Under the Same Stars
It is late at night and we sit all wrapped up in our cosy sweaters, sitting in our wooden succah beneath twinkling lights. The schach rustles whenever the wind picks up, and through the gaps in the greenery I can just make out a star or two. Moments like this have a way of carrying me all the way back to1976, my childhood in Boro Park.
Our little succah stood in a narrow alleyway close to our neighbour the Greenwald’s succah, squeezed into whatever space could be found, What I remember most is not how it looked but how it sounded. From every direction came singing: Chassidish families, Litvish families, Oberlanders and Sefardim, each with their own niggunim rising from their own huts, and all of them carrying the same beautiful words. I think I learned at least six different versions of U’shavtem mayim b’sasson before I was old enough to realise that one song could live in so many melodies at once. Looking back, it was my first lesson in how a people can be utterly different and yet completely united, singing the same words in different voices under the same sky.
Then came succah hopping, which was a special treat for us children. We would wander from one Succah to the next, peering in at the decorations with the seriousness of art critics. One family made paper stars, an art form in itself: some were fashioned from a hundred different shiny papers and others from just six, but every one of them had been made for a single purpose, to adorn the walls of the succah. There was also one home where you had to stand in line to get in. That family worked all year on a theme, and when Succos finally arrived we would crowd in to marvel at the artistry and patience it had taken to bring their vision to life. Even as a child I understood that this was not decoration for its own sake; it was love of our heritage made visible.
Succos has a flavour all its own. It is about gathering together away from our everyday routine and sitting in a home that is not our usual safe space. We step out of our comfortable lives and move, for a week, into a hut covered in bamboo and greenery, there we eat, sing and what amazes me is that we are celebrating something that happened thousands of years ago as though it were happening now. The Torah tells us to dwell in a succah so that our generations will know that Hashem made Bnei Yisroel dwell in Succos when He brought them out of Egypt. We are not simply remembering the wilderness; for these few days, we are living in it.
In truth, Succos, coming as it does after the intensity of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, is a time of assurance. We have spent the past month preparing for the new year, a time when we felt the weight of the world on our shoulders. It was an intense period of connecting to Hashem, and because we are, in essence, created in Hashem’s image, in reaching towards Him we were also reaching towards who and what we truly are.
After all that searching and striving, Succos arrives almost like an exhale. There is something special about that joy. The succah is flimsy by design; its roof must let the stars show through, its walls tremble in the wind, and a heavy downpour can send everyone running indoors with plates in hand. Yet it is precisely in this fragile structure that we are asked to feel most secure. The walls of our real homes, with their locks and central heating, can give us the illusion that we are in control. The succah gently strips that illusion away and asks us to find our safety somewhere else entirely: in faith, in family, and in the company of those gathered around the table.
That company is part of the story too. Tradition teaches that each night we are visited by the Ushpizin, seven exalted guests: Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, Moshe, Aharon, Yosef and Dovid. Many families extend that welcome to the living as well, opening their succah to neighbours, friends and anyone in need of a place at the table. When I think back to Boro Park, to the songs drifting between all those Succos and the queue of children waiting to see a neighbour’s handiwork, I realise that we were all, in a sense, each other’s guests. The walls between our little homes were thin, and for one week of the year that was exactly the point.
Tonight, in my own succah, the lights are twinkling and the air has that first sharpness of autumn. Those gathered around my table may not know all six versions of U’shavtem mayim b’sasson that I once knew, but they know the feeling of sitting close together in the cold, singing and laughing and staying up far later than we should. Perhaps that is the real inheritance: not the particular tune, but the habit of singing together at all.
Succos teaches us that we can leave the familiar behind and still be held, and that the most temporary of homes can become the one we remember for the rest of our lives. After the awe of the Yamim Noraim comes the reassurance that we are not alone, that we never were, and that the same sheltering presence that surrounded our ancestors in the desert surrounds us still, under the schach and under the stars.
Chani Schreibhand is our founder and Editor.
Shes a trained menopause coach.
Chani also has a column in the Jewish Tribune called Bubby's View.
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
- Chani Schreibhand
