Diary of a Chief Rabbi
It Was a Day When a Nail Made All The Difference
It happened in the early nineteen-seventies. For the first time in our lives, Elaine and I owned a house and Sukkot was drawing near. We didn't have a car, and we were not quite sure how to get the materials to build a sukkah.
Help appeared in the form of one of the best friends we've ever had, Rabbi Shlomo Levin, now famous as the rabbi of the South Hampstead Synagogue, but in those days, just a co-worshipper in the little Habad minyan in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Shlomo had a large estate car, and one day he mentioned that he was going to the timber yard to pick up wood for the sukkah. Would I like to come along and get some for my own? Gratefully I accepted.
We went together to his house, and he showed me the plans he had drawn up for the sukkah he was proposing to build. I was awestruck. I hadn't realized that architecture and woodwork were among Shlomo's many talents. The plans were magnificent. What he had in mind was elegant, gracious, a kind of summer house without a roof. This was altogether out of my league. On one memorable occasion at school I had been placed 32nd for woodwork in a class of 31 students. Hitting a nail was the limit of my capacity, and even then, most times, I scored a direct hit on my thumb. I decided to say nothing and follow the footsteps of the master.
Well, we got to the timber yard. Shlomo had prepared a long list of materials, two-by-fours, four-by-eights, and other mysterious entities. I hadn't a clue what I needed, so, following the classic Jewish recipe, I ordered a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I remember that the bill came to less than ten pounds. Shlomo dropped me off with my random harvest, and we both began our constructions. After much banging I managed to produce something which looked like a large cardboard box that had seen better days. I went round to see Shlomo's, and there it was: a Taj Mahal among tabernacles, a sukkah far too grand to be merely temporary. I was grateful that we lived some way away. Had the two structures been placed side by side, mine would have died of shame.
Fate, though, or Providence, still had a surprise in store. On the second night of Yom Tov there was a tremendous storm. All night, the wind howled. Trees bent. Leaves were sent scattering like snowflakes. The next morning in shul, Shlomo was crestfallen. 'My sukkah blew down,' he said, 'How about yours?' 'It's still there,' I said with restrained Schadenfreude. 'I don't believe it,' said Shlomo, 'This I must come and see.' He couldn't work out how our shack had survived the storm while his had been demolished, and to be honest, neither could I. So off we went together to our back garden to fathom the mystery.
What happened next, I will never forget. Shlomo looked at the sukkah, gave it a shake, and saw that it was rock solid. Going inside he immediately saw why. I had fixed one of the uprights to the wall of the house by a single nail. That was what made the difference. His was a free standing structure. Mine was joined at one point to the house. Shlomo is a wonderful man, rarely more so than at that moment. He smiled and said: 'One nail made the difference between your sukkah and mine. Mine was not attached to something stable; yours was. And do you know what that nail represents? It's faith. Now I realize that if you're connected to something solid and immovable, then even if the winds blow, you will still stand firm. But if we're not - if we are just free standing individuals - then when the storm comes, even our most carefully planned constructions get blown away.' Ever since, when Sukkot comes around, Shlomo and I tell the story.
He was so right. Sukkot is about faith - a particular kind of faith. People sometimes think that faith is about certainty. It isn't. It's the courage to live with uncertainty. That is the faith our ancestors had when they first set out on what Nelson Mandela calls 'the long walk to freedom.' The journey from Egypt to Israel is not long. People walk it in a few days. But it took the Israelites forty years, and throughout that time, they had only the most fragile dwellings as shelter. To this day, sitting in the sukkah, exposed to the wind and rain, remains a vivid reminder of the vulnerability our ancestors so often knew, not just in the desert, but in almost every country of their dispersion, never knowing whether they were safe or whether they or their children would suffer expulsion and be forced to begin their wanderings again.
Yet they had faith. They were not naive. They didn't believe that all would be well, that they would lead a charmed life, that somehow they would live happily ever after. Jews do not see the world through rose-tinted glasses. Their faith meant something else: that they were not alone, that God was with them, that their heritage - the Torah - was worth the sacrifice and the risk, and that eventually they would reach the promised land. No people has shown more courage, more loyalty. The Jewish journey turned out to be the longest in human history, but in the end we did get there - to Israel, to Jerusalem and to freedom, even if not yet to peace.
Reb Shlomo understood. What makes the difference is that one point of connection to something eternal and immovable. I saw a nail. He saw faith. Thank you, Shlomo, for teaching me to see the beauty of a shack that, though humble, could not be blown down by wind or storm: our sukkah, symbol of a people who had faith in God.