Sukkot in Sheldon
By Sophie Lieberman
This Sunday evening, we concluded the month-long rush of important Jewish holidays, beginning with the new year on Rosh Hashanah, and ending with Sukkot, the harvest festival. Sukkot is a holiday that lasts eight days, traditionally celebrated by erecting a structure called a sukkah. Sukkah is usually translated as “booth,” which in modern practice is a temporary outdoor structure made up of less than four complete walls and a roof covered with any organic material, called s’chach, through which you can see the sky and stars. According to the laws of the holiday, we try as much as possible to live our lives in the sukkah for the duration of Sukkot. This means eating meals bundled in layers of coats and scarves as the fall evenings get colder and spending nights sleeping on the ground, trying to peek at the constellations.
Growing up in an apartment in New York City, my family always built a sukkah with our friends in their backyard down the street. That sukkah was a build-your-own Ikea-style one with a metal frame and green plastic tarp held taut by elastic bobbles, constructed and taken down again each year. This year was the first time I’ve had a sukkah at my own home, built from materials we found around us, in an effort led by JR Zumwalt, Gavi and Remi’s father. The four corner posts were made from branches of an osage orange tree in our backyard, which has wood known for its bright yellow interior that can be used for natural dye. Each post worms its way to the sky in a different direction, reminding me of plants searching for available sunlight. We collected dozens of corn stalks from fields that John Zumwalt farms behind our house to lay across the top slats for s’chach. We even found a tarp that had been covered in cow manure before we soaped it off to form three walls. While it seemed well-used, I don’t think it had ever wrapped around the corners of a sukkah. Being able to build a sukkah for my own home was an exciting mark of the Jewish community my housemates and I have cultivated, especially as current circumstances have confined us to ushering in weighty Jewish observance and celebration without leaning on family or synagogue.
As we spent the past month gathering and observing these holidays, we’ve also felt activity ramping up across town. During the day, semi-trucks rumble past our house weighed down by thousands of tons of harvested soy, and clouds of dust move across the skyline as combines plow across acres of cropland. Anticipation is apparent across faces and through the frenetic movement of local farmers for plants to be harvested as soon as possible because of how much value is currently sitting idle in their fields. In last week’s blog post, Samm described the impressions left by observing a soy harvest as she glimpsed the scale and bounty of agriculture at this size. I also had a chance to ride in the combine with farmer John Zumwalt as the harvesting machinery guzzled tons of soybeans into its back cabin, until the window behind our heads was filled with a solid wall of yellow-white beans. Even as we lay down our sleeping bags on the ground of the sukkah, John’s combine turned on its headlights and raced across the soy field adjacent to our backyard.
In Jewish tradition and history, the sukkah takes on a dual significance. One reading uses the sukkah to remind us of temporary shelters that Jews built as they wandered the desert after fleeing slavery in Egypt. A sukkah also helps us imagine huts that farmers would build out in their fields during harvest season so they could remain there and squeeze as many harvesting hours out of the day without having to return to their homes at night. During our observance of Sukkot this year, it didn’t escape me that as we purported to recreate these old agricultural practices, humans and machines continued to work into the night just yards from where we slept.
Another requirement of Sukkot is to shake the arba minim, four species, which are made up of an etrog (citron) and a sheath that holds palm, willow, and myrtle branches, referred to collectively as a lulav. When you hold the etrog together with the base of the lulav, you shake the four species in the four cardinal directions, then up and down. Each of these plants are native to Israel, and remind us of verdant plant growth that awaited the Israelites as they finished wandering through the desert. Usually shaking these branches into the air around me transports me to a Mediterranean climate, and I’m left astounded that we are still relying on the same species of plants that provided fresh air and shade to those emerging from a barren landscape thousands of years ago. This year, I wondered what it would mean to choose species that are native to the land that we are farming, and that people here have relied on for generations while they established their own lives here.
Celebrating Sukkot felt different this year. I wasn’t in a backyard in Brooklyn, but in a town where the population barely tops 1,000 (and the number of Jews probably hovers right around four). My s’chach came from rows of conventionally farmed corn that gave our three-walled sukkah a feathery roof through which I could see even constellations that appear in the absence of interfering light sources. We didn’t welcome anyone into our sukkah who wasn’t already living with us, making me long for the years when it seemed any sukkah could grow to lovingly fit any number of people in attendance. But, the contrasts that stood out to me the most were the ones that emerged between our surrounding environment and the new species and structure we had brought into it. The lulav and etrog made me reflect on plants I have come to know since being here, from walks along soy fields or through the woods across the street, thinking about which ones I would bring with me to other places to show people what our lives our like here. The sukkah illuminated new aspects of our relationship with farmers in the area, highlighting how much more work we can do to empathize with lived realities of people working on some of the most agriculturally productive land in the country. As we now dive headfirst into the new year, I realize our observance of Sukkot does not only remind us of old practices and experiences, but opens our eyes to agricultural systems that ceaselessly hum around us, that define the lives of current farmers and also those wandering far from their home.