The Sukkot Guest List

By Judith Bolton-Fasman

Sukkot is coming and my guests will be arriving. Like Chagall brides, they fly over the silver moon; their white gauzy dresses double as wings. They drop in mostly in the middle of the night. Following the Sukkot custom of "inviting" mystical guests or ushpizim into the sukkah or outdoor booth for each of the seven nights of the holiday, some of them will be culled from the bible and Jewish history. But every occasion should be Sukkot-like; making it special by summoning different ancestors from seminal times in family history, ancestors who paint a room with the full spectrum of emotional color. My guests--mystical and otherwise--often come around times of distress or joy. The disparate feelings can sometimes feel indistinguishable.

Sukkot is also a time to make a wish list of people you've always wanted to meet. When I was a kid, I loved programs that brought historical persons into the living present. Even a program like Bewitched tickled me because there was always the possibility that someone like Columbus or Shakespeare could suddenly come to life, my life. I've been thinking long and hard about exactly who I need in my life this year. I've decided to issue three invitations: one for Leah the matriarch, one for Rachel the wife of Rabbi Akiva and another for Sara Schenirer--founder of the first yeshivot--or Jewish day schools for women.

Every woman has been a Leah at some point in her life. Taken for granted, ignored, but still triumphant in ordinary yet miraculous ways. I have always been Leah to my sister's Rachel. I, the older, dowdy sister. She vivacious and lovely--the one my father would wake up and bring downstairs to light up a dinner party with her luminous beauty. The eyes, he'd point out to everyone, did you ever see such black eyes? I, still awake in my bed, heard it all. Once you have been Leah, you feel like Leah, forever.

The Rachel that I want to meet was the long-suffering wife of Rabbi Akiva. The middle-class Rachel married the illiterate Akiva against her family's wishes. But Rachel knew something about Akiva that even he did not understand about himself. His genius was subtle, natural, wild. Yet it flourished in a modesty that was both sacred and beguiling to Rachel. She encouraged him to learn his alef, bet--the Hebrew alphabet--and then to puzzle it out in his studies. Akiva excelled and went off to learn for more than three decades.

Rachel coped in his absence with grace, endurance, and above all, fortitude. I want to know how she did it. I want to know if she felt the same despair that I do when my husband travels abroad in the service of science. I want to know how she controlled her rage when finally her husband came home and his students, ever protective of their beloved teacher, did not let her through the throng. "Let this woman pass," Akiva ordered his students, "if not for her none of you would be here." I want to know if after hearing those words, it was all worth it for Rachel. I want to know if everyone with a brilliant husband pays by sacrificing his company for rewards not immediately seen. I feel weak compared to Rachel. E-mail and a mobile phone don't ease the loneliness of sending a husband off to yet another trip.

And then I want to shake Sara Schenirer's hand. Maybe I am not the person she had in mind when she founded the Bais Yaakov movement, but I and every woman with any Jewish education are her beneficiaries. Sara Schenirer, hunched over her sewing machine, had a revelation. Or was it a moment of despair that gave way to lucidity? What if girls had their own schools? Schenirer's idea was radical. The implementation of it was nowhere near egalitarian. But the fact that there was even an attempt to educate girls formally at the end of the nineteenth century was inspiring and enduring. I did not know how to articulate all of that when I decided to speak about Sara Schnerier at my ninth grade graduation from yeshiva. Each graduate had to make a speech about the person in Jewish history that most inspired them. There was a straw poll for Moses and David. And then there was me. The only graduate to talk about a woman, and a little known one at that. Now I'm certain that she was flying over the moon with wings of gauze the very moment that I began my speech.