Biography
Rabbi David Saperstein is Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C., an organization that has been at the center of Jewish social justice for over 40 years. In 1999, Rabbi Saperstein was elected the first Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He is also the author of Jewish Dimensions of Social Justice: Tough Moral Choices of Our Time. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"Sukkah of Peace" 
Each fall in the sequence of Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, are followed by the week-long celebration of Succoth. Now there are many symbols associated with the Jewish holiday cycle: the shofar, the stirring sound of which highlights the Rosh Hashanah service, the menorah which is lit on Chanukah, the matzah which Jews are commanded to eat during the holiday of Pesach [Passover]. But of all of these symbols, perhaps the most colorful and interesting is the sukkah.

A sukkah is a framed booth made usually of wood or a similar material, the sides of which are generally open or a doorway must always open, covered on the sides by the fruits and vegetables that symbolize holiday harvest and the fall harvest season, and covered on top by leaves, branches and twigs. It reminds us of the temporary booths that the children of Israel, passing through the desert for 40 years, would live in at night, pack up and transport during the next day's travels for the 40 years that they walked towards the Promised Land. The Biblical injunction is that we should actually dwell in the sukkah for seven day. Leviticus, chapter twenty-three, verse forty-two says, "You shall live in the booths for seven days. I, the Lord, want to remind you that these were the booths that the children of Israel lived in during their journey through the wilderness." Literally moving out of our homes and into these temporary and frail shelters, over the many generations and centuries Jews evolved that custom so today they will not eat under a fixed roof during the entire period of the festival, taking all of their meals in the sukkah.

When my family and I lived in Jerusalem on sabbatical, you could walk down the streets right before Succoth and see families setting up frameworks and gathering the leaves for the sukkahs which were built on the tiny balconies of each apartment or out in the backyards or in the front yards of the homes. To pass through that area during the festival week itself and see each family sitting under its sukkah eating, talking, singing is truly a moving experience. Many communities here in the United States similarly have many people who obverse these commandments. Now, why these commandments about the sukkah?

Perhaps one insight comes from a line in the evening daily and Sabbath evening service called the Hashkiv from the Hashkivenu prayer: Cause us, O Eternal, to lie down in peace. And it contains the line Ufros Aleinu Succat Shlomecha, spread over us the sukkah of your peace. Now why did the author of this prayer use this particular image, the sukkah of peace? After all, peace is one of the highest of all Jewish values, while the sukkah is relatively common and ordinary. Why did he not write, "spread over us the stately mansions of your peace," or "the majestic palace of your peace," or use another image which would seem to be more appropriate? In other words, what does the sukkah have to do with shalom, with peace? But the more you think about it, the more you realize that maybe they have great deal to do with each other, that perhaps the author of this prayer was telling us something extremely profound.

First of all, a mansion or a palace is built on strong foundations, out of concrete or stone. Once it is built, it will likely stand for hundreds of years. You can travel through the land of Israel and see Crusader castles built almost 900 years ago, abandoned for 8oo years ago, and yet they still stand, their walls intact. But a sukkah is totally different. It is erected for short periods of time. It is fragile and vulnerable, exposed to the elements. A strong wind can come along and easily blow it over. It can be undermined by water seeping through the ground or burnt if someone carelessly drops a lit match. You have to watch over it almost constantly, care for it incessantly, lest it be suddenly destroyed.

The same is true for peace. There have been periods in history of tranquility for relatively long periods of time, like the so called Pax Romana. But peace has been far more like a temporary sukkah that a permanent castle. One historian once calculated that since the year 1500, there have only been about 30 years in which there was no recorded warfare of anywhere in the world. We erect structures of peace with care, but they are all too easily blown over by the strong winds of hatred, or undermined by the seeping waters of suspicion, or consumed by the fires of nationalistic self-righteousness. In order for the edifice of peace to stand intact, we have to be constantly on guard. We cannot take it for granted that peace once achieved will automatically endure. It is a lesson learned all too bitterly in our time.

But this is not the only similarity between the sukkah and peace. Let us return to our comparison of a castle and a sukkah. A castle is built with strong, thick walls which separate the people inside from the those outside. It does not have many windows. The few windows it does have are wide on the inside, but narrow to slit on the outside. They were designed this way so that men could stand in them and shoot arrows outside while affording only the narrowest target to the enemy. These windows were not meant for looking through. You could barely see out, you can't see in at all. But a sukkah is totally different. It is entirely open. It does not cut off those inside from those outside. You can easily see into it and those who are in it can see easily see out.

