Opinion & Comment
The Succah Still Stands

There is simply no describing the plaintive, moving melody to which Yiddish writer Avraham Reisen's poem was set. As a song, it is familiar to many of us who know it thanks to immigrant parents or grandparents. And remarkably, the strains of "A Succaleh," no matter how often we may have heard them, still tend to choke us up.

Based on Reisen's "In Succeh," the song, really concerns two succos, one literal and the other metaphorical. The poem, though it was written at the beginning of the last century, is still tender, profound and timely.

Thinking about the song, as I -- and surely others -- invariably do every year this season, it occurred to me to try to render it into English for readers unfamiliar with either the song or the language in which it was written. I'm not a professional translator, and my rendering below is not perfectly literal. But it's close and is faithful to the rhyme scheme and meter of the original:

A succaleh, quite small,

Wooden planks for each wall;

Lovingly I stood them upright.

I laid thatch as a ceiling

And now, filled with deep feeling,

I sit in my succaleh at night.

A chill wind attacks,

Blowing through the cracks;

The candles, they flicker and yearn.

It's so strange a thing

That as the Kiddush I sing,

The flames, calmed, now quietly burn.

In comes my daughter,

Bearing hot food and water;

Worry on her face like a pall.

She just stands there shaking

And, her voice nearly breaking,

Says "Tattenyu, the succah's going to fall!"

Dear daughter, don't fret;

It hasn't fallen yet.

The succah will be fine, understand.

There have been many such fears,

For nigh two thousand years;

Yet the succaleh continues to stand.

As we approach the yom tov of Succos and celebrate the Divine protection our ancestors were afforded during their forty years' wandering in the Sinai desert, we are supposed -- indeed, commanded - - to be happy. We refer to Succos in our tefillos as zeman simchoseinu, "the time of our joy."

And yet, at least seen superficially, there seems little Jewish joy to be had these days. Jews are brazenly and cruelly murdered in our ancestral homeland, hated and attacked on the streets of European cities -- and here in the United States, our numbers are falling to the internal adversaries of intermarriage and assimilation.

The poet, however, well captured a Succos-truth. With temperatures dropping and winter's gloom not a great distance away, our succah- dwelling is indeed a quiet but powerful statement: We are secure because our ultimate protection, as a people if not necessarily as individuals, is assured.

And our security is sourced in nothing so flimsy as a fortified edifice; it is protection provided us by Hakodosh Boruch Hu Himself, in the merit of our Ovos and of our own emulation of their dedication to the Divine.

And so, no matter how loudly the winds may howl, no matter how vulnerable our physical fortresses may be, we harbor neither despair nor insecurity. Instead, we redouble our recognition that, in the end, Hashem is in charge, that all is in His hands.

And that, as it has for millennia, the succah continues to stand.

Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.

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