A Sense of Sukkoth

 The Jewish holiday of Sukkoth began at sundown on Friday. Saturday morning, bright and early, I headed back to El Refugio for a weekend of volunteering, this time with my daughter in tow. Sukkoth is a holiday that commemorates transience and celebrates radical hospitality. Jews are commanded to build temporary shelters with only the idea of a roof; the sky is meant to be visible through a thin lattice of leaves and branches. It is a mitzvah to eat a meal in a sukkah, and an even greater mitzvah to spend the night there. It is perhaps the greatest mitzvah of all to invite a stranger to enjoy this temporary dwelling with you as it is meant to call forth the image of Abraham's "open tent."

Our family sukkah, back in 2020

Although my family didn't get around to building a sukkah of our own this year, I couldn't have asked for a better way to celebrate the holiday than to spend a night at El Refugio. I spent the weekend cooking, cleaning, and talking with visitors on their way to and from Stewart Detention Center. 

At this moment in the nation's regime of radical rejection, most of the people we met were more or less resigned to the purgatory of ICE detention, hoping only to speed their loved ones' release, even if it means seeking deportation to a third country. Over soup, grapes, and quesadillas, we talked about subtle differences between the governments of the U.S., Mexico, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic while reminiscing about the New York City subway and the Atlanta perimeter. My daughter entertained a two-year-old with a seemingly unlimited attention span for rolling Wiffle balls down a miniature roller coaster and then tossing them to her temporary abuelo, the husband of my friend who had organized the volunteer weekend. 

Butternut squash and hominy soup, made to share

While I wrote letters to detainees whom I had been told by guards had refused visitation by a volunteer (me), I listened to stories of bullying and occasional kindness, the banality of arbitrary power. In the sukkah of El Refugio, we offered sojourn and sustenance. Outside, communities share ICE location alerts like the hourly weather report. The risk of exposure is increasing as legal protections are stripped away like layers of paint. 

Abraham, with his open tent, was certainly at risk of being robbed or otherwise taken advantage of by strangers. He and his small band of iconoclasts were never the majority as they set out for Canaan. Nor were his descendants wandering in the desert after claiming their freedom from Egyptian tyranny. And yet, word of their hospitality spread from oasis to oasis. Kindness begets more kindness. Evil begets resignation and indifference, inviting only tit for tat. 

It is difficult to practice radical hospitality on a daily basis. It requires active maintenance of social norms and a great deal of work and dedication. Not to mention, our private homes offer neither the convenience nor the communal protection of an open tent. But creating a sense of sukkoth in the places where it is needed most is undoubtedly rewarding. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could live to see a world where we all appreciate the permanence of transience? Wouldn't we cling then, not to our possessions, but to our relationships, and to the possibility of welcome?