At this time of year, I find myself in awe of the emotional IQ of the Jewish calendar. We begin by marking the New Year, the birthday of the world, the beginning of a period of repentance and reflection. Shortly after the intensity of the Yom Kippur fast, we move into Sukkot and Simchat Torah.  Although you, dear readers of Drash Pit, will glean this after the fall festival, I write in the midst of the days that, for me, symbolize the fragile plenitude of Jewish diasporic life and the central role that reading and rereading play for People of the Book. 

The sukkah is a temporary shelter, a potent reminder that all shelter is provisional.  We build homes, some of them regrettably in diverse sorts of gated communities, but their boundaries are transgressed—by fire, by flood, by foreclosure, by those who would do us harm.   But those inevitably permeable boundaries are also what allow us to invite people in, to foster community, to not only remember the stranger but also to share a meal with her.  While Virginia Woolf famously asked if it is worse to be locked in or locked out, the sukkah reminds us that those are false choices.  We are always in relationship with one another, with the elements, with perils and possibilities. 

And on Simchat Torah, we dance with storied scrolls and commit anew to our relationships with foundational narratives.  We leave Moses with a glimpse of the promised land that he will not reach and then we turn our attention once more to the creation of the world.  Happily, these textual relationships need not be mechanical reproductions nor rejectionist scripts.  Abraham, Moses, and Jacob talked back and wrestled; Sarah laughed; Miriam sang and wagged her tongue; Ruth committed herself to Naomi; Jonathan and David were two men in love; Esther’s intermarriage was a new beginning rather than an end for the Jewish people.  Jewish creativity, imagination, and chutzpah are embedded in tradition—and our revisions of it. 

Do we tell stories, or do stories tell us?  Cashdollar, a character in Michael Chabon’s noirish novel of menschlikhkeit , The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, insists that “the story . . . is telling us.  Just like it has done from the beginning.”  Cashdollar, a Christian evangelist and a high-ranking U.S. government official, assumes that he knows the end of a predetermined story and hastens to get there as quickly as possible.  But the midrashic impulse resists such final solutions. Dancing with our classic and contemporary Jewish texts, reading them anew, filling in their gaps, imagining an alternative story—these are a means of choosing life.

Helene Meyers is the author of Reading Michael Chabon (available on Kindle) and Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness. Find each of them at these links.  http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Michael-Chabon-Book-Club/dp/0313355509  http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5279-identity-papers.aspx