5770 Sukkot

The world sometimes moves too quickly, and I feel uncomfortably unsettled everywhere and anywhere. One child wants to move into a house off campus—her comment to the change is that suddenly she feels too grown up and therefore, a bit ‘weird.’ I’ve been saying for years that she is too grown up—by which I mean that she and her younger sister are inevitably moving away from home and a physical presence. I experience sadness when I consider this, though there are, I must admit, moments of great relief also as part of the mix.

As for the younger, she is dressing for the annual Homecoming Dance in an elegant relatively formal dress that serves only to remind me that she, too, grows up beyond me.

And today I learned of the deaths of two people whom I knew fairly well and who were both younger than I. The problem with mortality is that it weighs too heavily in the background until it’s too late, and then it cannot weigh in at all. Spinoza says that the free man thinks least of all of his death, but I am not so free. And so I read the obituaries. An acquaintance reminded me of what George Burns once said: I read the obituaries in bed, and if I’m not there, I get up.

It is a morbid, melancholy evening. I sat in the sukkah and had my dinner. Sukkot is supposed to be a joyous festival, but not this year. But over the next week of the holiday, we’ll invite people into the sukkah, and by this mitzvah, perhaps we will merit some honor.