Celebration of water

I WAS born in Manchester. We took rain all the year round for granted. I never made the connection between Sukkot and rain until I went as a teenager to study in Jerusalem in 1958. Of course, I knew about the prayer asking for rain on Shemini Atzeret, the Eighth Day of Assembly, but that was after Sukkot.

No one ever went short of water in my rain-sodden English countryside. And whenever I thought of Jerusalem, I envisaged a city in the words of poet William Blake, in “England’s green and pleasant land.” It wasn’t until I actually got there climbing up through the dusty, yellowy- brown ceramic hills, in burning heat to its dry summer streets, the old wells in the courtyards of Mea She’arim, that I realized how crucial water was to Israel, Jerusalem and Sukkot.

The sukka symbolized to me the impermanence of life. But in the cold English autumn, we didn’t sleep in it and rarely ate complete meals there because of the perpetual rains. The arba’a minim (the Four Species) arrived in boxes imported through a central supplier. They represented an abstract idea of humanity; the spine, the mouth, the eyes and the heart. Holding them, shaking, rustling the palms was a wonderful sensual experience that brought us closer to nature. It focused on the smells, sounds, touches and tastes that we normally took for granted. But the atmosphere was always damp and out of place.

Sukkot was very different in Jerusalem.

Mea She’arim had a sukka on every balcony, in every courtyard. People were rushing around the marketplace to find skhakh (roofing for the sukka), to choose the perfect etrog from those laid out on rows upon rows of trestle tables, with palm fronds, willows and myrtle. Piles of them. And everyone was an expert with his loop or glasses up over the forehead looking intently for the smallest blackhead, for the tiniest split, for perfect symmetry. Everything as fresh as could be, not dried out and gasping for oxygen after a long journey.

The four types of plants, depending on water, were swollen with sap and juice. But the temperature was hot, very hot and men were perspiring under their black hats and coats. If you needed to drink water, you couldn’t just open a spigot and it would flow. Besides, the water from the taps was brownish. Signs warned you not to drink it.

You resorted to the Arab water carrier or the man at the drinks stand or the gazoz (soda) fountains that cost a few grush. For the first time I appreciated that this was a festival for water. Plants as well as humans would die without it, without irrigation, without the rains that filled the cisterns, the channels and wells.

THIS WAS what it was like living in the desert climate. Here you slept in the sukka and your sleep was disturbed by the constant droning of mosquitos and the sounds from other balconies of disturbed sleepers tossing and groaning in the stifling desert wind. This was why tempers were so short and the people kept complaining.

This was taking me back from my ersatz Judaism in a foreign land to the source, the origins and the authenticity of the festival.

You couldn’t flush toilets whenever you wanted to. The taps did not always run. You had to save water, reuse it and often stand in line behind a tanker to get your supplies.

And the only place you could get a hot shower was in the mikva, the ritual bath.

And the biggest surprise was that under these difficult conditions there was a powerful current of joy and passion that erupted during the Sukkot holiday with simchat beit hasho’eva, the Joy of the Water Drawing.

I had learnt the Mishna that spoke of how there was no joy like the Joy at the Well House in Jerusalem. The celebrations were lit up by huge bonfires set on high, burning the worn out priestly clothes, and rabbis dancing in the streets below. But that was then. And I had never experienced anything like it.

This was now. On every night of Sukkot’s seven days, the whole of Mea She’arim came alive. In each yeshiva, bands led by amazing klezmer musicians roared out their tunes, as circles of young men hurled themselves around and at each other throughout the night. The quarter was filled with families all escaping their cramped quarters, mingling in the streets and moving from one yeshiva and beit midrash to another.

All of this was a celebration of water, the rains coming from Heaven in both senses of the word. They would pour out precious water over the altar then, in the hope that Heaven would replenish their stocks. After the pain and solemnity of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, this was delighting in the gifts of the physical world and yet realizing our vulnerability to the vagaries of nature.

The Land of Israel could never take water for granted. That is why we have invested so much in ensuring we will not go short.

The world should take notice. To value something, you need to celebrate it.

Jeremy Rosen is a graduate of Cambridge University in philosophy and yeshivot in Israel. He has been a rabbi of Orthodox congregations in Britain, principal of Carmel College and director of Yakar UK and the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Belgium. He is presently the rabbi of the Persian Jewish Community of Manhattan

Delighting in the gifts of the physical world and realizing our vulnerability to the vagaries of nature.