Now there have been those over the centuries who thought that the way to peace is through strong, impregnable borders which the enemy is unable to pass. It is the idea of Maginot Line; or, to a certain extent, the aim of policies today like America's effort to build a missel shield or Israel's security fence that the horrific terrorism aimed at it's children and families has forced it to build. Necessary as such borders may be at times, it is like a doctor treating a symptom instead of curing the illness. Impregnable borders may make fighting difficult but they do not bring true peace. Shalom, like the sukkah, must be based on openness of each side to each other, on the understanding that can come from only through access and availability.

One of the great failures of Middle East peace so far, is that they have not succeeded in building a kind of economic, cultural, social, human interaction that builds personal relations and human trust. And even while every country needs to try to deter terrorism militarily, only when we address the underlying causes of terrorism will we eliminate it. And so to in our societies, we can build walls like in our suburban neighborhoods that have exclusive gates and fences around them or luxury buildings with doormen. But they and the self-imposed social isolation that distances us from people's religion, race, or ethnicity that differ from our own, like we heard in the moving stories in the beginning. But all the barriers will come crashing down in the end if we can't build understanding and see each other as we truly are and learn not only of our differences, but of our far greater commonality.

Another quality of a sukkah that seems to me to be relevant, a third one, is that a palace and mansion has a solid ceiling which sets a limit on how high we can rise, but according to Jewish law, a sukkah that has a solid roof is unacceptable. In order to be valid, the roof must be made of twig or branches so you can look through the spaces and see the stars in the heaven. It reminds us of the infinite potential of humanity that can come under conditions of peace. We live in an extraordinary time. We're the first generation that can blow up the world in a nuclear holocaust, pollute it until we can't breath our air or drink our water, can make Orwell's nightmare of 1984 the reality of the world, or that can through genetic engineering create new forms of life, either create Hitler's master race or transform and eliminate birth defects. But we are also, with all of that scaring us, the first generation in all of human history that produces enough food to feed every child of God on Earth, that can educate every child, that can wipe out diseases that have plagued us from time in memoriam, that can tear down the walls that separate us and differ from us. Which path we will choose is our decision. If only we could use that trillion dollars spent in military expenditures each year to make real the dreams and hopes that all people share, what a world we would create! We could, as in the sukkah, look up and see the stars and reach for them.

These then are the things that sukkah teaches us about peace: that it is vulnerable and easily destroyed so that it demands our constant vigilance, that it must be based not on barriers between people but on openness and access, that it can enable us to reach for the stars. The holiday of Succoth is the third of the major Biblical festivals of the year, after Passover and Shavuot. All of them are associated with great historical events. Passover celebrates the exodus from bondage in Egypt. Shavuot, the revelation and the giving of the law at Sinai. The third great event which should be the cause for our celebration is the entering into and the possession of the Promised Land. But Succoth does not celebrate this. Instead it refers back to the period of wandering in the wilderness.

Why is there no holiday for the Promised Land? Perhaps because we have still not entered the promised land of peace. We are still wandering in the desert, in the wilderness of war and strife. We have not yet arrived, although we can envision the peace in the land before us. All we have is hope and our determination to bring closer that day when that prayer will be made real: Ufros Aleinu Succat Shlomecha. Spread over us the sukkah of thy peace. Amen.Each fall in the sequence of Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, are followed by the week-long celebration of Succoth. Now there are many symbols associated with the Jewish holiday cycle: the shofar, the stirring sound of which highlights the Rosh Hashanah service, the menorah which is lit on Chanukah, the matzah which Jews are commanded to eat during the holiday of Pesach [Passover]. But of all of these symbols, perhaps the most colorful and interesting is the sukkah.

