When I ask how the day is going, my friend Marvin, who is older and much wiser than me, often likes to say, “Good—so far.” By which he means something like: The day isn’t over yet, and while thankfully things have been good so far this day, who knows what might come next.
In the world of Torah, we generally associate the question “Who knows?” with Mordechai, who uses those very words to encourage his niece Esther to go to King Achashverosh and plead the case of the Jews before him: “Who knows if it were not for such a time as this that you became Queen?” (Esther 4:14)
Writing on the Book of Esther, Avivah Zornberg notes that it represents a hinge moment in not only Jewish history, but also our people’s collective understanding of our relationship with the Divine: “The world of the Bible, where God directly intervenes in history, has come to an end; even the restoration of Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple follow no clear pattern of fulfillment… No longer one simple, consequential story, history divides into the age of Scripture, of the sacred texts, on the one hand, and present time, when Rabbinic Judaism arises to interpret those texts and detect the ways in which they may be seen to intersect with this quite different time.” (Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep, 114)
Zornberg fleshes this out some more: “After Esther, the world of prophecy and miracles yields place to the world of chokhmah, of wisdom, of hints and interpretations. Instead of the overwhelming revelations of Sinai—with its visual, perhaps blinding manifestations of God’s presence—there is the world in which God and the human are separated and linked by a third force—by the text, the messenger, the transmission.” (Ibid., 126)
According to my quick search, Esther marks the last instance in which the phrase mi yodeah, “Who knows,” occurs in the Bible. Of the eleven other times we find this phrase, five of them appear in Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes, which we read on the Shabbat of Sukkot. Of course, we might say: it tracks with the book’s deeply existentialist vibe. In case you need help getting in the mood, I’ll list them:
“Who knows whether he will be wise or foolish?” (2:19)
“Who knows if the lifebreath of humans does rise upward and if the breath of animals does sink down into the earth?” (3:21)
“Who can possibly know what is best for people to do in life—the few days of this fleeting life? For who can tell what the future holds for them under the sun?” (6:12)
“Who is like the sage, and who knows the meaning of the adage: ‘Wisdom lights up a person’s face, so that deep discontent is dissembled’?” (8:1)
“Indeed, what is to happen is unknown; even when it is on the point of happening, who can tell?” (8:7)
When I asked Gemini AI to suggest some adjectives to describe Ecclesiastes, its number one recommendation was “pessimistic.” Here’s how it fleshed out its thinking: “The main speaker, Qoheleth (the Preacher), investigates virtually every human pursuit—wisdom, pleasure, wealth, labor, and power—only to conclude that they are all transient, empty, and ultimately fail to provide lasting significance under the sun. This general outlook on life’s lack of ultimate meaning and the inevitability of death is the very definition of a pessimistic viewpoint.”
That’s hard to argue with.
Yet if you go back a couple of paragraphs, you’ll see I didn’t choose “pessimistic,” but rather Gemini’s number four suggestion, “existential,” perhaps because it’s a notch or two less dour. Perhaps I was thinking of Marvin, who, as anyone who knows him will attest, is the farthest thing from a dour person I could imagine. Rather, he’s a realist who has acquired a good deal of wisdom through his many years on the planet—and that wisdom also enables him to be one of the most joyful, loving, and spiritually attuned people I know (it also helps that he’s got a million-watt smile that can light up a small city).
The precariousness of the sukkah, its ephemeral quality—here today, gone tomorrow—is of course deeply linked with Kohelet. There’s a reason we read this book on this holiday. It’s the harvest holiday, and while we are hopefully happy with our crop, we also know that winter is coming. Yet Sukkot is also zman simchateinu, the time of our rejoicing—not in spite of, perhaps, but actually because of the clearer lenses through which we can perceive our lives, especially on this side of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We are, hopefully, a bit clearer on what we can truly know and what we can’t—and we can let go of the resistance we grip (or that grips us?) in both past and future.
I write all of this at what feels like another hinge moment in Jewish history, as we mark the second anniversary of October 7 and hold our collective breath that the remaining hostages will come home, the killing will stop, and the dust might begin to settle. It is a moment of many mixed emotions, many conflicting realities, many truths we will have to work to hold and inspect simultaneously. (I include in those mixed emotions those we may feel about the President, to whom I certainly feel an enormous dose of gratitude for this—even as I strenuously object to so many of his other actions.)
Just a week ago, on Yom Kippur, we read the story of Jonah (who, my friend Rabbi Hody Nemes pointed out in a lovely sermon this week, builds a sukkah of his own—see Jonah 4:5). Among other things, Jonah is the survivor of a shipwreck. And that brings me to a passage from José Ortega y Gasset, which Avivah Zornberg quotes in her essay: “And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.”
Whether our sukkot have survived the holiday thus far intact or, perhaps, have experienced their own version of shipwreck, I expect we can probably all relate to the metaphor on some level. May this moment be one that brings the shipwreck to a close, may it be a moment that enables healing to begin.
