This Shabbat, our youngest will become a Bar Mitzvah. Lisa and I would love to have you join us for a festive Friday night service and special oneg. Sammy is one-of-a-kind: smart, funny, understated and loving. Like all kids, he’s layered and amazing. My dad will be giving the sermon at services. I’d love to have you join us.

Sammy’s Bar Mitzvah will take place during the fall festival of Sukkot, now underway. For me, Sukkot is one of the real highlights of the Jewish calendar. We leave the heaviness of the high holy days for the air and the calm that comes with Sukkot. We enter the Sukkah, a symbol of life’s fragility. We gaze up at the vast sky above us, remembering our own humanity and the sheer scope of our world. We look up at the sky and greet our problems and issues with a newfound perspective. The Sukkah has us express thanks as well for the places in our lives where there is stability: friends, family, a home to call our own, a congregational community that embraces us for who we are. The Sukkah is also unique; like our kids, no two are exactly alike.

I will admit that I am thinking in new ways about Sukkot this year. Life does seem so precarious these days. Our world is so fraught. So much hangs in the balance. Wars play out, violence runs rampant, division is everywhere we look and there is no shortage of hate and vitriol. Do we spend our days bemoaning all of it? Do we live in a state of permanent dread? Sukkot says otherwise. Sukkot has us breathe deep and remember life’s beauty. The Sukkah itself has us see our lives not only as tenuous (which they are) but also as sacred and enduring. Sukkot has us recall not only the myriad trials and journeys of our ancestors, but our own too.

I have stood with hundreds of Bar and Bat Mitzvah students. Each one of those services was a gift: fun, memorable and highly meaningful. I am not sure exactly what I will feel when I stand on the bimah with my Sammy. There will likely be lots of nostalgia, mixed with pride and disbelief. I do know this: I am so glad that we will have the chance to celebrate him, his story, his life, reminding him yet again of his great sense of worth and how much we need his sense of compassion and kindness, especially now. Life is so short and so fragile, it becomes a mitzvah to pause and thank God for all that we have.