“Yesterday the ancient truth came home. We all live in a sukkah. How do we make such a vulnerable house into a place of shalom, of peace and security and harmony and wholeness?”
These words came from Rabbi Arthur Waskow on September 12th of this year, the day after the devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon. They describe precisely the new atmosphere of insecurity, first forced upon us by the raids on New York and Washington, and now reinforced by the warfare over Afghanistan.
Rabbi Waskow also asks the basic question facing all of us, young and old. How is it possible for us to find the basic human qualities that will enable us to live with interior peace and outward harmony with others? Is there any remedy for the tangled feelings that make so many of us lose sleep at night and force us to fret during the day?
I, too, have found inspiration in the sukkahs constructed by Jewish friends and neighbors. As Rabbi Waskow suggests, these fragile structures stand as images of vulnerability. Since they have roofs open to the sky except for slender wooden slats festooned with flowers and fruits, they provide only inadequate shelter. Storms with heavy winds and rain could devastate them.
In this vulnerability, sukkahs are meant to remind believers of sacred history. Specifically, they evoke the memory of the people of Israel who wandered in the wilderness after being rescued by God from their slavery in Egypt. The Jewish community has always looked back to those days when they were vulnerable to the dangers of homelessness and had to look toward their faith and one another for survival.
Other great spiritual traditions have always taught the same message: there can be no foolproof security on earth. At this point in history no one needs to be convinced of this fact. What we do need is light on how to live in such an insecure world. We want to know how to adjust to a new situation marked by threats that cannot be identified in advance.
In some ways we elders have an advantage. Many of us have become used to living with vulnerability. Disabilities have made us aware that it might not take much to do us in. We realize that a simple fall on the floor of our kitchen might be enough to start in motion a chain of events that could result in our becoming physically incapacitated.
Years of coping with physical problems that cannot be solved and chronic illnesses that cannot be healed have accustomed us to coping. Reverses in health that seemed in prospect devastating have become familiar companions. We have learned to make the best of situations that continue to be uncomfortable and threatening.
This experience may have taught us to be more patient with ourselves and more compassionate toward other people. Paradoxically enough, a new wholeness may have emerged from our brokenness and an unexpected peace of soul from our suffering. We may have become veterans in the warfare against personal disintegration, emerging with surprising victories of spirit.
As people familiar with the vulnerability brought on by age, perhaps we older people can cope with the new environment of anxiety in which many Americans suddenly now live. Having wrestled with the demons of inner terror we may have the experience needed to face bravely the outer terrors of the world. At least, we can recognize that we need not have scruples about preserving our inner peace when so many people around us seem to be losing their cool. We can assert our right to stay calm despite the chaos abroad in the land.
That means we can find ourselves equipped to resist letting the latest report upset us every time we hear a broadcast. Allowing the many rumors that circulate at a time like this to throw off our inner equilibrium surrenders our own wisdom. Losing our peace of soul does no one any good and robs us of one of the precious fruits of later life.
All of this does not argue for complacency. The threats to our nation and to the whole world are real. Suddenly we Americans have been introduced to the terrors that have afflicted the other peoples of the world for generations and have become familiar conditions of their lives.
However, we have good reason not to surrender the inner and outer gains of later life. In fact, these qualities, wrung out of long and hard experience, can benefit those people with whom we come into contact. This response may be our best to Rabbi Waskow’s question about how to turn our vulnerable house into a “place of shalom, of peace and security and harmony and wholeness”
Richard Griffin