A Lesson in Peace from the festival of Succot – The festival of booths.

Succot is one of Israel's three pilgrim festivals. The other two are Passover and Pentecost (Shavuot). This means that one must go to Jerusalem to celebrate them. Other festivals can be celebrated in one's own town, but these three must be celebrated in Jerusalem.

Succot is different from the other two in that it has only one name, Hag Hasuccot, whereas the others have three. These names signify three dimensions of the feast: a historical or national dimension, a natural dimension, and a heavenly dimension.

These three dimensions signify the harmony between the nation of Israel, nature and God.

By celebrating these festivals, we acknowledge that harmony and unity exist between the nation of Israel, nature, and God.

In celebrating Succot, however, we acknowledge an even higher unity, namely, the unity of all mankind.

Without mankind, the well-ordered arrangement of things would be disturbed as if the fruit stopped ripening in its season or the sun and the moon changed their course. Nature is only complete if all its parts exist, and mankind and the Jewish People are two of those parts. Their existence is as necessary as all the other parts of nature.

God is above all the parts and guarantees their continued existence; therefore, everybody and everything that exists must acknowledge God's sovereignty. The nation of Israel does this by celebrating the festivals.

Sukkot, however, is unique because it is the only festival when not only the Jewish people must go up to Jerusalem, but all mankind must go up, according to the words of the prophet Zachariah:

Zachariah 14:16

"And it shall come to pass, that everyone who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Booths."

The booth symbolizes a universal home. By building a Sukkah and living in it for seven days instead of in his regular home, a Jew symbolically goes outside his national boundaries to live among the rest of mankind.

Going out of one's home into the world is the opposite of what the Jew does, for example, on Passover, when he gathers his family around him in his home and invites the hungry to enter.

In Succot, the Jew is putting himself in the virtual position of being hungry and homeless and giving the rest of mankind an opportunity to show its humanity by helping to provide the Jew shelter.

On Passover and Pentecost, Jews celebrate that they became a nation. On Tabernacles, Jews celebrate their equality with other countries.

Universalism requires individualism. At Passover, with the exodus from Egypt and at Pentecost, by receiving the law on Mt. Sinai, the Jews became a clearly identifiable individual national entity. On Sukkot, they became a part of the universal brotherhood of nations.

These events, namely, the Exodus from Egypt and the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai, fix the national character of the Jewish people.

Once they have a clear picture of who they are, know and are proud of their national heritage, they can join the rest of the nations and live in harmony with them.

Succot symbolizes each nation's identification with the distinctive characteristics of other countries. When a nation identifies and respects the customs and history of its neighbour, it can live in harmony with that neighbour.

As long as a nation exists on earth that thinks its way is the only right way and all other ways are wrong, it will try to make war to convert other nations to its way of thinking, and we won't have peace.

Peace can only be achieved when we accept each other's differences and do not try to make everybody like us or try to make ourselves like others.

We all live in the house of the Lord. The world is His house.

Only by love and acceptance of one another will His house be established.

Micah 4:5

Let all people walk every one in the name of his God, and we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.

Cul de Sac by Roman Polanski. An interpretation by Leon Gork

Cul de Sac Dir: Roman Polanski 1966 seen at the Jerusalem Cinemateque on Tue 14th Dec 2016

The end of the road is the tragedy of the victor in man’s struggle for supremacy over a world of evil doers, who threaten to tumble him from the heights of his dominions, as in the children’s song “I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascal”, is that he’s left alone; the beautiful damsel, who was to be the prize of victory, has disappeared, his castle is in ruins, his loyal followers, having been chased away by him, have left him. He is all alone at the top of a sand heap, which was once his castle, and he’s happy, not being aware even of his tragic situation.

Knife in Water. My interpretation of a movie by Roman Polansky

Knife in the Water. "Nóz w wodzie" (original title) Dir: Roman Polanski 1962 Seen at the Jerusalem Cinemateque Mon 14th Dec. 2015

Most people live mundane, monotonous lives, consisting mostly of routine activities, so it’s not surprising to find that many people dream of exciting or romantic situations. When such a situation occurs, as in this film people may at first be hesitant to make the best of it, but as the situation develops it’s possibilities for a thrill become more apparent and people grab it with open arms.

The consequences of having a thrill for a moment can be disastrous, but amazingly the expected disaster is avoided and a big sigh of relief goes up from the audience.

Mein Land Dein Land (Heb title: קו הפרדה) Interpretation

Mein Land dein Land. Hebrew title קו הפרדה Dir: Alexander Dierbach Seen at the Jerusalem cinemateque 12th Dec 2015

As long as the war lasted many Germans avidly supported National Socialism, belonging to the party and participating in its orgies of persecution, while others were simply patriotic Germans.
After the war, however, with the Americans and the Russians controlling Germany, it became a matter of life and death to demonstrate that one had not supported National Socialism and even abhorred the Nazi philosophy.

