In the middle of the summer, we lost our sweet dog Madeira. Within a few weeks, we noticed that the neighbourhood had changed. Raccoons bounded up our trees, nestling in divided trunks. They dug holes in our lawn, and sauntered up to us as we dined on the patio. Squirrels left gnawed bagels and cookies in our shrubs and tossed the soil from our container plants, scattering it about. Something unseen howled at night. The occasional skunk scurried away as we flicked on the outdoor lights, its white on black streak disappearing into a neighbour’s hedge. We found overturned flowerpots, uprooted herbs.
Word spread quickly in the urban wilderness we inhabit: the territory was available. For almost 14 years, Madeira’s presence – her bark, her scent, her puppy-like exuberance until her last days – marked our space as hers. She kept the critters at bay. Without her, apparently, the territory was up for grabs.
I thought of Madeira as Sukkot approached, and not only because the holiday brings us out into the backyard again after the season for al fresco dining has wound down, or because she would warm our feet in the sukkah in the cool Canadian autumn evenings, or because she would settle just outside the sukkah entryway keeping guard. Something about the way our backyard changed in her absence reminded me of Sukkot. Specifically, it made me think about the way in which the presence of a sukkah changes every place where it is not.
Most reflections on the nature of Sukkot focus on its temporary nature – its fragility, impermanence and permeability. But for me, there has always been something more striking about erecting a sukkah. It’s the way that using it radically alters your perception of familiar space. The sukkah changes your relationship to everything about your home that is not the sukkah – that is, everything that is everyday and, if not permanent, then longstanding.
It is not simply a matter of eating in your sukkah, but of not eating in your dining room or kitchen, which for eight days becomes simply a corridor through which you bring food prepared indoors into the shelter that is neither indoor space nor outdoor space, but a bit of both. Guests arrive at your home only to pass through it, a conduit to your temporary hut. Or they might bypass your house altogether and go straight to the sukkah. The warmth, comfort, expansiveness and elegance of your home become irrelevant as you entertain in a chilled and compact space decorated with an eclectic collection of homemade, purchased, new, preserved or slightly weather-worn objects. The sukkah is full, and your home, empty.
In other words, the presence of the sukkah outside defamiliarizes the space inside. It brings you to recognize the fluidity and ephemeralness of the structure you ordinarily think of as most fixed. Nothing is permanent.
There is something about mortality in all this. But there is also something about renewal, about change. There is an invitation to try and shift perspective, and in so doing, to open up of possibilities we might have not seen before.
Our liturgy asks of the Divine to spread over us “sukkat shalom” – a shelter, tent, canopy of peace – not a fort, citadel, bastion, fortification or rampart. The strength suggested by fixed structures are necessary for protection during war. But the ability of the sukkah to set everything around it in flux suggests that shifting perspective can bring us to peace – that implacable enemies and intractable situations may morph in ways we can’t yet foresee, but we might be able to bring about.
And as I pause in front of the sukkah door and look out at the section of our urban forest that I call my backyard, it occurs to me that perhaps the panoply of animals were not out to claim Madeira’s territory as their own. Perhaps they had just come to pay their respects.