What a journey this has been! Over the past ten days, we have been through a marathon of spiritual experiences. From the sounding of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah to the deep introspection and fasting of Yom Kippur, we have journeyed to the very core of our souls and back again. It has been demanding, beautiful, and, let's be honest, exhausting. And so, tonight, my words will be shorter. But while we may welcome this brief respite, our spiritual marathon isn't over yet. This moment of transition still asks us to assess our own conduct with seriousness and sincerity.
In the article I sent out on AdKan this week, I wrote about the collision of joy and grief, and the challenge of living in the space between the wound and the healing. Tonight, I want to add another dimension to that search for balance, one that is presented to us with stark clarity in the contrast between this week’s parashah, Haazinu, and the festival of Sukkot, which begins on Monday night. It is the tension between the rock and the sukkah.
Parashat Haazinu is Moshe’s final, poetic address to the people of Israel. It is a song of memory and warning, of love and lament. And woven through this powerful poem is a single, dominant image for God: HaTzur. The Rock. Five times in this short parashah, God is called The Rock.[1] The rock is a symbol of everything we crave when we feel vulnerable. It is permanence in a world of fleeting moments. It is strength in the face of our own fragility. It is stability, security, and power. To lean on the rock is to seek safety from a position of unshakeable strength, to build walls that cannot be breached, to exercise the power necessary to ensure survival. It is to identify with the powerful, because we know all too well the cost of powerlessness.
And then, just as this image of the mighty, eternal Rock echoes in our ears, the Torah commands us to do something utterly counterintuitive. On Sukkot, we are told: בַּסֻּכֹּת תֵּשְׁבוּ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים – for seven days, you shall dwell in booths.[2] We are commanded to leave our sturdy, comfortable homes—our own little rocks—and move into a temporary, flimsy hut. A sukkah is, by definition, an unstable structure. Its roof, the s’chach, must be sparse enough that we can see the stars through it. It leaves us exposed to the elements: the wind, the rain, the chill of a spring night.
The sukkah is the mirror opposite of the rock. It is a symbol of impermanence, fragility, and radical vulnerability. For one week, we are asked to intentionally inhabit insecurity. We are asked to develop our empathy by trying to imagine, just for a moment, what it would be like to live in such conditions permanently. On the one side, the parashah gives us the Rock, inviting us to identify with the powerful. On the other, the chag gives us the sukkah, commanding us to identify with the vulnerable.
This is not just a theological paradox. For the Jewish people, and for all who care about the future of Israel and its neighbours, this tension is the central, agonising challenge of our time. The context of the last two years has pushed us, with terrifying force, towards the extremes.
On Monday night, we will sit down for the first meal in the sukkah. We are commanded for it to be z’man simchateinu, the season of our joy. But this year, as we do so, we will also be marking a solemn and painful anniversary. For on Tuesday, the first day of Sukkot, the world will mark two years since the 7th of October, 2023. We will be asked to hold our impulse toward simcha—toward joy—and make space for memory and grief. A week later, on Simchat Torah, as we prepare to dance with the Torah scrolls, we will be asked to do it again, as we mark the second anniversary of that terrible day according to the Jewish calendar. The calendar itself is forcing us into this impossible balance.
The trauma of that day, and the ongoing pain of the past two years, has sent many of us running for the shelter of the Rock. There are those among us, and in our global Jewish family, whose hearts are, rightly, focused on the victims of that horrific attack. They feel the immense, unending pain of the families of the captives, who have lived every single day of the last two years in a state of suspended agony. Their focus is on security, on strength, on ensuring that our people never have to endure such a horror again. This is the impulse of HaTzur, The Rock—a legitimate, deeply understood, and necessary response to existential threat.
At the same time, there are those among us who, looking out from the fragile walls of their sukkah, feel their hearts breaking for others. They see the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians whose lives have also been shattered by this conflict. They see women, children, and men who reject Hamas and its cruelty with all of their being, but whose homes, families, and futures have been destroyed. This is the impulse of the sukkah—the call to empathy, to see the humanity of the other, to feel the pain of all who are vulnerable, no matter who they are.
Our world, and the algorithms that drive our discourse, tells us we must choose. You must be for the Rock or for the sukkah. You must stand with the powerful or with the vulnerable. You must wrap yourself in the flag of your own people’s pain, or you must dedicate yourself to the pain of the other.
But Jewish tradition says, no. You must do both. It is a breathtakingly difficult demand. As I wrote in my article this week, "compassion is not a scarce resource, and Jewish conscience does not permit dehumanisation. We can condemn cruelty and still pray for the protection of all innocents. We can pursue security and still yearn for a future where no child goes to sleep afraid."
We must find the moral courage to live in the space between the Rock and the sukkah. To demand security for our people and to see the humanity of our neighbours. To mourn our dead and to mourn the innocent dead on the other side. To hold our own trauma and to recognise the trauma we have, in turn, inflicted.
This is not a path of easy answers. It is a path of constant, soul-wrenching struggle. But it is our path. We are the people who are commanded to be strong as a rock and vulnerable as a sukkah, all in the same week. We are the people whose season of greatest joy is now forever intertwined with a memory of profound sorrow.
And so, as we prepare to enter the sukkah, let us not choose between these two sacred obligations. Let us choose to hold them both. Let us build our sukkah with strong foundations, but leave its roof open to the stars. Let us find the strength to protect ourselves and the compassion to feel for others. And in that spirit, let us pray for the peace that can only come when the security of the Rock and the empathy of the sukkah are extended to all. A prayer for peace for us, for the state of Israel, and for everyone.
Shabbat Shalom.
[1] Deut. 32:4, Deut. 32:15, Deut. 32:18, Deut. 32:30, Deut. 32:31
[2] Lev. 23:42
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