The German who came under control of the Soviet Union, found that even this was not enough to satisfy the new regime, which built a wall separating Germany into East and West, ostensibly to keep out the corrupting influences of the decadent, capitalistic West.

East Germany was to be the new utopian society of the Soviets, cleansed of any taint of capitalism, National Socialism and aristocratic heritage.

The Germans of East Germany were now obliged to demonstrate support for Communistic ideals, which previously, under National Socialistic Germany of Hitler they had to reject and even detest. Changing loyalties, in order to survive, lead to crises in the community and the family.
The conclusion is that the the Germans and all the world learned that patriotism is not fixed in concrete. One can, nay, must, change ones patriotic feelings according to what is expedient for survival. Regimes care little or nothing for the well-being of the individual, and, in any case are constantly changing. This means that people must take care of themselves or else suffer the vagaries of constantly changing, irresponsible regimes.

Rocco and His Brothers. Directed by: Luchino Visconti.

Rocco and his brothers. Dir: Luchino Visconti 1960. From the 3rd Ear at the Jerusalem cinemateque. Sun 5th Dec. 2015

This wonderful movie focuses on the tragedy of farmers who are forced to migrate to the big city, because of circumstances, in a modern world, where the big cities offer the means of earning a living, no longer possible in agriculture.

The dream of returning to an earlier, ideal world, where one was honored and life was beautiful, even though it was hard and they were poor, motivates the desire to be noble, despite the dishonorable temptations of the the city. This leads to making absurd sacrifices to achieve the the goal of attaining honor and nobility.

The hero becomes like a knight in shining armour, he is a veritable Don Quixote; he sacrifices the object he loves most in all the world, the woman he loves, and who he rescued from dishonor, and so allowing his immoral brother to have her, causing her, in her disappointment, to return to her original immoral situation.

The Rest is Silence - Movie interpretation

The Rest is Silence. Dir: Nae Caranfil. Seen at the Jerusalem Cinemateque Thu 3rd Dec. 2015

One of the reasons why National leaders, especially dictators, love cinema is because cinema has the ability to perpetuate historic events, like great battles, that inspired the people to pride in their nation and their leader at the time when they happened. A film showing a great battle, for example, can be shown again and again and each time the people will be inspired as they had been at the time of the actual battle. This is the power of the cinema.

The director in this movie succeeds in demonstrating this power to the king of Romania and the cinema industry is set on its way to success. This is why my association with the title of this movie is with the phrase “and the rest is history”.

But it seems that I’m wrong and that its actually taken from the last words of Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. This is suitable for several reasons, but mostly because the theatre sees cinema as its death knoll. In fact the movie ends when the most ardent supporter of cinema, realizing the disaster that cinema, that he has ardently supported is going to bring an end to theatre, sets fire to the store of films, kept in a storeroom of the theatre, and inadvertently burns down the theater and the heroine, an aspiring actress burns to death in the conflagration. She is the sacrifice for the success of cinema.

O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.

Why the world needs to remember catastrophes

Catastrophes happen suddenly, without warning;

The 17th century philosopher Pascal saw Nothingness as a possibility that lurked, so to speak, beneath our feet, a gulf and an abyss into which we might tumble at any moment. (irrational man p.116 Kindle)

one minute a group of people are shopping happily in a market; the next, some lie dead and bleeding on the ground; their lives and the lives of people dependent on them changed forever because of an explosion which happened indiscriminately, without warning.

Only yesterday, I heard about a young man walking vigorously to the synagogue to pray - now he lies, unable to speak, because of brain damage caused by a bomb thrown casually in his path and blowing away half of his brain.

Unfortunately, the suddenness of catastrophes is matched by the suddenness with which they are forgotten. Nobody, except the family and other loved ones, spends time remembering the catastrophe and the people injured and killed by it.

This is natural, as the writer E.M. Forster points out in his masterpiece novel, A Passage to India:

"outbursts of grief could not be expected from them over a slight acquaintance. It’s only one’s own dead who matter. If for a moment the sense of communion in sorrow came to them, it passed. How indeed, is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there."

Catastrophes are indeed recorded in the annals of history. Still, human beings don't hold daily memorial services for the dead, even though there are annual memorial days commemorated by family members and, in the case of a national catastrophe, like the holocaust and an entire nation celebrates a memorial day.

Some nations, however, like the Jewish Nation, have suffered a catastrophe so great that practically every day a memorial service is held. For example, a service is held every day in the hall of memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel's national memorial to those who perished in the holocaust.

Memorial Day brings all those who celebrate it into the warm, comforting circle of the family. The catastrophe that struck some of us now becomes the glue that sticks us together if we celebrate Memorial Day.