Quote (s)

I've been reading for class this weekend and these passages all struck me as wonderful.

"A sukkah is a ceremonial replica of the nomadic huts the biblical Israelites used during their wandering through the desert. It took them forty years...to shift the horizon so that a new way of being, a new terrain of communal identity, moral commitment, and political freedom, could 'show up' for them. During the days and nights of celebrating Sukkot, Jews are encouraged to build and actually live in a sukkah. The tradition says that a sukkah should be built so that one can look up through the palm leaves of the roof, into the night sky, and see the stars. By sleeping under the stars, the rabbis hoped to emphasize the wandering, impermanent, and fleeting moment that is a human life, to confront the dangers and material deprivations involved in revolution, and to acknowledge the ultimate values of human relationship...and freedom."

"Living is a passage untamed by our yearnings for certainty and permanence."

"Ours is an uncertain and impermanent fate, but one that allows us room to struggle, fight, imagine, dream, wish - to build, ever anew, the cultural bridge that keeps us aloft. We must build and rebuild it, even as we walk upon it, depending upon it for support. Our limitation, then, is also our strength: we live in an interdependent, interpenetrating world of tradition and change, communalism and individuality, confidence and confusion, authority and uncertainty. The source of our confusion and fear is also the source of our significance."

"We give ourselves over to building that which must be continually resculpted and reconfigured. We must build bridges, not idols. Life is in the wandering."

---Philip Cushman
(Constructing the Self, Constructing America: a Cultural History of Pscyhotherapy.  Pg 330-331)