by Greg Beiles
This issue of THINK arrives between the Jewish festivals of Sukkot and Chanukah. Both illuminate the art of Jewish imagination.
During Sukkot, Jewish people around the world observe the mitzvah leshev basukkah, to reside in a temporary dwelling. The ritual recalls the ancient Israelite experience: fleeing slavery to wander for 40 years in makeshift huts. The week that we spend in a sukkah stimulates our thoughts to roam from our backyards and balconies to another place and time in our people’s journey; it rekindles sensitivity to the experience of vulnerability and transition. Many refugees today live in temporary shelters.
An old folk story tells of a person who built a sukkah and carried in household belongings to use during the festival. There wasn’t enough material to enclose the sukkah completely but this didn't matter because Jewish law permits one wall to be built with tzurat hapetach--two posts covered with a beam that can be imagined as a full wall.
The day before Sukkot, the builder found that the family possessions had been stolen from the sukkah. Evidently, the thief entered through the open wall space and snatched the dishes, table cloth, and other items. Incredulous, the builder exclaimed, “How could a thief get into my sukkah? Didn’t the ignoramus know that there was a wall there?!”
The laws of Sukkot exemplify three dimensions of imagination that are prominent in Jewish tradition, consciousness, and practice. The first is the kind of thinking that produces compassion by leading us to imagine the experience of others. In the sukkah we sense a familiar fragility and impermanence; we remember that freedom is tenuous and that insecurity feels uncomfortable; we remember what it means to wander.
We recall a similar idea in the Passover Haggadah, which obligates one to see oneself as if having personally left Egypt. The idea of “seeing oneself” in a place and circumstance other than where we are, especially when this circumstance is one of suffering, is a central act of imagination that produces compassion, solidarity, and a sense of concern for others.
A second kind of imagination central to Judaism is the conception of law. The sukkah builder in our tale was affronted by a lapse in imagination on the part of the thief who crossed a boundary that was invisible yet configured conceptually by Jewish law.
There is nothing tangible or physically real about law; in truth, the notion of “legal fiction” applies to the very idea of law itself. Laws are ideas created in and by our imagination. When accepted, they help society function coherently.
But Jewish law is not merely functional, like a traffic code; it is primarily ethical. In Judaism, Revelation, the gift of law, epitomized by the Ten Commandments, is God’s gift to our imagination. Jewish law is not merely a functional law—traffic lights and such—but an ethical law: law that raises us above the less admirable impulses of human nature.
Whereas the laws of physics describe how things “are” (or how they are observed to behave), moral law describes how we imagine the world should be. The moral philosopher Emmanuel Kant refers to moral law as the principle that describes how we “ought” to act. As moral law, Jewish law imagines how we ought to live our lives; it is an act of moral imagination.
Ruminating on Sukkot and Jewish imagination, Rabbi Norman Lamm observes that we live our regular lives by certain illusions—not only in the intellectual disciplines, such as law and science, but in the deepest recesses of our individual and ethnic consciousness. Without the proper illusions, life can become meaningless and a drudgery.
One of the most recognizable “illusions” is the presumption of innocence in common law today. Rabbinic law imagines that “man is basically good…created but little lower than the angels; in other words, that man has a neshamah, a soul.” Lamm describes hezkat kashrut as a “presumption of being decent and honest” without which “there can be no trust, no loyalty, no faith. And, therefore, there can be no transactions, no marriage, and no happiness.”
A third dimension of Jewish imagination relates to envisioning the future. One of the most powerful aspects of Jewish imagination is that it must not remain in our heads; we must bring it to life. We are not meant merely to imagine a better, more just world. Explicit laws— such as the mitzvot of tzedakah, tikkun olam, bikkur cholim-- proscribe that we are meant to live it. We must act righteously, repair the world, and care for the sick.
The most ardent expression of the passion of the Jewish imagination is daily prayer, a personal declaration of the desire for the world to become as we imagine it should be. Each of the bakashot—the requests within the central Amidah prayer—calls for something which we imagine and want for ourselves, our community, and the world: healing, peace, justice, unity, integrity.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel identifies the imaginative power of prayer: “Prayer clarifies our hopes and intentions. It helps us discover our true aspirations, the pangs we ignore, the longings we forget… It teaches us what to aspire to… So often we do not know what to cling to. Prayer implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish.” When we pray for the coming of the Messiah, we imagine an ultimate time of peace, justice, and unity among peoples, the ultimate horizon of the Jewish imagination.
In Canada, after Sukkot, we re-enter our homes of brick and mortar and find shelter for the coming winter. We value permanence and appreciate our solid houses. Soon enough we will celebrate another festival that situates our imagination at our windows sills. At Chanukah we light candles or oil lamps to recall the miracles that occurred during the time of the Maccabees. In the glow of the flickering flames, we imagine how a small amount of a precious resource—sanctified oil—lasted much longer than expected; we imagine how people preserved their unique identities in the midst of overwhelming pressure to assimilate. We place our glowing Chanukiah in the windows of our homes to demonstrate our faith in miracles: which is to say, our faith in the ability to imagine that which seems unlikely, improbable, but nevertheless, worth striving for.
Long life to Jewish imagination! L’chaim! Happy Chanukah!
