An airplane plunged into a sukkah, metaphorically speaking, because it was during the festival of Sukkot that we got the news that the pilot of FlyDubai flight FZ1073 to Tel Aviv had been stabbedby his co-pilot. The airplane, packed with Israelis, had plunged 16,000 feet in under 30 seconds. In that short interval, the injured pilot managed to unlock the cockpit door and some passengers were able to enter and subdue the attacker. Another pair of pilots happened to be passengers on the flight and were able to take the controls and land the flight.
It is pretty well impossible to imagine the extreme turmoil and fear the passengers must have felt. I get a little queasy when an ordinary flight drops down to come in for a routine landing. What must they have felt, as the plane lost almost half its altitude in just half a minute?
In our ordinary lives, we tend to be heavily invested in ensuring that everything in our immediate sphere is predictably secure. We go to great lengths to eliminate any sort of vulnerability that might threaten our comfort and strive for lives in which nothing unexpected intrudes.
It’s an illusion of security, of course, like fastening your seatbelt on a crashing flight. No matter how stout the lock, thick the walls and ample the furnishings, illness, loss, economic upheaval, accidents and death gain easy access.
If you have ever experienced an earthquake, you will know what I mean. In an instant, the normally stable floor begins to gyrate beneath your feet; walls shake, windows rattle, furniture shifts, and familiar objects jump out of their ordinary resting places and crash to the floor. The ordinary rules of reality are suddenly totally disrupted.
The sukkah is built on the same premise. We erect a flimsy hut with an incomplete roof and thenleave the security of our permanent homes – with their solid walls, roofs, locks, and familiar comforts – and enter a fragile dwelling that exposes us to the uncontrollable elements.
The difference, of course, is that the disruptive events that come at us in ordinary life that unsettle our sense of security are thrust upon us beyond our control, whereas a sukkah is a choice. In this way, the sukkah functions as spiritual practice that can prepare us to live through the moments of insecurity that pierce the fortress we diligently build around our lives.
Stepping into a sukkah is symbolic acknowledgement that the sense of security we derive from our possessions and structures, the bank account and the life insurance, is actually an illusion of security because it offers no certainty. On Shmini Atzeret we read the book Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, where in verse 6:2, it says:“God sometimes grants a person riches, property, and wealth, so that person does not want for anything his appetite may crave, but God does not permit that person to enjoy it; instead, a stranger will enjoy it. That is futility and a grievous ill.”
The sukkah reminds us that all we do to create security and safety in our lives does not guarantee that outcome. Despite our efforts, and despite the extended periods of time when it might not seem so, the truth is that at any moment, our life can be buffeted and even upended by forces beyond our control.
That reminds me of a story about a teacher who was very poor but nonetheless too proud to accept charity. When students would come to his house for lessons, they would see how impoverished he was and they wanted to help, but he rebuffed their every offer.
In the end, the students resorted to subterfuges to help support their teacher.
They would go to a store, buy cans of tuna, scuff and dent the tins, and then sell them to their teacher for a fraction of the actual cost, telling him there had been a trainwreck and these cans were being sold off as salvage.
The teacher often could not afford to buy lightbulbs and so they were frequently burned out. One student developed the habit of tucking a new lightbulb into his pocket and when during a lesson the teacher would step out of the room for a moment, the student would climb onto a desk, quickly unscrew the dead bulb, screw in a replacement, and then jump back to his seat.
One time, just as he was unscrewing the burned-out bulb, the teacher walked back into the room. “What are you doing,” he asked?
“Oh,” stammered the student. “I saw that this bulb was burned out and I happened to have a replacement with me, so I ….”
“You don’t have to do that,” the teacher admonished. “When a light stops working, you just leave it to rest for a while and it gets refreshed and starts working again.”
The teacher didn’t know that the student had been changing the lightbulbs for some time, just as we can’t see all the forces that go into creating the reality of our lives at any given moment. There is always a curtain, and things happening behind that curtain, that affect and sometimes even uproot all the predictability we so diligently invest in building for ourselves.
The sukkah offers training for living in vulnerable circumstances, but additional to that, thesukkah gives us the opportunity to practice bitachon [trust], which is the spiritual capacity to live with full awareness of our vulnerability while trusting that our lives are taking place within a larger trustworthy order that we can’t fully see or grasp.
Bitachon is not the absence of vulnerability but the ability to inhabit vulnerability with trust.
The mitzvah of sukkah transforms this idea into an embodied practice: we experience directly what it means to loosen our grip on the illusion of control and to discover security in something deeper than transient, unreliable material means. In this sense, the sukkah is a training ground for bitachon — a place where we practice trust and strengthen that trait in our souls.
When I was 24 years old, I had a meditation teacher in the Himalayas named Geshe Ngawang Dargey who, like the Dalai Lama himself, was a student of Trijang Rinpoche. Geshe Dargey taught a small group of westerners how to meditate, and every morning we would walk up the hill to the Tibetan Library and sit for hours while he instructed us (through a translator, of course).
Although I have left Tibetan meditation far behind in my life, one lesson he taught is firmly stuck in my mind. Time and again he would tell us young people: “Do spiritual practice now so you will have it when you need it.” He drilled that into us, “Do spiritual practice now so you will have it when you need it.” That was his mantra.
Because when you need it – like when the pilot takes an axe to the other pilot of your flight, for example, or the market crashes, or your car won’t start, or your business partner absconds, or you sustain any other shock to the system coming from left field – the only resources you have to call on are those you developed when you didn’t actually need them.
In the sukkah, the structures that ordinarily make us feel secure become visibly fragile. Yet precisely through this experience, we learn that our deepest security does not rest in material protections, but in trusting the One in whose hands our unpredictable lives ultimately rest.
This was the realization of Adam Polovincik, one of the passengers on that FlyDubai flight, who said that although he was not religious, he could not escape the feeling that the fate of the flight and its ultimate survival “was in the hand of God.”
That’s an insight we can practice now, so we will have it when we need it.