I am embarrassed to admit that, three months after moving, I still have unopened boxes sitting on the floor of my new home. I suppose I have the excuse of my new job keeping me busy, but the reality is that I have not been eager to open those last few boxes. I am a little bit frightened of what I will find in them.

This week, I did bring myself to opening yet another box and found in it the contents of a bureau drawer that my wife and I call the "old tech" drawer. This is the place where, over the years, we have accumulated the bits of technology – cell phones, music players, their accessories and other gadgets – that we no longer use. I suppose I also have to admit that my wife and I are gadget lovers, so we do have a lot of "old tech."

This definitely was one of the boxes that I was fearful about finding. It was a rat's nest of power adapter cords, earphone cords, card reader cables and USB cables. The thing that really gave me pause, though, were the items that I had long since forgotten that I even owned: The portable keyboard for a Palm Pilot, the dashboard GPS unit, the bulky Bluetooth earpiece. 

Why should such items cause me embarrassment? It is not because they are old and have been replaced by slimmer, smaller and more capable devices. Rather, it is because I remember how, long ago, I was so much in love with these … things. 

I remember how each device seemed so helpful, important and cool when I bought it. Looking at them now, I realize that I had put far too much faith in the ways that I imagined that would change my life. And, now, looking at my current collection of devices, I realize that I am still engaged in this silly self-delusion. My smart phone, laptop and tablet are all just things, too, that will soon fade away into some drawer or another.

This is what the holiday of Sukkot is supposed to do to us. It is supposed to remind us that, not only is our stuff subject to obsolescence, but that many of the things we imagine give us status, power and comfort in life are really transitory. The cult of "newness" that our society worships is nothing new and nothing lasting. Truly, "there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Like the roof of the sukkah, it can all be blown away with a good gust of wind. How embarrassing.

As we say goodbye tonight to Sukkot for another year, I try to remember to put my faith in the things that really last – sacred relationships, sacred memories, sacred learning and sacred love – and not just in things.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Sukkot: Gathering in Ourselves
Sukkot: To Everything There is a Season

It is instructive that the primary mitzvah of Sukkot is not to build a sukkah, but, rather, to dwell in a sukkah. It goes without saying that the mitzvah cannot be accomplished unless somebody takes the time to put up the poles, attach the walls, and cover the roof with branches, leaves and timbers. However, the point of the sukkah is not the experience of making it. The point is being in it.

The history of this temporary hut is shrouded in some mystery. According to the Torah, it is a remembrance of the travels of the Israelites through the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt (Leviticus 23:42-43). According to historians and biblical scholars, its origins are probably as a shelter used during the harvest in ancient Israel. For us, though, the sukkah serves as a spiritual palace – a place to contemplate what is truly temporary and what is truly permanent in our lives. The sukkah is a haven from our obsession with making and getting stuff – our achievements, our reputation and our elaborate toys. Sitting inside a sukkah, one is aware that all of these things can get blown away with a good gust of wind.

What I love most about this holiday is just sitting in the sukkah. Its four walls define the perimeter of an alternate universe. Time does not exist inside the sukkah – there is only now. Sitting in the sukkah, the sound of the birds chirping is louder and the chill of the autumn breezes is more refreshing.

Inside the sukkah, all of our conceits about our prized possessions seem ridiculous. Perhaps this is why the rabbis said that we should bring our "beautiful vessels" and "beautiful couches" into the sukkah (B. Sukkot 28b). They wanted you to look at your antique chaise longue and your Chinese vase as they sit in your backyard under a roof of pine branches – moist from the rain and stained from the grass – and they wanted you to hear yourself say, "What, am I nuts?"

Yes, you are. Inside the sukkah you know that nothing is permanent. We are here now, and soon we will be gone. We are triumphant now, and soon we will be defeated. We are asleep now, and soon we will be awake. To everything there is a time, and a season for every experience under heaven. In the sukkah, all of those times and seasons run together into one undifferentiated moment. Sitting in sukkah is taking an adventure through space and time – or, perhaps, an adventure through the annulment of space and time. 

