Sukkot 5762/2001: Strength Under a Frail Canopy

Abstract

Brettschneider uses the Jewish fall harvest festival of Sukkot as a frame to analyze how the U.S. response to 9/11 plays out historical cycles of governmental repression where national tragedies and foreign "threats" are used to undermine civil liberty protections and crack down on segments of the domestic population. Using the lessons learned from the frail booths, called sukkot, she assesses the ways that the U.S. administration's response to 9/11 was unfortunately all too predictable despite its claim to the "unprecedented nature of the circumstances." When the World Trade Towers crumbled as if they were made of more than one hundred floors of sukkot, the very vulnerability of the fragile structure of the sukkah points out the hubris of methods that seek to abolish vulnerability "by all means necessary." Moreover, the holiday asks us to think about how the devices and methods of power that we rely on to make us secure are intimately implicated in the conditions that endanger us.