Fragility and Interdependence

This past Tuesday, when I came into work, somebody commented that he needed to go back and repair his sukkah, because it had been blown over. I smugly thought about how lovely my own sukkah was, and visualized it in my back yard, erected the prior evening, standing beautifully. Very late that evening, as I came home, I thought to look out back just to see how it was doing. It wasn’t good.
I was surprised: I thought I had done a good job. But the truth is, this is how sukkahs are by necessity. As we studied over the past 2 mornings, the sukkah has to be impermanent, and anything impermanent is inherently fragile. According to the Talmud, anything that looks permanent (like by being too high) is treyf. For a week we surround ourselves with the experience of impermanence, fragility.
What’s so great about fragility?
The truth is, that which is most important in life is the most fragile. We davenned on Yom Kippur a prayer about our extreme fragility: we wither like grass, vanish like smoke, like a dream. People, god forbid, have heart attacks, get hit by cars, and are gone in an instant. There we say, “atah hu meleck el hay vekayam.” God is the eternal king, somehow if we can root ourselves in transcendent values, we can transcend our own fragility, our own mortality.
Today we read in kohelet (4:7-8):
There is one [person], and there is no second [with him]; yea, he has neither son nor brother, and there is no end to all his toil; neither is his eye sated from wealth. Now for whom do I toil and deprive my soul of pleasure? This too is vanity and an unhappy affair.”
Yes, my bank account seems pretty stable: it’s insured, I could leave it there forever. We insure our possessions, and can replace them if anything happens. But what good are possessions if you don’t have anyone to leave them to?
There was an excellent movie on this theme, “Up in the Air.” The protagonist has as his ambition amassing one million miles in the sky, has no home, no base, no true friends. His job is to go around firing people, making them rootless, destroying their lives. By the time he finally reaches the goal, he realizes his life is completely empty. There is no family there to congratulate him, just a flight attendant and a legendary pilot, and a glass of champagne he doesn’t enjoy.
I have worked in nursing homes around Philadelphia, especially the Philadelphia geriatric center. I will tell you that on their walls, people didn’t have pictures of their cars or homes. They didn’t save the letter telling them they’d paid off their mortgage, or their student loans. They had pictures of their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. And the ones with no pictures, no visitors, were the most depressed.
The Earth for ages was thought of as the image of permanence: think of the ad slogan, solid as a rock. Kohelet says: dor ba, vedor holech, veha’aretz leolam omed—a generation comes, a generation goes, but the earth stands forever. The earth was used as a counterpoint to highlight our own fragility. But now we see that the earth itself is deeply vulnerable. Because of deforestation, pollution, unsustainable agriculture & climate change, the world’s species are disappearing 1,000 times faster than the rate at which species naturally go extinct. By the year 2100, researchers say that 1/3 to ½ of earth’s species could be wiped out. Nahmanides says we are prohibited from making one species go extinct. This is a mass tragedy.
The physical earth, too, is fragile, and changing. Many of you may have read about the massive sink hole, 330 feet across, in Siberia, which may have been caused by methane released from the permafrost. The black panther is coming back, but an estimated quarter of its habitat will likely be lost to rising oceans. The earth is changing.
Zalman shachter shalomi, who died last year, said one of the major shifts in consciousness was when we went to space and could see the earth as a whole. He called this gaia consciousness: earth is a living organism that we are ethically responsible to, that we are limbs of. The earth is finite, just a big spaceship, and there’s not really anywhere else to go. Maybe Mars, but it’s not much of a life. The earth, like us, is a beautiful and fragile divine creation.
If life is so fragile, if we are so vulnerable, how do we respond?
Kohelet posits at least 2 parts of the response:
1. don’t try for safety—enjoy that which is fragile. Enjoy your limited time here. Enjoy those things which are most meaningful in life, and also most fleeting.
2. find safety in Healthy interdependence:
It is amazing to me how pathetic babies are. When they are born, the only thing they can do is cry, suck, and move their eyes. They can’t use their limbs effectively, they flop over, they can’t hold their heads up, they fall off furniture if you let them. They are completely vulnerable, completely fragile. So how have humans survived for millions of years? By being carried by their mothers, and in the days before slings and strollers, carried in their mothers arms, around the world, for millions of years. Parental love that has kept babies safe, has kept the human species and all mammals alive for millions of years. We cannot survive alone
Kohelet 4:9-12: Two are better than one, since they have good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his friend, but woe to the one who falls and has no second one to lift him up. Moreover, if two lie down, they will have warmth, but how will one have warmth? And if a man prevails against the one, the two will stand against him, and a three- stranded cord will not quickly be broken
In America, and perhaps this is human nature, we prize independence. I know of Iraqi vets who couldn’t go to bathroom by themselves, and felt deep shame for it. I have met many seniors scared of aging because they don’t want to be “a burden,” and who prefer to live alone in a nursing home where they are lonely and depressed rather than impose on their children.
My college years: only felt successful if I could accomplish a task by myself. At Dartmouth, there was a legendary challenge, “the moose.” I had a goal of hiking all the 50 miles of trails on mt mousilauk in one day—a sign of individual strength & endurance. I never did it. The person who did, my friend, Tom Marlowe, had other people stationed around, ferrying him, giving him food, maybe a massage. Now he’s a doctor, helping people walking their way through the world.
The truth is, every minute of our lives we are amazingly interdependent. Sitting in this building, with concrete made by one person, poured by another. Wearing clothes, cotton picked, transported, processed, woven, shipped, sold. Our bread, planted, harvested, the grain ground, shipped, baked. The electric company that powered the lights in the store where we bought the bread. And just think about our iPhones!
Back to the sukkah which was blown down, I had 2 people helping me, and for part of the time I was taking care of the baby; the other 2 people told me, I think you are needed inside. You can only imagine what would have happened if I had tried to put it up alone.
It is no coincident that sukkot, and festivals and Shabbat in general, are celebrated with family. The Talmud gives us advice: guys, eat red meat and wine, buy toys and candy for the kids, and jewelry for your wives. Not bad advice. Joy is celebrating together. Hold each other up. Two is better than one, and three is even better.
Judaism institutionalizes interdependence, forces it on us, by making it a mitzvah to get married. You can’t have a celibate clergy in Judaism because it’s not an ideal—lo tov heyot ha’adam levado—it is not good for a person to be alone. We studied this last week in our discussion of solitary confinement, and the detrimental psychological effects it has. People need human contact, and literally go crazy without it. I have often heard it said that we need to know who we are before we can love someone else. I don’t agree- we can’t know ourselves until we are in relationships. And we never finish knowing who we are- we grow, are challenged, are kept on our toes by having a partner. we grow through love, through relationships, through realizing our mutual dependence.
In the sukkah, we surround ourselves with that which is truly important, truly valuable, irreplaceable, and completely fragile: our family, our friends, our planet. Enjoy it.
Hag sameach, a festival of joy, togetherness & celebration