Parshat Emor: The Shadow of Faith

This week’s parsha, Emor, includes the Torah’s instructions for the holiday of Sukkot: “In booths you shall dwell seven days.” On the surface, this is a very physical commandment. We leave the solidity of our homes and enter the fragile shelter of the sukkah. For one week, we eat, gather, and sometimes even sleep beneath a roof that is intentionally incomplete. The sukkah does not pretend to protect us from everything. Wind can pass through it. Rain can enter it. The stars may be visible above. And yet, somehow, this temporary structure becomes a place of deep spiritual shelter.

A beautiful teaching from the Zohar, one of the great mystical texts of Jewish tradition, reads this verse from Emor in a surprising way. The Zohar imagines that when a person sits in the sukkah, they are sitting in “the shadow of faith.” The Shekhinah — the felt presence of God — spreads her wings over the person from above. And not only that: the sukkah is spiritually visited by honored guests from the Jewish story: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David. This teaching is known as Ushpizin, an Aramaic word meaning “guests.”

This past Sukkot, many in our own community had a chance to bring this teaching to life during our communal sukkah meal. We invited one another to imagine our own ushpizin: the people we would want spiritually present with us in the sukkah. Some named grandparents. Some named mentors. Some named friends. Some named people who had passed away, and others named people still living whose presence has shaped them or helped them become more fully themselves. In that moment, the sukkah became not only a physical structure, but a vessel of memory, longing, gratitude, and love.

There is something tender and powerful about this image. The sukkah is physically vulnerable, but spiritually full. Its walls may be thin, but the Zohar reminds us that we are not alone inside them. We are accompanied by ancestors, teachers, friends, memory, divine presence, and the possibility that our fragility itself can become an opening. So often, we think safety means making ourselves invulnerable: building stronger walls, controlling more variables, protecting ourselves from uncertainty. But Emor’s teaching about Sukkot suggests another kind of safety: the safety that comes from being held, even when we cannot control everything. Faith is not the absence of exposure. Faith is the possibility that even in our most fragile places, there may be wings spread above us and companions beside us.

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Artwork by Hillel Smith.