A sukkah is a framed booth made usually of wood or a similar material, the sides of which are generally open or a doorway must always open, covered on the sides by the fruits and vegetables that symbolize holiday harvest and the fall harvest season, and covered on top by leaves, branches and twigs. It reminds us of the temporary booths that the children of Israel, passing through the desert for 40 years, would live in at night, pack up and transport during the next day's travels for the 40 years that they walked towards the Promised Land. The Biblical injunction is that we should actually dwell in the sukkah for seven day. Leviticus, chapter twenty-three, verse forty-two says, "You shall live in the booths for seven days. I, the Lord, want to remind you that these were the booths that the children of Israel lived in during their journey through the wilderness." Literally moving out of our homes and into these temporary and frail shelters, over the many generations and centuries Jews evolved that custom so today they will not eat under a fixed roof during the entire period of the festival, taking all of their meals in the sukkah.

When my family and I lived in Jerusalem on sabbatical, you could walk down the streets right before Succoth and see families setting up frameworks and gathering the leaves for the sukkahs which were built on the tiny balconies of each apartment or out in the backyards or in the front yards of the homes. To pass through that area during the festival week itself and see each family sitting under its sukkah eating, talking, singing is truly a moving experience. Many communities here in the United States similarly have many people who obverse these commandments. Now, why these commandments about the sukkah?

Perhaps one insight comes from a line in the evening daily and Sabbath evening service called the Hashkiv from the Hashkivenu prayer: Cause us, O Eternal, to lie down in peace. And it contains the line Ufros Aleinu Succat Shlomecha, spread over us the sukkah of your peace. Now why did the author of this prayer use this particular image, the sukkah of peace? After all, peace is one of the highest of all Jewish values, while the sukkah is relatively common and ordinary. Why did he not write, "spread over us the stately mansions of your peace," or "the majestic palace of your peace," or use another image which would seem to be more appropriate? In other words, what does the sukkah have to do with shalom, with peace? But the more you think about it, the more you realize that maybe they have great deal to do with each other, that perhaps the author of this prayer was telling us something extremely profound.

First of all, a mansion or a palace is built on strong foundations, out of concrete or stone. Once it is built, it will likely stand for hundreds of years. You can travel through the land of Israel and see Crusader castles built almost 900 years ago, abandoned for 8oo years ago, and yet they still stand, their walls intact. But a sukkah is totally different. It is erected for short periods of time. It is fragile and vulnerable, exposed to the elements. A strong wind can come along and easily blow it over. It can be undermined by water seeping through the ground or burnt if someone carelessly drops a lit match. You have to watch over it almost constantly, care for it incessantly, lest it be suddenly destroyed.

The same is true for peace. There have been periods in history of tranquility for relatively long periods of time, like the so called Pax Romana. But peace has been far more like a temporary sukkah that a permanent castle. One historian once calculated that since the year 1500, there have only been about 30 years in which there was no recorded warfare of anywhere in the world. We erect structures of peace with care, but they are all too easily blown over by the strong winds of hatred, or undermined by the seeping waters of suspicion, or consumed by the fires of nationalistic self-righteousness. In order for the edifice of peace to stand intact, we have to be constantly on guard. We cannot take it for granted that peace once achieved will automatically endure. It is a lesson learned all too bitterly in our time.

But this is not the only similarity between the sukkah and peace. Let us return to our comparison of a castle and a sukkah. A castle is built with strong, thick walls which separate the people inside from the those outside. It does not have many windows. The few windows it does have are wide on the inside, but narrow to slit on the outside. They were designed this way so that men could stand in them and shoot arrows outside while affording only the narrowest target to the enemy. These windows were not meant for looking through. You could barely see out, you can't see in at all. But a sukkah is totally different. It is entirely open. It does not cut off those inside from those outside. You can easily see into it and those who are in it can see easily see out.

Now there have been those over the centuries who thought that the way to peace is through strong, impregnable borders which the enemy is unable to pass. It is the idea of Maginot Line; or, to a certain extent, the aim of policies today like America's effort to build a missel shield or Israel's security fence that the horrific terrorism aimed at it's children and families has forced it to build. Necessary as such borders may be at times, it is like a doctor treating a symptom instead of curing the illness. Impregnable borders may make fighting difficult but they do not bring true peace. Shalom, like the sukkah, must be based on openness of each side to each other, on the understanding that can come from only through access and availability.

