Do They Know It's Sukkos?

On Shabbat, I heard a mother reviewing with her elementary school-age son what he had learned in school about the biblical story of the spies who were sent to scout the land of Canaan. When asked why the spies didn’t take off their kipot and cut their payot so they would blend in better, he responded, because then they’d look like chilonim (secular Israeli Jews).

Then today, among our various errands, we drove out to an outlying community of Jerusalem to buy lights to hang in our sukkah from a woman who sells them out of her house. In a combination of broken Hebrew and broken English, the woman, Asian and married to an Israeli (presumably, though it’s very difficult to get an interfaith marriage in Israel) with a beautiful little girl of about three in a Dora the Explorer shirt, showed us all the various lights she had, and explained that she didn’t know if the lights would survive the rain in the sukkah because she only hangs them around the house. This was a chiloni community, and Micah mused that we were probably the frummest people ever to have ventured there. We bought two awesome strings of lights, and our hosts wished us a chag sameach (happy holiday), though we knew they wouldn’t be celebrating it.

Unlike in America and elsewhere in the Diaspora, Jews are the majority in Israel. Demographics force Diaspora Jews, to some extent, to identify as a unit, despite strong unwillingness to do so by many of them with assorted religious and political leanings. In Israel, Jews are the majority, but the Jews still manage to make things difficult, as they are often wont to do. Here, in an effort to self-define, every little detail is used to separate one group from the next. Various groups dress differently, live separately, and build their own communities. I may have been the only one in shul not wearing a srugi (a kipah srugah, or knitted kipah, mark of the dati leumi, or religious Zionists)—granted my suede one has choochoo trains on it.

But at the same time, as a Jewish state, there is a shared heritage. Everyone here knows it’s Sukkot, regardless of personal religious observance, the same for which cannot be said of America. Here, all the meat in the grocery store is kosher. Traditions, even those of others, are common knowledge. It’s an odd paradox of prizing both personal and national identity. The dichotomy of distancing the other and celebrating commonality is an inherent part of Israeli culture. Achdut, or togetherness, is a virtue here. Kinda.