dug it out of their memories, because they heard that I love having photos to enhance my prayer, and because there are shared memories here. The wall hangings that used to be tablecloths; the flags of our places of birth and the place we met; the pretty sukkah enhancements picked up for various holidays past. The bracelets jangling softly on my wrist, a gift from Adele right here in this sukkah a few years ago. My hands smelling still of the lingering lotion that was a gift from Shulamis on one of her visits to the Holy Land, a lotion I choose not to afford, which makes the gift even sweeter. Nearby, the purse Marilyn gave to me along with all of "her girls," thus binding with silk and leather and love my place in her family.
Hovering outside of our patented Sukkot Force Field ©, UNESCO and others are busy trying to make us vanish by using Orwellian New Speak. (If you must, see here and here -- but I'd wait until after Sukkot, if I were you.) "And the slanderers should be denied hope, all evil should be instantaneously obliterated..."
Friends drop by with enough warning for me to put out a bit of a spread, thus turning a day-without-plans into a feast of conversation, fun and sharing of their adventures, turning our sukkah briefly into a Tardis to take us with them to Ma'arat Hamachpela and to The Moshav, without having to fight traffic!
Tonight we will visit another couple's sukkah, to play music... with the sad silent echo of the yearly invitation that will not come, because that family is in aveilut, one of our cherished fellow musicians having lost a dear relative only weeks ago.
Soon, it will be Shabbat, a "full Shabbat," meaning all of the Israel-based family will crowd in with larger-than-life talking and squabbling, one-upping and teasing, and beer pong and feasting and bear-hug loving.
Each day in the sukkah brings new sounds and songs and stories. I wish it could last longer than a week. It is a precious island in time toward which I begin to look again, even before it fades into the coming winter.
Wishing one and all a 5777 full of love, good health, good news, clarity, and even more than usual joy from family and friends.
