Listen to the frog chorus – Sukkot Day 1 (Shabbat)

Written by Rabbi Eleanor Davis — 30 September 2023

There’s a popular poem of somewhat mysterious origins that you might remember from your schooldays: “What a wonderful bird, the frog are / When he sit he stand (almost) / When he walk he fly (almost) / When he talk he cry (almost).”  Perhaps surprisingly, this description is very close to a teaching of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, who followed a mystical tradition of seeing the frog as a kind of bird; because what is a bird, but a creature that can both fly through the air and sing?  Rabbi Nachman looks at the Hebrew word for frog, tz’farde-a, and sees it as a composite word: made up of the two words tzipor and de-a.  A frog is a tzipor, a bird, who is de-a, who knows.  We could call a frog a “knowledgeable bird”: a creature who knows how to leave the earth and fly up into the heavens.  Other rabbis (based on the Maharil) explain this knowing as having the wisdom that lets it sing all night but recognise when morning arrives and stop.

You might mistake the frog’s all-night croaking for mere noise, but midrash (Yalkut Shimoni Tehillim 889) warns against this, via a story about King David.  When he completed writing the Book of Psalms, that large collection of Biblical songs, David felt proud and self-satisfied.  So he said to God: “Sovereign of the Universe, surely there is nothing in the world that sings more songs and praises of you than I do!” At that moment, a frog came up to him and said: “David! Don’t become proud, for I sing far more songs and praises than you, each one containing three thousand parables! [ref to 1 Kings 5:12].”  This frog dares to remind the great King David, the original Biblical singer-poet, that it is not only humans who sing to God: other voices throughout creation sing too, and they even outdo humans.

While I hope you won’t find uninvited frogs in your sukkah, this does remind us that Sukkot encourages us to feel a little humility about our power in the world.  We have huge power to shape and influence our world, but there are forces of nature far beyond our control, which can destroy us sometimes in just a moment.  The time we spend out in a sukkah takes us physically closer to nature and reminds us of our vulnerability, which is harder to forget when we’re not protected by solid walls and roofs.  Sukkot literally takes us out of our comfort zones and asks us to view the world from a different perspective, which may especially mean listening to voices that differ from our own.

There’s a practical importance to seeing other perspectives.  Rarely a day seems to go by without discovering that what we thought was a virtuous eco-option turns out to be problematic:  how much of that could we avoid if we consulted beyond our own circles when assessing the available options?  What decisions would we make about our goals and strategies for net zero, for example,  if we looked at the impact of those plans on those in our own country on lower incomes, or on those living in the global south?  It’s too easy to think we are so advanced that we have all the answers – yet other groups’ experiences may add dimensions or considerations that benefit us all.

Sukkot is a particularly important time to think about these other voices, because we have the tradition of inviting Ushpizin into our sukkah: ushpizin is the Aramaic word for ‘guests,’ and this can be a lovely reminder that we should try to share the joy of this festival with others.  Sometimes that means inviting physical guests to share a meal in our sukkah, perhaps even in our “suk-corridor” here at Alyth but it comes from a mystical tradition of inviting Biblical characters as spiritual guests into our sukkot.  In the back of our machzor [from p.807], you’ll find a dedicated study section which both tells you who the traditional Biblical ushpizin are for each night of Sukkot and also gives readings from other cultures or traditions as a different kind of spiritual hosting.

As we think about Judaism, however, we might also consider how we listen to particular groups of Jews whom we sometimes treat as only guests, even though this is their tradition too.  Progressive Judaism has made good progress in the direction of gender equality, but there are other groups too often marginalised whose voices could enrich Judaism for all.  Jews from Sephardi backgrounds, Jews of colour, Jews in family configurations beyond the mum-dad-two-kids model: every bit of effort that we put into ensuring that their voices too are heard as part of our community, not just as guests we occasionally allow in, will help ensure that our Judaism continues to be alive and vibrant and a source of meaning.

We may need to be patient, because even when we try to listen to others, understanding may not come overnight.  A story is told that after the death of the Maggid of Mezrich, his disciples remained puzzled as to why the Maggid used to spend some time at the pond every day at dawn.  Rabbi Schneur Zalman explained: “He was learning the song with which the frogs praise God.  It takes a very long time to learn that song.”  It can take us a long time to learn to hear other perspectives as more than croaking; we may need to pay sustained attention to understand.

We may need to rethink some of our cherished beliefs or even our self-image, to grasp that even when we think we are like the great writer of Psalms, there may be a little frog with greater wisdom than us.  So I’ll leave us with a question: who or what are the frogs of our own time, to whose songs we should pay more attention if we too wish to become wiser?