During Sukkot, Jewish people around the world observe the mitzvah leshev basukkah, to reside in a temporary dwelling. The ritual recalls the ancient Israelite experience: fleeing slavery to wander for 40 years in makeshift huts. The week that we spend in a sukkah stimulates our thoughts to roam from our backyards and balconies to another place and time in our people’s journey; it rekindles sensitivity to the experience of vulnerability and transition. Many refugees today live in temporary shelters.
An old folk story tells of a person who built a sukkah and carried in household belongings to use during the festival. There wasn’t enough material to enclose the sukkah completely but this didn't matter because Jewish law permits one wall to be built with tzurat hapetach--two posts covered with a beam that can be imagined as a full wall.
The day before Sukkot, the builder found that the family possessions had been stolen from the sukkah. Evidently, the thief entered through the open wall space and snatched the dishes, table cloth, and other items. Incredulous, the builder exclaimed, “How could a thief get into my sukkah? Didn’t the ignoramus know that there was a wall there?!”
The laws of Sukkot exemplify three dimensions of imagination that are prominent in Jewish tradition, consciousness, and practice. The first is the kind of thinking that produces compassion by leading us to imagine the experience of others. In the sukkah we sense a familiar fragility and impermanence; we remember that freedom is tenuous and that insecurity feels uncomfortable; we remember what it means to wander.
We recall a similar idea in the Passover Haggadah, which obligates one to see oneself as if having personally left Egypt. The idea of “seeing oneself” in a place and circumstance other than where we are, especially when this circumstance is one of suffering, is a central act of imagination that produces compassion, solidarity, and a sense of concern for others.
A second kind of imagination central to Judaism is the conception of law. The sukkah builder in our tale was affronted by a lapse in imagination on the part of the thief who crossed a boundary that was invisible yet configured conceptually by Jewish law.
There is nothing tangible or physically real about law; in truth, the notion of “legal fiction” applies to the very idea of law itself. Laws are ideas created in and by our imagination. When accepted, they help society function coherently.
But Jewish law is not merely functional, like a traffic code; it is primarily ethical. In Judaism, Revelation, the gift of law, epitomized by the Ten Commandments, is God’s gift to our imagination. Jewish law is not merely a functional law—traffic lights and such—but an ethical law: law that raises us above the less admirable impulses of human nature.
Whereas the laws of physics describe how things “are” (or how they are observed to behave), moral law describes how we imagine the world should be. The moral philosopher Emmanuel Kant refers to moral law as the principle that describes how we “ought” to act. As moral law, Jewish law imagines how we ought to live our lives; it is an act of moral imagination.
Ruminating on Sukkot and Jewish imagination, Rabbi Norman Lamm observes that we live our regular lives by certain illusions—not only in the intellectual disciplines, such as law and science, but in the deepest recesses of our individual and ethnic consciousness. Without the proper illusions, life can become meaningless and a drudgery.
One of the most recognizable “illusions” is the presumption of innocence in common law today. Rabbinic law imagines that “man is basically good…created but little lower than the angels; in other words, that man has a neshamah, a soul.” Lamm describes hezkat kashrut as a “presumption of being decent and honest” without which “there can be no trust, no loyalty, no faith. And, therefore, there can be no transactions, no marriage, and no happiness.”
A third dimension of Jewish imagination relates to envisioning the future. One of the most powerful aspects of Jewish imagination is that it must not remain in our heads; we must bring it to life. We are not meant merely to imagine a better, more just world. Explicit laws— such as the mitzvot of tzedakah, tikkun olam, bikkur cholim-- proscribe that we are meant to live it. We must act righteously, repair the world, and care for the sick.
The most ardent expression of the passion of the Jewish imagination is daily prayer, a personal declaration of the desire for the world to become as we imagine it should be. Each of the bakashot—the requests within the central Amidah prayer—calls for something which we imagine and want for ourselves, our community, and the world: healing, peace, justice, unity, integrity.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel identifies the imaginative power of prayer: “Prayer clarifies our hopes and intentions. It helps us discover our true aspirations, the pangs we ignore, the longings we forget… It teaches us what to aspire to… So often we do not know what to cling to. Prayer implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish.” When we pray for the coming of the Messiah, we imagine an ultimate time of peace, justice, and unity among peoples, the ultimate horizon of the Jewish imagination.
In Canada, after Sukkot, we re-enter our homes of brick and mortar and find shelter for the coming winter. We value permanence and appreciate our solid houses. Soon enough we will celebrate another festival that situates our imagination at our windows sills. At Chanukah we light candles or oil lamps to recall the miracles that occurred during the time of the Maccabees. In the glow of the flickering flames, we imagine how a small amount of a precious resource—sanctified oil—lasted much longer than expected; we imagine how people preserved their unique identities in the midst of overwhelming pressure to assimilate. We place our glowing Chanukiah in the windows of our homes to demonstrate our faith in miracles: which is to say, our faith in the ability to imagine that which seems unlikely, improbable, but nevertheless, worth striving for.
Long life to Jewish imagination! L’chaim! Happy Chanukah!
Greg Beiles is Head of School at The Toronto Heschel School and Director of The Lola Stein Institute.
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