Spread over ALL of us the sukkah of Shalom!

 “ALL of us” means all the interbreathing life-forms of Planet Earth. The sukkah -- the leafy, leaky hut, open to Earth -- comes to us on the full moon of the lunar “moonth” of Tishri, two weeks after Rosh Hashanah (evening of  Monday, September 20 to the evening of September 27).

It is the earthiest of all the Jewish festivals. That means a lot – since all the festivals are the offspring of a love affair between Earth and the subculture of Humanity called the Jewish People.

 (Photo shows Rabbis Berman & Wasow at "Occupy Sukkot" at Philadelphia City Hall in 2010.)

This year Sukkot comes as part of the Sabbatical Year when we are called to release all Earth from overwork and all human beings from economic oppression. In Hebrew the year is called Shmita (“Release”) and Shabbat Shabbaton (“Sabbath to the exponential power of Sabbath”).

 The Shalom Center has embarked on a journey we call “Share Sukkot: Green and Grow the Vote.”  Though synagogues, churches, mosques and religious organizations of all kinds (including The Shalom Center) are prevented from endorsing or opposing specific  electoral candidates or political parties, we are encourages to discuss and educate on major issues and to help eligible Americans register to vote, and then help them actually vote. To “Green and Grow the Vote” unites those two visions of what a tax-exempt organ of the body politick should do.

In the Washington DC area, an ad hoc multireligious group initiated by The Shalom Center and the Am Kolel Congregation  with co-sponsors of Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light and Jews for Clean Energy are with Rabbi David Shneyer, Mirele Greenberg, and others organizing a Sukkot Climate Caravan aimed at the US Senate in the midst of Sukkot on September 23, with a portable sukkah and people waving the traditional Four Species of palm, myrtle, willow, and lemony etrog in the seven directions of the world.

We urge other communities to take on similar actions. We recommend either aiming at local district offices of US Senators, or a local branch of Chase Bank, the #1 investor in businesses that are burning, boiling, and flooding Earth, or at your local Jewish Federation to urge them to lend or grant money to solarize Jewish buildings. .

What are the ancient values  embodied in Sukkot that speak to our generation?

1. It is the fall harvest festival. To us that means pursuing a regenerative agriculture that can feed people while replenishing Earth, not wounding it.
2. When the ancient Temple stood, there were offerings of seventy rams. The rabbis discerned that this meant we were invoking and celebrating a prosperous harvest for all the “70 nations” of the world.
3. It is no accident that Sukkot in every other year in America comes just before an election. For when American election dates were  timed to follow the harvest, so that millions of farmers could turn their attention to voting. It is appropriate to use the festival now to turn the attention of the disenfranchised to the election.
4. The sukkah was the simplest home that the earliest human beings could make to live in. According to Torah, it became the simplest home for the band of runaway slaves who fled Mitzrayyim – the  Tight aNarrow Land of Egypt. So it points toward housing the poor, the homeless, and refugees.
5.  Each evening, a traditional prayer seeks peace in the shelter of a sukkah.  Why not in a fortress, a castle, a tower? Because recognizing the fragility, the vulnerability, of each other is a surer way to shalom than rigidity and walls.
6.  Further exploration of all these can be found at--

                https://theshalomcenter.org/ShareSukkotResources

What do these values mean in terms of the issues today? Our suggestions:

1. Support for the $3.5 Trillion advanced “social infrastructure” bill, especially including provisions of the 30 Million Solar Homes Act and the Environmental Justice for All Act, with a special concern for eco/ social justice through those two new Congressional bills.

Even more especially, solar co-ops in rural, small-town, and low-income urban neighborhoods. Encouraging such co-ops can make them not only ways to save  money as in “get  it for you wholesale” but also to protect marginalized neighborhoods from asthma and cancer epidemics brought by oil/ gas fumes and coal dust, and insist on climate justice; to sponsor CSA urban and rural farms; to become sparks of resilience if a neighborhood is struck with a climate emergency; and to work for change in public and corporate policy, to heal the planet. To grow an “Earth of Neighborhoods.”

       Websites to consult: https://www.30millionsolarhomes.org  and https://www.cbf.org/news-media/newsroom/2021/federal/environmental-justice-for-all-act-is-a-crucial-step-to-empowering-vulnerable-communities.html

 2. “Move Our Money, Protect Our Planet” ---  the MOM-POP demand at all levels of spending and investing. All banks should move their investment money out of fossil-0fuel businesses, into renewable energy businesses; the US should move billions of subsidies (“our” tax money) out of fossil-fuel company into renewable energy; synagogues and Jewish Federation should shift their money the same way; Federations should offer loans or grants to solarize and conserve energy to all Jewish institutions that own buildings in their communities; synagogues should switch where their checking, saving, and credit-card accounts are held to community banks and credit unions; individuals should do the same thing.

 3. For the “Grow the Vote” part of this effort, support for the “For the People Act”; for the John Lewis Act to restore and improve the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for which John Lewis as a young nonviolent demonstrator suffered a skull broken by a violent policeman; the bill to make the District of Columbia into a new state, “Douglass Commonwealth”; and for abolition or basic reform of the filibuster so that the right to vote can be protected.

Please write us what you decide to do in your own community. May the Breath of Life, the Wind of change, the ruach ha’olam, bring you new vigor and new wisdom to the healing of our Earth and human earthlings --   Arthur

In Chayei Sarah (Gen 25: 7-11) not only are Ishmael and Isaac for the first time called “Abraham’s sons” (plural and together) as they come together to bury their dangerous father, but in verse 11 we are told that Isaac settled at Be’er Lachai Ro’i, Well of the Living One Who Sees Me. This is the well that was named by Hagar during her first troubled venture into the wilderness while she is pregnant with Ishmael and then finds the Well again in her travail with the teen-age Ishmael in the wilderness, the well that perhaps was renewed by her tears that “opened her eyes.” (Gen. 16: 9-16 and 21: 15-21)  It surely became Ishmael’s wellspring as well (you might say). So the two brothers do at last come to live together. There is ample evidence back in chapters 16 and 21 that Torah affirms the blessing of God to Ishmael.

 For decades, Rabbi Phyllis Berman and I have always, whenever we had the responsibility to lead Torah reading on Yom Kippur, have made sure that the passage of Genesis 25: 7-11 is read from the Torah as a crowning story for the two readings on Rosh Hashanah – making a tikkun and a tshuvah of the earlier stories, as the Torah Herself does the work of tshuvah that we are taught to do during the Ten Days that are fulfilled by Yom Kippur.  We believe that failing to lift this reading in  the same way as the expulsion of Ishmael and the Binding of Isaac are lifted from their regular places for Rosh Hashanah is a failure in our own duty of Tshuvah, and we believe that raising the Genesis 25 passage to special Yom Kippur consciousness could help lead us to a new approach to peacemaking between Muslims and Jews, Palestine and Israel. 

I commend that Yom Kippur practice to others, as well as the practice at the original Elat Chayyim and for decades now at Congr Mishkan Shalom in Philadelphia of ending Kaddish always with --  “Oseh shalom ... alenu v’al kol Yisrael v’al kol Yishmael v’al kol yoshvei tevel.”