One of the great failures of Middle East peace so far, is that they have not succeeded in building a kind of economic, cultural, social, human interaction that builds personal relations and human trust. And even while every country needs to try to deter terrorism militarily, only when we address the underlying causes of terrorism will we eliminate it. And so to in our societies, we can build walls like in our suburban neighborhoods that have exclusive gates and fences around them or luxury buildings with doormen. But they and the self-imposed social isolation that distances us from people's religion, race, or ethnicity that differ from our own, like we heard in the moving stories in the beginning. But all the barriers will come crashing down in the end if we can't build understanding and see each other as we truly are and learn not only of our differences, but of our far greater commonality.

Another quality of a sukkah that seems to me to be relevant, a third one, is that a palace and mansion has a solid ceiling which sets a limit on how high we can rise, but according to Jewish law, a sukkah that has a solid roof is unacceptable. In order to be valid, the roof must be made of twig or branches so you can look through the spaces and see the stars in the heaven. It reminds us of the infinite potential of humanity that can come under conditions of peace. We live in an extraordinary time. We're the first generation that can blow up the world in a nuclear holocaust, pollute it until we can't breath our air or drink our water, can make Orwell's nightmare of 1984 the reality of the world, or that can through genetic engineering create new forms of life, either create Hitler's master race or transform and eliminate birth defects. But we are also, with all of that scaring us, the first generation in all of human history that produces enough food to feed every child of God on Earth, that can educate every child, that can wipe out diseases that have plagued us from time in memoriam, that can tear down the walls that separate us and differ from us. Which path we will choose is our decision. If only we could use that trillion dollars spent in military expenditures each year to make real the dreams and hopes that all people share, what a world we would create! We could, as in the sukkah, look up and see the stars and reach for them.

These then are the things that sukkah teaches us about peace: that it is vulnerable and easily destroyed so that it demands our constant vigilance, that it must be based not on barriers between people but on openness and access, that it can enable us to reach for the stars. The holiday of Succoth is the third of the major Biblical festivals of the year, after Passover and Shavuot. All of them are associated with great historical events. Passover celebrates the exodus from bondage in Egypt. Shavuot, the revelation and the giving of the law at Sinai. The third great event which should be the cause for our celebration is the entering into and the possession of the Promised Land. But Succoth does not celebrate this. Instead it refers back to the period of wandering in the wilderness.

Why is there no holiday for the Promised Land? Perhaps because we have still not entered the promised land of peace. We are still wandering in the desert, in the wilderness of war and strife. We have not yet arrived, although we can envision the peace in the land before us. All we have is hope and our determination to bring closer that day when that prayer will be made real: Ufros Aleinu Succat Shlomecha. Spread over us the sukkah of thy peace. Amen.

Interview with David Saperstein
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: David, the rich imagery of the sukkah of peace you conveyed so eloquently in your message. How could the sukkah become a template for the resolution of the clash of rights between Jews and Palestinians in Israel?

David Saperstein: The word shalom in Hebrew, as I think your regular viewer have heard other speakers mention, comes not from the same root as pax in Latin, the absence of war, but rather shalem, to make whole, to heal. Two thousand years ago the rabbis wrote in the Talmud, "The sword enters the world because of justice delayed and justice denied." It is clear that if we're to have peace in the Middle East it must be a just peace that will the give the Israelis the security they need but will also give the Palestinians the ability to determine their destiny, to have justice and the opportunity to live out their lives as they want with economic opportunity. And they can't do it alone, they can't have one without the other, they are bound together like Siamese twins joined the hip. Their destinies are going to effect each other. This will be a real test about just how committed both sides are to making real the dreams of their own people. It can't be one at the expense of the other. The fragility of the sukkah reminds us of how fragile efforts at peace can be and how deeply they need to be cared for and nourished.

Talbot: How do you maintain the inner peace of your soul when you are confronted with so much conflict?

Saperstein: There is really, I think, a sense that many people who enter into a relationship with God—to be God's partners in shaping a better, more hopeful future for all of God's children—have a sense, as in the words of the great Orthodox rabbi, Isadore Twersky, that in calling us to that partnership God has ennobled humanity. He has given to our lives meaning, destiny, and purpose in that the work of social justice is God's work. It is what God has called us to do and that Divine plan which has been entrusted to us is what gives meaning to our lives. There is a sense of wholeness that comes from that.

Talbot: Thank you, Rabbi David Saperstein for your compelling message.