Dwelling in ambiguity

The rabbis devote considerable attention to the question of what makes a sukkah a dirah, a dwelling. How many walls? How high? What kind of roof? How much sky must remain visible? The precision of the questions is striking because the object itself refuses easy classification: a house that is not quite a house, a shelter whose defining feature is its exposure, a temporary structure in which we are nevertheless commanded to dwell.
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Perhaps this is part of Sukkot’s wisdom. The holiday does not ask us to resolve ambiguity. It asks us to inhabit it.

For me, as an Israeli, Sukkot carries additional layers of ambiguity. In October 2011, during Sukkot, Gilad Shalit came home after more than five years in Hamas captivity. His return produced an extraordinary national outpouring of joy, even as Israelis wrestled with the enormous moral and strategic costs of the exchange that brought him home. The timing was almost unbearably apt: In the season of temporary dwelling, a son of Israel came home.

Yet, since Oct. 7, 2023, I continue to struggle with the juxtaposition of Z’man Simchateinu — the Season of Our Joy — with the pain and uncertainty that have marked these years. The holiday that asks us to leave our permanent homes and enter a fragile shelter now carries an especially difficult resonance. What does it mean to dwell beneath a deliberately porous roof when vulnerability is no longer metaphorical? What does it mean to speak of simchah when joy itself can feel morally complicated?

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As an interim rabbi at Tree of Life this year, I find myself especially attuned to that ambiguity. An interim is, by definition, a time between: between what has been and what will be, between endings that have already occurred and beginnings whose contours are not yet clear. The word interim is deceptively simple — it suggests a placeholder, a pause before the “real” thing begins. But perhaps the rabbis would resist that impulse. The bein, the space between, is not necessarily empty space. It can be a place of encounter, discernment, and possibility. The question is not simply what comes next, but what we might notice, learn and build while we are here.

The Torah commands us to dwell in sukkot.

Not securely. Not permanently. Not with the illusion that the walls can keep everything out.

Yet we are also asked to invite guests inside. Sukkot is a place where we make room for whatever is actually present: grief and gratitude, fear and hope, the memory of those no longer with us, and the joy of sitting together with family and friends. It reminds us that shelter is precious precisely because it is never absolute.

The sukkah does not resolve these contradictions.

It gives us a place to sit with them.

And perhaps that is what Z’man Simchateinu, the Season of Our Joy, asks of us now — not uncomplicated happiness, but the courage to keep making a human and Jewish life amid uncertainty. To gather. To welcome. To remember. To hope.

To dwell, however imperfectly, in the space between what we know and what we pray will yet be true. PJC

Rabbi Hannah Estrin is the interim rabbi at Tree of Life Congregation. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.