Sukkot’s Message Is Essential During Our Climate Crisis

The Jewish holiday about impermanence teaches us to work with the environment, not against it.

October 1, 2020

Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival that typically falls in September or October, has always been my favorite holiday. At its core, the exercise of building and being in a sukkah, a temporary and fragile structure to “dwell” in for the week, is one of both trust and humility. While we try our best to construct a sukkah that is stable, we don’t go to extraordinary lengths to fortify it; impermanence and fragility are a feature, not a flaw. We design our sukkot to be easily disassembled and reassembled each year, often replacing materials such as the natural roof, or s’chach, with time. This annual ritual of (re)construction is also a celebratory moment, an opportunity to acknowledge the cyclical nature of Jewish time and life.

…

The reality of climate change is that it will make almost all of us a whole lot less comfortable over the coming years and decades. With unprecedented forest fires, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters across the United States and world, our current condition is requiring us to drastically reconsider the ways we live and interact with our environment.

Acting with humility and acknowledging our vulnerability may mean accepting a broader range of temperatures as “comfortable” on our thermostats or resisting the convenience of personal car ownership. More importantly, however, this will require us to act not just as individuals but as a collective through policy and structural change to resist the tendencies of human ego toward building bigger and stronger and more destructive societies.

On Sukkot, and all year, we should remember that endurance is achieved not through material monumentality, but through the much more nebulous constructions of the social: tradition, interpersonal connection, ritual, and celebration.

Read full article at Hey Alma