The Shelter of Your Peace:
Ufros Aleynu Sukkat Shlomekhah
Frances, at Age 13


My mother lifts the crumpled Sesame Street sheet
from the foot of my bed, and shakes it out in the air,
letting it billow out and gently fall over me. She sings,

         ufros aleynu sukkat shlomecha.
"Spread over us the shelter of your peace."

The sheet and song envelop me, the wings of the Shechina,
filling me with peace and wholeness -- shalom.

I drift off to sleep.  

Ten years, hundreds of tears, and thousands of miles later, I sit down in a Friday night service in Jerusalem, in emptiness. A stranger in a strange land, with a foreign language and a foreign life.

A week ago I learned that one of my friends at home had died suddenly. I sobbed and sobbed when I first found out, but after the initial shock, I don’t feel much grief. I don’t feel anything – not anger, not fear, not love. In the heart of my soul gapes a wide, empty chasm. The combination of disbelief and my terrible distance from home and community surrounds me with a moat of frozen pain cutting me off from those around me, from G*d, from myself.

I am an alien to the land and to myself. I have tried to write my way back to my heart, but to no avail; the margins of the Israeli paper are on the wrong side. All attempts at coherence only lead me deeper into the confusion of my life. I entered the synagogue in borrowed clothing and the frozen mask of a gracious guest, layers which barely concealed the black ice of my soul.

The service begins. The prayers are strikingly familiar; I have said them hundreds of times with my family and my congregation. Compared to the modern Hebrew and Arabic in which I have been immersed, these prayers are a language I understand. I join in, welcoming the Sabbath bride with fervor and reverence, praising G*d. I feel myself beginning to open again. We turn the page of the prayer book, and I see in front of me "Ufros aleynu sukkot shlomecha." The congregation begins to sing, the same words, the same melody with which my mother tucked me in every night when I was younger, and which had echoed through my life hundreds of times since then. For the first time in a week, tears fill my eyes. As the singing continues, I feel the shelter of G*d’s peace enclose me, and a sense of wholeness pours through me, filling the emptiness I had felt.

*********

The image of the sukkah, used in this prayer as a metaphor for divine peace, was the vehicle for my connection with my inner self. A sukkah, literally a temporary shelter, usually refers to the impermanent dwelling which farmers used to set up in the fields for the harvest season. Every autumn, according to the Jewish tradition, my family and I erect our own sukkah in our back yard. Our basic task requires little imagination, the tradition is very explicit about what a sukkah must consist of. A there are only three walls, with the fourth side open to welcome guests. The roof is overlapped leafy branches, with enough room between them for stars to be visible at night Fragility is also an important quality; a strong wind should be able to topple the hut.

The sukkah represents the Judaism in which I place my faith. I do not believe that Moses received the bible from G-D at Sinai. Rather, I think of my religion as a human construction, like my sukkah. This does not belittle my faith, but gives me a sense of connection to a force larger than myself – a bond to the millions of Jews who have gone before, who have formed the explicit blueprints for our modern construction. Now it is up to my community and me to build our own vision.

I think of my community and our traditions as the walls of my sukkah. They protect me, a physical and emotional structure in which I can orient myself. They are open, accepting and embracing but they enclose a defined and sacred space. By dwelling in this space I am offered glimpses of greater truths, the light of last century’s stars shining into my soul, light I would never see in my mundane brick house. In the service I was able to re-create that space through the recitation of familiar prayers. Again, the powerful sense of connection with a presence other than myself helped to give me a stability and integrity which I had felt lacking in my numbed life.

For the week of the harvest festival, my family and I try to eat and sleep in our shelter, according to tradition. The sweet, musty smell of the burlap walls, the leaves and acorns littering th earth which serves as our floor, the stars woven into the latticed leaves of our "ceiling," the cold, the damp, the dark, the jokes about how these customs make much more sine in Israeli autumns, and the warmth of candles and family – all this is conjured by one simple word. This aura of familiarity and physical protection, like the sheet whispering down from my mother’s hand, gave me the safety and connection I need to let myself feel again.

I cried for the rest of that service in Jerusalem. And I walked out aching with a beautiful pain, a pain I was grateful for, because it did justice to my friend’s memory. I had come to Jerusalem empty, and I left full of grief, and full of love, the gifts I had received with the sukkah of holy peace.       

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