In the Tent
It is the season of the Jewish feast known as Sukkot. A harvest festival also often referred to as the Feast of Booths, or the Feast of Tabernacles. During this time each year, Israel is to live in booths or temporary tents to remind them of the wilderness journey of their ancestors from Egypt to the Promised Land.
“And the LORD said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say, ‘On the fifteenth day of the seventh month the Feast of Tabernacles to the LORD begins, and it continues for seven days ... You are to dwell in booths for seven days. All the native-born of Israel must dwell in booths, so that your descendants may know that I made the Israelites dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God”
The Hebrew word for booth is sukkah and means covering or protection. A sukkah is a three sided temporary shelter. I imagine the festival participants sitting cross-legged in their sukkah recounting stories like the parting of the Red Sea, Moses descending the mountain with the tablets of stone, and how in forty years of trekking round and round through the desert no one’s shoes wore out. Accounts of God’s faithfulness handed down from generation to generation.
I’ve had tent experiences of my own. A handful have been in a real, proper tent.
For example, once on a camping trip with cousins, we had to transfer sleeping quarters from the tent to the van during the night due to rain that seeped through the tent floor. I don’t recall much else about that trip except, if memory serves, I was in a cast from hip to toe. I was about five or six years old.
Another instance was thousands of miles away in a blue tent pitched on the red dirt of a remote village in Mozambique. My husband and I lay in our sleeping bags talking in quiet whispers by the light of our headlamps as the Mozambiquians who had accompanied us guarded the campsite. Though we were careful to knock off our shoes before entering, it was impossible to keep the red dirt out of the tent. We awoke the next morning with grit in our hair and between our teeth. That’s the way it was with Africa. It got into you no matter how hard you tried to keep it out.
Our tent among a sea of others spread across the hosting pastor’s yard in Mozambique. June 2016.
My fondest tent memories come from the homemade variety. You know the kind. Sheets and blankets thrown over carefully arranged chairs configured to form the perfect shelter. Toys and pillows pulled inside. And a flashlight because all good campers need a flashlight.
My brother and I built many ‘forts’, as we liked to call them, and spent hours engrossed in games of make-believe. Funny, but I don’t remember our normal sibling squabbles following us through the tent door.
Similar structures were erected for my boys, tucking blankets around the top bunk so that they draped down to enclose the opening to the bottom bunk. Somehow the adventures of G.I. Joe and Batman were much more exciting inside the dark and mysterious space between the beds.
My grandchildren are very young, but we’ve had a few tent adventures so far. They are still small enough that they want me to come inside with them. At first, it’s awkward. Someone my size playing in a homemade tent. Aren’t I too old and inflexible for this? I tuck myself so that I don’t inadvertently take down a wall. Soon though, I relax into the intimacy of the enclosure abandoning myself to the thrill of sharing these moments with my grand companions.
Looking back over these experiences, I begin to understand why this feast is sometimes referred to as z’man simkhateinu, “the season of our rejoicing”.
The memories transform the tent into a place of remembrance, a retrospective of my journey. As with the Israelites, there are times that are painful to recall. The golden calf, the bickering and complaining. My wanderings through wilderness, deep valleys, and rough places replay through my mind like a reel stored away and then discovered anew. As the memories play, I clearly see God’s faithfulness. A cloud by day. A fire by night. Healer. Provider. Sustainer.
Through everything, whether good or bad, God has never left me. That’s not just my testimony, but that of my parents, and grandparents, and their parents also. The generations before me have lived their own journeys through their own deserts and emerged to tell their progeny of a God who is abounding in love and mercy.
Think I’ll grab some blankets and pull together a few chairs. I feel like spending some time in a tent.