Sukkot: My favorite Elvish holiday

[bnewman]

Peering between the sheltering branches, you can see the stars...

(Song alert — link to lyrics of new song after long, rambling meditation)

In the vague-but-deep way in which my brain finds analogies everywhere it can, the elves of Middle Earth are Jewish. I know, if there's a stereotypically Jewish race in Middle Earth, it's the dwarves, but that's not the kind of Jewish I mean. It should be understood that I understand most of the theology which follows in as metaphorical a way as possible (I am, philosophically speaking, a Reconstructionist Jew, that's the movement that removed the idea of "chosenness" from the siddur). That said, let's examine the evidence:

• The elves are the "firstborn" of the One God who created the universe.
• Their special relationship with the divine is realized in a holy land.
• But, they (specifically, the Noldor) are in exile from that land, and long to return.

This by itself would be sufficient basis for a classic Ben Newman Analogy Spaz, but that's not all. In J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century (my copy of which I won as a door prize at a talk co-sponsored by SWIL and the Swarthmore Christian Fellowship, somehow an appropriate provenance for the insights which follow), Tom Shippey points out a recurring theme in the poetry of the Noldor in exile: the opposition of stars and trees.

Na-chaered palan-díriel / O galadhremmin ennorath
To a distance having gazed afar / From tree-tangled Middle Earth

A thematic contrast between stars and trees occurs not only in the Sindarin "Hymn to Elbereth" (which it has been, and may be again, my practice to recite when three stars are in the sky — speaking of which, if elves are Jewish, who is Gandalf?), but in other Elvish poetry and in Hobbitish and Mannish poetry which is culturally rooted in that of the elves. But what does it mean?

The stars represent a transcendent beauty that never fades, from the immanent presence of which the Noldor are in exile. Trees are more ambiguous. They obscure our sight, getting in the way of seeing the stars. They mass in dark forests where we lose our way. Yet, they have a beauty all their own, a beauty that comes from the same source as that of the stars. In other words, they represent our life in the here-and-now — a life which can be hard, which can alienate us or make us forget what is eternal, and yet which has a meaning that eternal things, being eternal, can never have. This is what these symbols appear to mean in the poetry of the elves of Middle Earth...

...and it is what they mean to us Jews on Sukkot. A sukkah is a temporary booth-like shelter roofed with branches or other cut plant material laid so that there is more shade than not, but so that the stars can be seen through it, and the rabbis tell us that this signifies... well, what I just said.

Anyway, I thought this was so nifty that I wrote a song about it, which hopefully was performed by ladymondegreen and batyatoon in the sukkah at OVFF despite my absence — thanks, whether or not you pulled it off, and if you did, I look forward to your report! — anyway, here are lyrics and a temporary, low-quality MP3 (expect a better MP3 at this same URL eventually). Enjoy, chag sameach, and Namárië!

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Judith. And Deborah. But Judith, especially, is my favorite. But then, hers was not a very elf-like way of fighting.