The week-long adventure is beginning in just a few hours. Bon voyage.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Sukkot: Intentional Disorientation
Building a Sukkah in Hurricane Territory

"All seven days we treat our sukkah as our regular dwelling and our house as our occasional dwelling."  –Mishnah Sukkah 2:9

This is an odd holiday. We build a small, flimsy structure and —  for one week — get comfy in it. We put up our feet, relax with a nice meal, and call it "home sweet home." 

If we should happen to notice that nice solid looking building next to the sukkah — the one where we keep our bed, furnishings and books — we think to ourselves, "Yes, that is my temporary shelter. It's sort of an out-building. A shed. I acquired it almost by accident. This lovely hut with the roof made of branches — this is my real house. This is where I live." 

Is this a holiday for us to lose touch with reality? In a way, yes.

Sukkot is about changing your perspective and looking at things in a completely different way from the usual. It is about intentional disorientation. For seven days, we convince ourselves that everything we thought we knew is wrong. Up is really down; right is left; in is out; and, most importantly, permanent is really temporary, and vice versa. 

We engage in this odd behavior because we need to. We need to remember that the things in our lives that we are most prone to regard as solidly, permanently real — our homes, our possessions, our identity, even our our physical existence — are really quite temporary. In truth, the things that are most real in life are the things that we usually think of as fleeting and ephemeral — convictions, ideals, values, faith, friendship and love. Sukkot invites us into a topsy-turvy world in which huts with loose branches for a roof are permanent, and steel-framed buildings with poured concrete are temporary. It does this so we can see what is really real.

In fact, almost every holiday and ritual has some aspect of intentional disorientation. On Shabbat we live in a time beyond time where work is unnecessary. On Passover we affirm that we personally were slaves who left Egypt. On Shavuot we hear and see the voice of God from Mount Sinai. On Yom Kippur we live as if food and drink were unnecessary for our existence. On Purim we enter a state in which there is no difference between "blessed is Mordechai" and "cursed is Haman." We choose to depart from our ordinary reality in order to glimpse the deeper truths that underly our world.

In my mind, the intentional disorientation of Sukkot stands above them all. There is something so very physically real about a sukkah. It is our most elaborate and massive ritual object. When you are sitting inside a sukkah, you truly can convince yourself, "Yes, this is the way things should be. I could sit in here forever and be happy." 

Why should it not be so? This week, may it be your reality.

Moadim l'simcha, chagim uzmanim lesason!
May these days bring you joy. May these festivals and seasons bring happiness to you!


Other Posts on This Topic:
Sukkot: Reconnecting to Our Food
Sukkot: Building Something from Nothing

The day also marks the end of the Days of Judgment. Yom Kippur was the day on which God's judgment was sealed, but Hoshanah Rabbah is said to be the day on which the judgment is delivered. In the book of Isaiah, God says that Israel "will seek Me day [after] day" (Isaiah 58:2). The repetition of the word, "yom" in this verse, meaning "day," is taken as a hint that Hoshanah Rabbah is a second Yom Kippur. It is another final opportunity to appeal to God and find redemption. 

It is clear, though, that Hoshanah Rabbah is a very different day of judgment. It could not be more different in tone and expression than Yom Kippur. Hoshanah Rabbah is not a day of somber self-probing. It is not a day of fasting and self-denial. It is, rather, a day of joy. Hoshanah Rabbah is the greatest day of celebration of zman simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing.

We have, it seems, two distinctly different routes toward redemption. First, we must pass through the day in which we seek forgiveness by confronting our wrongdoing and asking for forgiveness. It is only after that day that we can experience the redemption of joy. We acknowledge today that 
we complete our t'shuvah by giving ourselves over to joy.

Life is not just about acknowledging our faults and feeling remorse, and neither is our relationship with God. There is a second path toward atonement, a second day for discovering our scarlet sins turned to the whiteness of the Torah scroll mantles. Before the final judgment is delivered, we are given a chance to experience transformation, healing and wholeness through the path of joy. We march around the synagogue, waving our lulav and etrog, and affirm that deep and fulfilling happiness puts us on the path of return.

