Between a Symbol of Peace and a Testimony of War: the Assembling, Dissasembling and Permanence of Contemporary Sukkot

• In Event: Embodied Judaism

Abstract

The yearly construction of sukkot during the festival of Sukkot, constructed to observe the commandment 'live in booths for seven days,' performatively recreates the establishment of the temporary shelters Jews constructed in the desert, bringing together many tensions: between a temporary connection to the inhabited place and the longing for a permanent home, between the private and the public, between the mythical past and the present.

In this paper, I will address the last iteration of a ten-year research-creation project dealing with the performative assembling and disassembling of contemporary sukkot: The 'Colony of Sukkot.' The one-day event performed during the last holiday of Sukkot, on October 5-6th, 2023, not only observed the Jewish custom but also realized, on a Jerusalem hill, on the border between West and East Jerusalem, the unrealized architectural dream of a fictitious character in Michal Govrin’s novel 'Snapshots' (2002). In the novel, the architect Ilana Tsuriel planned for that very hill the construction of a monument that bridges religious, ethnic, and national territories—an 'anti-' monument for Peace, 'the kind you don’t look at, but one you build and live in'—a colony of sukkot. For the inaugural event in the novel, a performance by a Palestinian theater troupe was planned as a concretization of the hope for the transformation of boundaries into thresholds, but the reality of war became stronger than the dream. 'The performance,' said the Palestinian theater director to Ilana, 'is now a war, not a monument for peace,' referring to the Gulf War. Ilana’s monument was never realized in the fiction.

On October 5, 20 years after the publication of the novel, Ilana’s dream was realized by the Sala-manca Group in collaboration with Michal Govrin. For a day till its dismantling on October 6, the dream of the monument for Peace became a temporary fragile reality. But just a day after, on October 7, 2023, during Simcha Torah, the performance of war started in Israel and Gaza, erasing also the symbolic dream of peace. In parallel to that, dozens or hundreds of sukkot remained installed till this very day in the south and the north of Israel, challenging the symbolism of the sukkah and the festivity. A disperse colony of temporary sukkot remained as a testimony of the war.

In this paper, I will discuss the sukkot not only as a fragile structure of home, a hybrid structure of belonging as defined by Lipis but also as a symbolic fragile structure of peace and a material testimony of war. I will deal with the process of the realization of a scripted fictitious dream and with the symbolic gesture of constructing a peace shelter that anticipated the subsequent displacement of Israelis and Palestinians from their homes, the power of war, and the necessity of performing and assembling common dreams.

Author

• Diego Rotman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem