It is Sukkot in Jerusalem again, eight days of joy. The nation state is on official holiday. People sleep outdoors in booths bedecked with reeds, fruits and tinsel. Drab synagogues sprout gardens overnight as each worshipper carries a personal pack of date palm fronds, myrtle boughs, willow branches and citron fruits. They wave this bounty at their seats, march around the lectern, and on the seventh day they beat them against the pews, staining them green.
I think it is wise of the Jewish people to bring the garden into their temples and homes in this way, a good example of the wisdom of religion in general--it is a good example of the wisdom, and not the dogma, in religious life.
My nonreligious friends smile at the worshippers, and wink behind their backs. On the one hand they tolerate ritual practice--they are politically correct and multi-cultural, after all. On the other hand ritual scares them, as any palm frond may hide a mullah, inquisitor or herem-pronouncing rabbi. They are certain the university is rational and religion is not.
I suspect they make the classic "expert error," like the typical 17th century European doctor that took up his cups and leeches to cure his patients, so rational, so certain of his certainty, and so dangerously wrong.
Many of the Jewish religion's wisest discoveries were globalized (or independently discovered) long ago, such as universal literacy, hypertext, humane butchering, washing before meals, and the ever popular bans on human sacrifice and polytheism. But the Sabbath and Sukkot have yet to be widely adopted, though they have a lot to offer.
The secular, American Sabbath of the 19th century died when most Sunday blue laws were revoked, and today only Christmas Day and the occasional natural disaster can bring a true day of rest to the American street.
But the social garden of Sukkot is yet to be discovered. It means more than the secular disciplines of ecology, landscaping and interior decorating. Sukkoth is a millennia-long romance with specific species, monitored by a living collective intelligence, fostering an annual inter-species détente that has meanings not yet quantified by evolutionary theory, nutritional science or Victory garden planting.
Americans today can adopt a stretch of highway. Imagine adopting a plant species instead. Sukkoth is like that: adopt the plant, stick with it for thousands of years--keep in mind, no nation state lasts more than a few hundred!--and one week a year celebrate your green friendship.
It's not easy to tell the difference between religious wisdom gleaned from millennia of experience, and dogmatic certitude adopted by fiat--but there is a difference, and Sukkot in Jerusalem is the former.
If secular society deems Hosannot dogmatic and irrational, then so be it. I suspect they, like the good Western doctors of the 17th century, are making a classic "expert error," mistaking their assuredness for a surety.
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