SUKKOT INVITES US TO THINK OF THOSE FOR WHOM TRANSIENT LIVING IS IS THE NORM

This is Howard Cooper's Face to faith column in today's Guardian:

Sukkot invites us to think of those for whom transient living is the norm

Inviting guests into one's home is a habitual part of Jewish social living that receives a special emphasis at this time of year 

How much insecurity can you bear in your life? How much awareness of the randomness, the sheer contingency and unpredictability of life? How much do we want to be reminded of the fragility of our bodies, our minds, our social structures, the innate vulnerability grafted into the carefully constructed fabric of our daily lives? 

Religious traditions can seem to offer some respite from the unsettling reality of inhabiting bodies that gradually fail us, and societies where our sense of wellbeing is dependent on social, political and financial forces outside any individual's control. Religions attempt to create a meaningful world for believers to inhabit. They seek to keep existential terror at bay – the terrifying fear that life has no inherent meaning; that it is, in Thomas Hobbes's words, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"; and that we avoid this fate more by luck than our own good judgment. 

The week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles), which started this week, offers a plangent perspective on the questions that surround the personal and collective need for security, and our fragmentary awareness that genuine security may not be achieved through attachment to the material world. The central symbol – the temporary shelter, the sukkah, constructed next to one's home, where one eats and sometimes sleeps for the duration of the festival – is an antidote to religious certainty. 

Made of organic materials, branches and leaves, its roof must be such that one can see through to the stars at night: as one looks up, and out, there is a dawning realisation of the impermanence of all we build and hold dear. We recall the origin of these "booths" in the mythic narrative of the Israelites' 40-year journey through the wilderness towards a distant "promised land". The biblical story describes the temporary homes the people built – sometimes for months, sometimes for years – and their education into the reality of following the peripatetic divine force that always moved on them in ways they could never predict or control. 

This annual festival is a reminder that permanence and certainty are antithetical to a spiritual sensibility. The great German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, scribbling a new theology on postcards in first world war trenches, saw the festival of Sukkot symbolising something vital for his diasporic people and something with a universal resonance: it "serves to remind the people that no matter how solid the house of today may seem, it is but a tent which permits only a pause in the long wanderings through the wilderness of centuries". 

In sensitising us to our transience, the festival invites us to think of those for whom transient living is the norm, not merely an annual religious ritual. The invitation of guests, strangers, "outsiders", into one's home is a habitual part of Jewish social living that receives a special emphasis at this time of the year. Hospitality as an everyday virtue takes on a deeper religious significance. My own synagogue is making itself available this winter, along with local churches, as a host venue for Homeless Action in Barnet, offering a cooked meal, a warm place to sleep, washing and toilet facilities, fresh clothes, conversation and breakfast for the area's homeless. 

Our guests will help us understand what George Steiner has called "an arduous truth" that emerges from the mystery of Jewish resilience – "that human beings must learn to be each other's guests on this small planet".

Howard Cooper is a rabbi and psychotherapist, and the author of The Alphabet of Paradiser: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life