Isaac L. Bleaman retweetledi
The more I think about this, the sadder this becomes.
This isn't a sukkah. It's not beneath an open sky and doesn't have palm-frond roofing. Those requirements are so basic to the sukkah that they're basically its definition.
This is a prop sukkah for a prop Judaism that's now being built out for political ends.
They have good reason to cling to this fakery, of course. Sukkot is one of Judaism's three great pilgrimage holidays. That's what "chag" means; its cognate in Arabic is "haj."
The pilgrimage, of course, is to the Temple in Jerusalem.
Sukkot is about the fragility of existence, but also about a sacred homecoming from the desert into a land of your own. A holiday timed to the harvest - one of the Torah's names for it, "chag ha'asif," "pilgrimage of the harvest" - in the agricultural cycle of the land.
Of this land.
Even those images of fruit and harvest are the "seven species" native to and symbolic of this land. They are some of Judaism's oldest symbols, now handed over to an icon of a Palestinian child.
So this fake sukkah isn't really, as I first thought, a clumsy but earnest anti-Zionist return to Judaism, which in my view would be a good thing.
They can't use an actual sukkah, pray the actual prayers of the holiday or study the actual message and history of Sukkot, so they do this. They make props of it all, shrink Judaism down to a shoebox so they can hand it easily over to the other side.
Or put another way, this is the erasure of Judaism through the appropriation of its symbols and rituals, emptying them of their meaning and cultural and religious context, for the purpose of erasing the Jewish story at the heart of it - the story of refugees and homecoming and an ancient tradition of belonging, the beating heart of the Jewish experience and the Jewish bookshelf.
This is Judaism gutted and eviscerated until it is no more than this emoji of a sukkah, so that real Judaism, that many-layered language of meaning and wisdom and history and faith beyond the tokenized rituals that is all these people really know, can't interfere with their politics.
If "cultural appropriation" is a kind of bigotry, how should we judge this erasure through propification?
Yagdil Isn't Brisk@Briskerov
The JVP Sukkah is actually under a tree I kid you not 🤣
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