How will you build the walls of your sukkah this year?
This exhibit is part of a community conversation about our quickly changing and disorienting world, evidenced in the building, tearing down and blurring of the boundaries that structure our lives.
The sukkah is the temporary dwelling of the biblical Israelites, who wandered in an ever-changing wilderness of shifting desert landscapes, blinding sunlight and verdant oases. For forty years they trekked, seeking a yet unknown home, and trying to understand the rules that would define a new kind of living. All the while their promises and hopes struggled against fear and uncertainty. We recall this experience on the holiday of Sukkot when we build the fragile shelter and talk about how people respond to the challenges of new realities.
The sukkah, built anew each year to stand for only one week, can represent a constructed vision of the future- its walls defining and defying boundaries. It is as if the Jewish calendar has carved out a time and space for us to imagine and talk about the kind of world in which we want to live. The process of designing and building the sukkah walls can be a creative, thoughtful, empowering experience… especially this year.
Heading To The Promised Land by Sara Swinson
She floated—her heart a garden of scars (she said unapologetically, having had numerous crushes on mixed metaphors). Some called the garden a wilderness; easy to get lost here, easy to feel homeless here; natural to wander. She could see it, though; the glorious, otherly, “it“… just over that lifeless, brown mountain. That’s what she wanted! That’s what she wants! Ask her how to get there and she’ll tell you a bunch of different things. Ask her who she is and she’ll hesitate. But there she is … getting carried away … by the winds … to who knows where—hopefully, There. I really hope, There!
I’m not able to really inform you of my heritage, as I’ve not been raised, nor, schooled in Jewish tradition. But look! There’s the Star of David! I know this Star. And I also know this—that the heart is a place. It widens; it contracts. People come in; people leave. I like to fantasize, though, that there’s no limit to how many souls I can make laugh—but there are boundaries, I get so tired, even while dreaming everyone else’s cheeks hurt. Then there’s this dream of infinite expansion even while encumbered by finitude! But once I weigh it all— the temporal, I mean— eternity lightens the load.
Tell me something, where should I let all this hot air out? I’d love to land now.
Sukkot (a poem) | Naomi Fishman
Inspired by the image of the Israelites
Traveling in the wilderness
Making camp in temporary huts
Talking in those huts
…Searching for the future…
Traveling and wandering
Building and taking down
Every day trying to construct
A new image of self
Traveling and wandering
Building and taking down
Every day trying to construct
A new image of living
Wandering and traveling
How will you build the walls of Sukkah today?
…What will be its boundaries?
Home by Connie Swinson
This painting represents a journey. Years of travel, years of change and now finding my way back to Jewish tradition. My roots. My Jewish roots, somehow lost along the way.
This Sukkah represents to me shelter, food, friendship, fun and family. I am back after coming full circle. I’m home.
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