Today begins the festival of Sukkot, or the Feast of Tabernacles. It is a week-long festival, where Jewish people construct shelters (called sukkot, plural) and then eat and even sleep in them for the week. The festival reminds them of their time wandering in the desert when the Israelites lived in temporary dwellings, and how God himself tabernacled in the midst of them.

Also on this day, 1934 days after his capture, Gilad Shalit’s release has at last been secured by political negotiations. The young, Israeli soldier was kidnapped and held hostage over five years ago, and now finally he will be going home to his family. I imagine it might be the most joyous Sukkot that family has ever celebrated!

Only temporary...

Shalit’s parents erected a shelter on a prominant road in Jerusalem, keeping track of the number of days he had been gone in order to help keep their son in the front of everyone’s minds. By building a shelter and living in it, Shalit’s parents knew that it would be a constant reminder to the government and to the people of Gilad's plight.
Its temporal nature was a statement of their hope and expectation. They never gave up their intention to take down the shelter and welcome their son back to his permanent home with them.

God commands his people in Leviticus 23: “Live in temporary shelters for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in such shelters so your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in temporary shelters when I brought them out of Egypt. I am the LORD your God.”

In his creative genius, seen not only in the natural world around us but also in the law that God himself dictated, we can see that God also knew how effective building a shelter would be to provoke thought. He knew that this activity would help remind people of the journey that they had taken with him through the wilderness. That time of desert wandering was where the nation was forged once and for all as a community of faith, following the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Their tents were only temporary - they were traveling towards a more permanent home, where they could live with their God.

A sukka also speaks powerfully of temporal nature of our travels through life

Sukkot is a fun, family festival. Households up and down the land of Israel will be putting up their sukkot and decorating them, as Christian families might decorate a Christmas tree. Fruit and decorations are hung from the roof, which according to rabbinic instruction must be scant enough that you can see the night sky through it. This is deliberately to remind us of how fragile and temporal our lives here on earth are.
In the New Testament, Peter urges believers to see themselves and "foreigners and exiles" here on planet earth, and Paul also had a strong sense of the eternal as his permanent home.

I used to have a poster on my wall which read:

This world is not my home, although it seems to be
My home is with God, in the place he made for me
He's coming back real soon, the signs are very clear
So when the last trumpet sounds, I'll be outta here!