On Friday evenings and festival eves, the Hashkivenu blessing closes with a familiar phrase:

Blessed are you God…who spreads the “sukkat shalom” [canopy of peace/completeness] over us, over all His people Israel, and over Jerusalem.

Blessed are you God…who spreads the “sukkat shalom” [canopy of peace/completeness] over us, over all His people Israel, and over Jerusalem.

The image suggests shelter and a sense of things settled. One might expect that on Sukkot, when we move our meals and much of our daily routine into a less stable booth, this would be the image we invoke at the table as well. Yet the festival addition to Birkat ha-Mazon [Grace after Meals] draws on a different source, taken from Amos’s prophecy of political collapse in the eighth century BCE (9:11):

May the Merciful One raise up for us the Sukkat David ha-Nofalet [falling booth of David].

May the Merciful One raise up for us the Sukkat David ha-Nofalet [falling booth of David].

We cannot know exactly what the early shapers of the liturgy intended by this choice. It is, however, more than a reference to the holiday’s central object – the sukkah. Placed side by side, sukkat shalom and sukkat David ha-nofalet reflect two ways of understanding Jewish life. One looks toward an ideal of completed peace. The other acknowledges an ongoing condition of vulnerability.

The wording in Amos is provocative. The prophet does not speak of a booth that fell once, long ago (asher nafelah), and now lies in ruins. He uses the participle ha-nofalet, “the falling sukkah.” It is a structure that is still in the process of falling, and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)