Shelter for the ingathering

I owe all of my understanding about this cultural wellspring, to a review of websites e.g. Chabad.org, through watching the PBS series "Sacred Journeys", and from recalling conversations over the decades with Jewish friends and persons served. Any lapses in the quality of the interpretation of the doctrines, their practice, or their being a metaphor for what a speech-language pathologist does - the fault is mine alone. My spiritual walk continues daily, and I welcome everyone's comments on how communication can do the "pretty wonderful" things it does for our better understanding.

The upshot of this blog post for readers: James Thurber and E.B. White once wrote "a man needs a den". A speech-language pathologist needs a SUKKAH.

As I am writing this, we are at the midpoint of the Jewish festival of Sukkot (translated from Hebrew as "booths"or "tabernacles"), which celebrates the protection given the Jewish people by God during their forty years' journey through the Arabian desert. Sukkot also is known as a harvest festival marking the end of the agricultural year, and then is termed the "Festival of the Ingathering". One hallmark of the festival for observant Jewish is the construction of a person's own sukkah (singular of sukkot) adjoining one's permanent home. The sukkah builder is to live within the structure during Sukkot as much as possible, blessing the structure daily and having meals in the sukkah with family and friends.

A sukkah's place in the harvest? It comes from the farmer traditionally living in such a structure, during the intense work schedule of bringing in the crops. Sharing a meal  in your sukkah is thus a time for celebration, and for blessings of the season to be dispersed amongst your loved ones.

I do not see any salient theological alignment, between what my colleagues do each day in their clinical work and what observant Jewish do in their sukkah. I do like still, the imagery of the sukkah as a protective enclosure about the person served. It may be a room with a door, with utter quiet provided from the outside world - though one of the university faculty stands opposite the mirror glass. It may be one corner of an elementary school playground,with room for student and teacher to stand alone. It may be a dual-occupancy SNF bedroom, with daytime TV dramas playing as mood music in the background. It may even be the hospice bed of a person slipping away, but the work of the speech-language pathologist evokes the spirit of the sukkah as protection from the world -  protection to grow and develop. As the newest Nobel literature laureate said it: "shelter from the storm".

Likewise, bringing in the harvest via use of the sukkah makes me think of the days of hard-fought success in meeting a person's treatment goals. The person and the speech-language pathologist spontaneously shine with the joy of accomplishment. Those readers of this blog who know of my fondness for incorporating gardening work into therapy, may know the pleasure of picking the first ripe tomato. Some of my colleagues have even helped their persons served, in picking the first punctuation mark they might use.

My everyday existence as a speech-language pathologist gives me the chance to create safe and fertile environments, and then to help extract the fruits of labor by the persons served. Sukkot is one symbolic stream that conveys the aims of the SLP in beautiful terms.