Your Hand Like a Hut Above my Head

Ps. 140:8

There are so many prayers, in every language, for safe shelter. 

We seek protection from the moment we are born, need our little heads to be covered with warmth and shade, shelter from the elements - it’s all we need and want and pray for throughout our lives. 

And right now on the planet,  so many people are without this basic shelter - no home, or even the illusion of a safe tent, no security, and no soothing knowledge that it’s temporary, and that a sheltering sky and protective ground will be available, soon, forever, to protect the very lives of far too many of us. 

The poets who wrote these psalms over 2,000 years ago came from exile, and knew homeless wandering and terror of the trials of life. They counsel us to find our source of strength and faith within our hearts, and somehow to seek shelter in each other’s trust, with the hope or knowledge that there is a greater force of love always looking out for us - even when it isn’t always visible or kind.  Faith in better outcomes becomes a sort of inner shelter against the violence.  These poets named this sense of fleeting care - a Succah - the temporary hut erected for the harvest holidays, a shelter that is not supposed to be there always, but is enough to get one through the season and represent what reassurance could be imagined as. It’s a hut that represents yearning for shelter.

Today’s psalm may have been written post or mid-war, mid-fear of foes and armed forces and empire, suspicious of the other side. We read it today with different eyes but similar questions and deep yearning for safety and a safe roof over all heads:

יֱהֹוִ֣ה אֲ֭דֹנָי עֹ֣ז יְשׁוּעָתִ֑י סַכֹּ֥תָה לְ֝רֹאשִׁ֗י בְּי֣וֹם נָֽשֶׁק׃

O GOD, my Sovereign, the strength of my deliverance,

You protected my head on the day of weapons.

Ps. 140:8

The Hebrew word ‘Succotah’ translated here as ‘protected’ is related to the word ‘succah’ the hut in which we sit this week, a holiday of harvest, left over from our agricultural days. Today’s succah may be lots of things - and rarely related to the ancient need to head out to the fields during the fall season and focus on the harvest - with no time to head back home. The huts that would become our modern Succah are about the blessing of abundance and the promise of protection even when a flimsy hut set in the field helps us feel safe as so much that’s ahead of us will never be known. 

The intense desire to be sit in a Succah - unharmed, relieved, safe, protected, is what our ancestors and all ancestors yearned for and what all of us still yearn for now. For too many humans, from those impacted by storms, to Israeli and Palestinian and Lebanese civilians thrust into the politics of war, the sky offers no safety and the ground is burning with no end in sight.

There are many empty chairs in succot all over the world, with continued prayers for the hostages and for so many whose fate is in peril.

There’s a lot that can each of us do to more than pray towards alleviation of suffering, saving lives, and offering support all those who are thrust into this cycle of terror and are without shelter.  There are multiple ways to offer support and to lift up the tireless peacemakers who still insist on working towards a better future with a succah of peace extended over all our heads. 

We each have our own wise ways with which to cultivate our inner shelter-making within ourselves and our homes. The last verse of this poem is relic from a ancestral prayer to sit in serenity and to dwell within divine justice, safe and snug inside the holy hut of human imperfection and yearning:

אַ֣ךְ צַ֭דִּיקִים יוֹד֣וּ לִשְׁמֶ֑ךָ יֵשְׁב֥וּ יְ֝שָׁרִ֗ים אֶת־פָּנֶֽיךָ׃

“Those who walk the path of justice will be grateful, 

the upright will dwell in Your presence.”

Ps. 140:14

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