Cat Stevens, from “Peace Train”
This Sukkot, I’m symbolically inviting Cat Stevens into our sukkah. I realize he’s not been welcome in our country recently but the folk singer/songwriter turned Muslim peace activist will be a welcome guest in my family’s sukkah.
As a teenager, I listened to Cat Stevens’ music for hours; it inspired lightness, beauty and freedom just when I needed it. And when he converted and changed his name to Yusuf Islam, I somehow acquired tapes of a long, in-depth interview about his new faith.
I listened to them in my college dorm room, feeling abandoned.
His songs are still a powerful message of living right, of finding your truth, of being peaceful and of loving fully and deeply. From “I Can’t Keep It In”: “I can’t keep it in, I’ve gotta let it out. I’ve got to show the world, world’s got to see, see all the love, love that’s in me.”
I’d like to invite Stevens/Islam for other reasons also. I don’t assume to understand what exactly happened last week when he was stopped from entering the United States because his name turned up on a security watch list. But I have my hunches.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security gave no details, just that “the intelligence community has come into possession of additional information that further raises our concern.”
Cries of McCarthyism have sounded throughout the country, demanding that explanations be given, that our government not narrow its vision so severely that we become a nation of fear-driven persecutors.
Maybe Stevens/Islam is engaged in terrorism; but, as author David Stillman explained last week at the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Community Campaign 2005 Opening Event, I belong to Generation X and I’m a skeptic.
My hunch is that Stevens/Islam was stopped because of his last name. And I’m certain that his donations to Muslim causes ended up in the hands of terrorists. (How can they not? Hamas, for example, runs not only terrorism but also a complex social services network.)
Inviting Stevens/Islam into our wonderful blue and purple sukkah is a chance to smash all that hate and suspicion to bits. Sukkot is finally a chance to sit together in one common, spiritual space.
“The whole beauty of the mitzvah of the sukkah is unity,” explained Rabbi Menachem Rapoport of Congregation Agudas Achim Chabad in Mequon. “We all are surrounded by an entity that unites everybody.”
Further, the holiday itself represents unity. For example, the Four Species, or arba minim — etrog, palm branch (lulav), willow branch (arava) and myrtle branch (hadas); Jews are commanded to hold all these species and “rejoice before the Lord.”
But if one of the species is missing, the mitzvah is incomplete. Rapoport explained that each of them represents a different type of person and all people are needed within the sukkah.
The idea of inviting guests into our sukkot is not new. Though traditionally the ushpizin (symbolically invited guests) have been our biblical fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, many Jews invite a range of other guests.
Feminist Jews may invite biblical and historical women. Followers of Chabad may feature a line of revered rebbes on the walls of their sukkah, Rapoport told me.
The ushpizin in our sukkah this year will be a diverse bunch. We’ll invite the strong and commanding, the joyful and musical, the nurturing and loving. They will be biblical and historical, men and women, those we knew and those we wished to know, those we needed and those who needed us.
And we will dwell in a space that is transient and vulnerable, that reminds us that, regardless of what car we drive or what passport we carry, we’re all formed of the same matter. And, if only for the time it takes to eat our festive meal, may we live together in peace.
Hag Sukkot sameach .
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