Thought For The Day - 26 September 2007

Today, in the Jewish community, we’ll be putting the finishing touches to the huts, with their roofs of leaves, in which we’ll be living and eating for the next eight days. We call the hut a sukkah, in English a tabernacle, and tonight the festival of Sukkot begins.

It’s a reminder of the forty year journey of the Israelites in the days of Moses, from slavery to freedom across the wilderness. For four decades they had no permanent homes. They lived, as some Bedouin still do today, in portable shacks; and each year we recreate that experience.

For a long time Sukkot puzzled me. Unlike Passover, for example it doesn’t recall any great miracle: the plagues, the division of the red sea, God’s wonders. It tells a much more human story, of vulnerability and exposure to the elements, as anyone who’s sat in a Sukkah in a soggy September can testify.

And then I suddenly realised that that’s the point. It’s easy to celebrate sudden deliverance, the dates every nation has inscribed in its database of memory, the day the war was won, or the walls came down, or the tyrant was deposed. It’s much rarer to remember the long journey with all its disappointments and defeats, setbacks and wrong turnings, the story not of miracles but of human endurance and the courage to keep going even when the promised land is not in sight. Freedom is a journey across the wilderness with no shortcuts. And that unspectacular story of human spirit is what Sukkot represents.

This Sukkot I’ll be thinking of the people of Burma, as they continue their long search for freedom. They too have been in the wilderness for forty years and more; yet they’ve never given up hope, even when protests were suppressed, and the opposition leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi, was placed under house arrest.
There’s one phrase that links Aung Sang to the Israelites of the Bible. When in 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the phrase the committee used to describe what she represented was: the power of the powerless.

That is what the sukkah symbolises: everything that’s frail and vulnerable about us as we travel across the wilderness in search of liberty. Hope is the power of the powerless. The Israelites kept hope alive, and hope kept them alive. There’s nothing more fragile, yet it can outlive empires and defeat even the worst tyranny. May God be with the people of Burma in their journey of hope.

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