Temporary Dwellings

One can't help feeling quite relieved when Yom Kippur is over: the lead up to it is harrowing, as though a dark, brooding mountain looms before you even though it's only one widdle day, and once it's been scaled and conquered a collective 'phew' rings around the stone alleys of Jerusalem. This year it wasn't baking hot and I think that was the key -no crashing headache, no dry-as-a-peanut-butter-sandwich mouth, I didn't feel hungry at all and Tamar found it fine, it being her first full fast. The gut wrenching soul searching head twist of many a year was strangely absent, however. When I mentioned this noticeable deficiency of mental and soulful affliction, it was pointed out to me that there's been more than enough of that going on over the last few months, so maybe Yom Kippur this year transformed itself, incredulously, into the one day of light relief.





After breaking the fast, we started mantling our Sukka (I'm aware that isn't a real word. Have you noticed that some words exist in the negative but the positive form has either disappeared from use or never existed: like we say dismantle but we don't say mantle; like we say someone is ruthless but never that he is brimming with ruth. Ineffable is in my hefty Encarta dictionary, but effable isn't. Are there others? Does anyone ever read this blog? I suppose this'll be as good a test as any to discover the answer to that.)

I'll continue regardless, seeing as, forlornly, I have no one to talk to this evening.

Four days after Yom Kippur, the holiday of Sukkot begins - that's the one where we build a small construction out in the garden or balcony, put huge date palm branches on top, decorate it with the same gaudy decorations Grandma's sitting room was festooned with every Christmas (generic use of decorations I consider strictly Christmassy seems unkosher to an ex-convent girl like me, but I guess gaudy decorations are gaudy decorations and they don't belong to any particular holiday. If they remind me of Christmas, and they do, I've decided to ignore - just for the time I'm under them - the warm memories of Grandma's house in December and won't tell my rabbi I think they're not as kosher as he'd like). The sukka is the place where we eat each meal and 'live' for a week, to commemorate the time after the exodus from Egypt, when we lived in tents in the desert and were at the mercy of the elements.





What this holiday does is ensure that all Jews, no matter how affluent they are, have to eat and sleep for seven days in a billowing, temporary residence where the stars twinkle through the roof, the rain can wake you mid-dream and the wind rattles the walls. In London, we'd put fleeces, thick socks and overcoats on in order to go out and eat, and even then, they'd be maybe three days out of seven, if we were lucky, that it wouldn't be bucketing down and we'd have to cover the sukka with a big plastic sheet. Today was the first day of the holiday and it was hot - the kind of hot I'm glad it wasn't on Yom Kippur. Then, by nightfall, which is about ten to six in the evening these days, the sky went a gloomy, menacing colour, a howling, chilly wind gathered up the local dust, and the rain that's been forecast for tomorrow looks likely, just in time for Maor's overnight trip to the Negev with a bunch of kids, no tent and possible flash flooding, which is slightly worrying stroke exciting.







At this time we are reminded of the temporality of all we consider solid, and when this comes to Jews and countries of residence or homes of opulence, it has a chilling backstory. But exiled people are resourceful people, that much I learned in India. In the northern cities in India who can get you a bottle of decent French wine? A top-grade down jacket from Europe? State of the art hiking boots, all sizes? A plasma screen TV or recordable DVD, should you want one? Who runs the black market up there in Manali? The Tibetans, of course - a nation of present day exiles. They gather all the clothes that kind-hearted Free Tibet types collect and send them, sell them on street stalls and pocket the cash to buy other things. They lend money and change currencies; they wheel and deal, exchange boots for sleeping bags, duck and dive, and where they get French wine from in the Himalayas is an admirable mystery but they can and they do. Exile, living in strangers' lands with no rights and no permanent home, brings out survival mode in folk, and that means being imaginative.






Oddly, Sukkot isn't my favourite holiday even though we're supposed to be rejoicing. For a long-term nomad like myself, living in a temporary dwelling should be no skin off my hardened heels, but my feet are actually soft things and I now like four solid walls around me (not the same ones forever, mind). Maybe it's the whiteness of the walls in the Sukka, or the fairy lights - if it looked more like the inside of a nomad's tent it might feel more authentic. Maybe it's the realisation that I'm exiled, or feel like I am, and want to release myself from the survival mode I've been in for years. In fact, ironically, what my mother-in-law talked about today in our temporary dwelling was of buying our own house. How permanent is that? I shiver to think of it, because mortgages are THE scariest concept ever to a free spirit like myself, but then, I reminded myself - how permanent is anything? What is solid and what isn't in this 'ere life? The wind flapped the walls of our sukka and the cold encircled my bare ankles. A storm was on its way. Nothing is permanent and nothing ever has been. As Van (The Man) Morrison sings:

I'm nothing but a stranger in this world. I'm nothing but a stranger in this world. Got a home on high. In another land. So far away. We are going to heaven. We are going to heav-en.

We're all exiles. There is no permanence here. Everything we take for granted is built on teutonic plates and the ground can shift at any moment. The sure-fire thing is never a certaintly and the fleetingness of our time here makes all we worry about laughable. A mortgage isn't scary because a house can be sold and even the most solid walls only surround us for the time being. I know I'm not normal - I can't be: this kind of thinking would make most folk quake in their boots but, weirdly, knowing how impermanent it all is makes me feel so much better.