To Everything Turn, Turn, Turn…

More to it than just The Byrds

Everything has its season…Ecclesiastes

On the holiday of Sukkot, we read Kohelet, or Ecclesiastes, as it is called in English. Ecclesiastes is my personal favourite. As a teenager, I loved the beautiful song of The Byrds—music to the words of Kohelet.

Actually, the words were written by King Solomon.

On Sukkot we leave our homes, and we are exiled to a hut, a temporary world. We try to leave our worries, our anxieties, our phones—back inside the house.

In Beit Shemesh there are certain difficulties to dwelling in the sukkah. Usually it’s the heat. Many people have discovered temporary air conditioning. We don’t stoop to that. We are purists. We sweat.

And cats. We fortify the sukkah with a fortress of boards so no one wakes up to a furry creature at their feet.

And then there are the ants. On the years when we forgot to demarcate the first line of defence with K1400 spray, against those giant black ones, they would invade after every meal.

The kids used to make fun of our sukkah because it was a vagabond sort of sukkah, draped in various quilts and orange and sequinned material. There was a tie-dyed piece with white birds gliding through a turquoise sky—my mother had picked it up somewhere in the South Sea Islands. But I liked our sukkah.

The world is futility, but our sukkah was an exile to tranquility.

Sukkot is seven days. Seven days in a week, seven notes to a scale, seven continents, seven colors in the rainbow. Seven is the natural world. Even Shakespeare counted the years of human beings in seven stages…

The Seven Ages of Man [the highlights]

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

At first the infant…

And then the whining schoolboy…

And then the lover…

Then a soldier…

And then the justice…

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut…

The sixth age shifts…

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side…

Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness…

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Our sages said, “All sevens are beloved.” The Sabbath is the seventh day, when we refrain from creative activity. Seven weeks from Passover to the holiday of Shavuot. The Sabbatical year is the seventh year, of course, when we refrain from pro-active agriculture. There are seven species in the Land of Israel—wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranate, olives, and dates. Seven days of Passover.

For seven days on Sukkot we escape the futility of life.

I’m really an Absurdist at heart. Me and Albert Camus. As a teenagers, we used to sit on the grass and philosophize.

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world, said Camus.

That image of rolling the rock up the hill just made sense. It was the logical picture of no sense. The world just doesn’t make sense, or as King Solomon said, some 3000 years before Albert…

For what has a man of all his toil and his stress in which he labors beneath the sun? For all his days are painful, and his business is a vexation; even at night his mind has no rest. This too is futility!

King Solomon was a teenager once, but he wrote Ecclesiastes as an old man. In fact, he comes to the conclusion that, although the world is futile, we indeed have a higher self.

The sum of the matter, when all has been considered…

is that Human beings have a spiritual essence…

And we make order out of a meaningless world. Not by being distracted by the pulls of the material world, but by nourishing our spiritual essence. Of course, a Jew does not run away from the world but raises up the material world; otherwise, the material world is just the rock falling down, again and again.

A time to scatter stones…

The seventh of October was when the absurd became nihilism. It was base human nature out of control. The 7th of October came out on the 8th, Shmini Atzeret, the eighth day after the holiday of Sukkot begins.

Eight?

Eight days of a bris mila, Jewish circumcision.

Eight days of Chanukah.

Shmini Atzeret, the day after Sukkot is the eighth day, the last holiday, when we leave the Sukkah to return to our humble abode. When we merge our material world with our spiritual essence.

All eights are above nature. Like the Jewish people.

I remember before the Gulf War when we were putting up our Sukkos. At that time they were telling us to prepare a sealed room. They said buy lots of plastic tape, to protect us from chemical weapons… And here we were, irony of ironies, putting up a Sukkah, the flimsiest of all “sealed rooms”. Saddam Hussain sent 39 missiles. It is reported that perhaps one or two people were hit. Like I said, above nature.

“Like,” as my teenage self might say, “Like, why are we still here after all these years?”

A time to gather stones together.

The Jews exist inside the Seven of nature but in the Eighth dimension, above nature.

Not like a rolling stone.