The Sukkah, as a temporary dwelling, is emblematic of the fragile nature of Creation. This delicate ‘reality’ becomes our reality when the parallelism between the world at large and our private lives merge into one set of reflections. Self as Sukkah underscores the diaphanous matter that is me, the impermanence and porousness of my identity. Establishing my interiority or enclosed space of my personhood barely holds together and only slightly sets me apart from my surrounding environment. Living in the Sukkah of self, meditating on its extreme relevance to the human condition, and internalizing its meaning, we hope to show is an activity worthy of celebration.

What is at once the prehistoric and the history of history, the primal pairing of Adam and Chava/Eve serves as a platform for the psycho-spiritual assimilation of all Sukkah-related phenomena. The Talmud [Baba Metzia 114b] maintains that Adam is not only the proper name of an individual human being but is also a general term for enlightened humanity as a collective: “You [in the plural] are called Adam. The worshipers of the stars are not called Adam.” “Worshipers of the stars” serves as a blanket expression for idolatry.

The nature of the idol is the solidification of truth (the sort of truth which can be manhandled and manipulated) even as it passes to a stable fixture of the universe. The stars were thought to be a transcendent realm that was unchanging and permanent. By contrast, all of our earthly existence is most transient. Thinking of the world as a permanent dwelling with a firm foundation and an unshakable nature is a result of putting faith in the stars. Ultimately, there are no fixtures in Creation. As we now have confirmed with modern day astronomy, stars are born and pass away. Close observation of our own sun has revealed that this once all-important constant that we have always counted on itself goes through constant changes sending up solar eruptions in spectacular fashion.

So if the sun and stars were not always here, but were in fact created and will one day expire, then we cannot base our reality on them. Star worshipers have a legitimation crisis. Once our sense of the Sukkah takes on cosmic proportions, then all the seemingly stable features and qualities of our universe are cast in doubt. Everything has an existential sway in a primordial ‘wind’ bringing dislocation after dislocation. According to the Jerusalem Talmud [Sukkah 2:3], a person should be able to see the brighter stars through roof covering or s’chach of the Sukkah. Then, when we dwell in the Sukkah and the mentality of the Sukkah resides within our consciousness, we look up and see the stars as impostors of their former selves and idolize these false gods no more. The Sukkah acts as the proper framing and lens that puts the stars in perspective, conditioning their existence upon something other than themselves.

If we are to absorb this experience, then we have to destabilize the fixed features of self that we use to navigate all the adventures of life. The idea that I am firmly planted and enrooted in myself (that I am a ‘self-made’ man/woman as the expression goes) is tantamount to the deification or idolizing of self or self-image. As if to say, no matter what happens, ‘I’ will not or cannot change, for my identity is a brick and mortar home reinforced of the strongest steel of my own making which is too massive to move.

According to Kabbalah, the name Adam not only derives from the clay of the earth (adamah) that was moulded into shape by the Creator (meaning to say that our identity from the outset has plasticity to it and was formed by forces other than itself); it can also be broken down letter by letter to reveal the Sukkah of self. In Hebrew, Adam is spelled Alef-Dalet-Mem [אדם]. The first and last letters (the beginning and end of mankind or our individual self) spell the word em [אם] meaning mother. Since we are creatures of our environment in the most literal sense, with our physical constitution pulled from our surroundings as our molecular machinery harvests the material required for our morphogenesis) we can be said to come from ‘mother earth,’ and to return our bodies to that same earth. We come from the womb and reenter the womb in that the grave or kever is likened to a womb. The mother-as-womb image is better described as a ‘matrix.’ As a result, the bookends or framing of the human condition (Adam) are themselves signs of our being surrounded by this matrix which constantly reshapes us.

But who are we to be reshaped? ‘Who’ addresses some Subject within this process of metamorphosis. The only sign or letter left is the Dalet which means dal or a ‘poor person’ in Hebrew. Our center of being, rather than having an abundance of riches or measurable qualities, is divested of everything. It has no processions of its own. My ‘I’ is at its core existentially improvised and requires content to be given to it in order to sustain myself as ‘self.’ ‘I’ owe my existence or self to others: to my parents, to my friends, to my environments, and most of all to God. Self-preservation is extremely difficult when our innermost sense of self is poor and homeless. The greatest poverty carries with it the nomadic sense of self that remains homeless its whole life. I barely find enclosure within ‘me.’ My ‘I’ is full of holes. The Sukkah-sphere is a bubble (in the sense given to bubbles by Peter Sloterdijk in his work on microspherology).

If we want to further qualify the type of poverty that the Dalet represents, we should also acknowledge that Dalet can mean a delet or ‘door.’ Pictographically the Dalet [ד] even looks that part–at least it resembles a partial door frame. This informs us that at our center (now also the literal center of the word Adam [A-d-m]), we place an incomplete framing or zone of transition, a portal that operates within a matrix.

An additional clarification of the nature of this matrix derives from the kabbalistic assertion that the letters Alef and Mem (em or ‘mother’) also function as an acronym for the words ohr makif [ohr begins with Alef and makif begins with Mem] which means ‘surrounding light.’ Panoptically we register the world all around us. Just as the Sukkah envelopes us, so too, there is a sense of experience coming to us from all directions at once. Light symbolizes revelation and manifestation or just plain experience. We always tend to occupy the center of ‘attention’ or be in the middle of things within our own world, keeping watch in a panopticon. Residing in a Sukkah reinforces this situatedness.

The performances of Sukkot are not limited to dwelling in the surrounding light of the Sukkah. We also need to internalize that Sukkah. The surrounding light needs to pass through the door of the self to become inner light trickling down through our consciousness. This is why we wave the lulav, which is itself an abbreviated expression for the dalet minim or four species of plants that are joined together and shaken in the six directions of space. This performance is preferably done inside the Sukkah and is hinted at in that the Dalet [ד] of Adam [אדם] equals four when the letter is transposed as a number. Consequently, the name for the human condition brackets ‘four’ elements which are the ‘doors of perception’ and consciousness within the surrounding ‘light’ of the Sukkah experience.

In Part 2 we will continue to probe the meaning of this surrounding light and connect it to the primordial mother image of Chava/Eve.

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