Pitka tava. May Hoshanah Rabbah conclude your season of judgment on a good note.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Weddings
Repairing Everything in an Instant

Sukkot is the  holiday that celebrates the culmination of the yearly cycle. For people who are more likely to get their meat and vegetables wrapped in plastic from the supermarket than straight from the farm, it is an occasion to reconnect to our relationship with the natural world. For people who have come to expect strawberries in winter and apples in the spring, Sukkot should remind us that we are part of a natural cycle that we can only bend so far before it breaks. We have become so removed from the way our food is produced that we sometimes fail to notice the connections that link our increasingly artificial diet  to disease, infertility and diminished health. I certainly count myself among the offenders.

My recommendation for a joyful Sukkot is simple. Don't just sit in your sukkah eating processed foods and diet soda. This Sukkot, make a point to eat real foods made from real ingredients. (Here's a hint: If you can't pronounce it, it's not real.) This is, after all, a harvest holiday. Make it an opportunity for you and your family to know where your food comes from. Go to a farmer's market, join a CSA, give up the packaged food aisle for a week and, instead, eat foods that you can actually trace back to the earth that we celebrate at this season.

Use this holiday as a time to remember that there really is nothing convenient about "convenience foods" once you take the consequences into account. Rampant obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancers, infertility and God-knows-what-else are too high a price to pay. To make matters worse, forgetting where real food comes from is just another way of forgetting where we come from and the source of our plenty. 

I wish you a chag sameach, a festival of joy that is also a festival of health, mindful eating, connection to what is real, and gratitude toward its source. 


Other Posts on This Topic:
Sh'mini: Eat. Pray. Kashrut.

* * * * *

Thank you, Scott. This is Chag Ha-Asif, the Festival of Ingathering. Sometimes, the thing we gather in is ourselves. We collect people together and harvest the joy of being a community.

Tomorrow morning, the Brotherhood will gather again to build Temple Beit HaYam's Sukkah. We're starting at 8:00 a.m. Come one, come all.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Sukkot: Gathering in Ourselves
Building a Sukkah in Hurricane Territory

Then there are the more subtle connections between the two. It is a connection based on a fundamental way of finding satisfaction and meaning in life.

Ecclesiastes begins in despair with the narrator telling us how all things end in emptiness and meaninglessness. Wisdom, he says, brings no lasting satisfaction because "increased wisdom leads only to increased sorrow" (ibid., 1:18) and because wisdom and the wise are soon forgotten. Pleasure, too, he teaches, is a path that leads only to emptiness. Those who give themselves over to their desires quickly find that it leads to foolishness that contains no lasting satisfaction. He also tests the value of ambition and achievement as a source of fulfillment, but he states that pursuing great achievements is also vain and meaningless in the end. "When I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve," he says, "everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind" (ibid., 2:11).

So, what does bring lasting satisfaction if not wisdom, pleasure and achievement? The narrator says that the only thing he has found to find meaning in life is to see everything as being "from the hand of God" (ibid., 2:24). It is only by recognizing that the world does not revolve around us, but that we are part of a plan much larger than ourselves, that we can know satisfaction. 

Paradoxically, it is only when you see yourself as part of the pattern that existed before you were born, and that will continue long after you die, that you can find ultimate meaning and satisfaction in life. You entered the world unwittingly and without your consent. You were given the world as a priceless gift that you did not ask for. Knowing this, and this alone, is what gives life meaning.

"God has made everything beautiful in its time. God also has set eternity in our hearts; yet we cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end" (ibid., 3:11). The world is made meaningful by patterns and cycles that are here for us to discover. God gave us the desire to seek them out, and we find meaning in fitting our lives into them, even though they ultimately are beyond our understanding. 

That also is the meaning of Sukkot. We spend these seven or eight days surrounding ourselves by the sukkah and we know that we are immersed in a world of nature that we did not create. The roof of the sukkah is made up of natural materials and of stars because creating a palm frond, a corn stalk, an evergreen branch, a red giant or a white dwarf is also beyond our ken. Yet, we sense the passage of the cycles of time around us. We know that we are in the right place under the sukkah's roof because God has given us the desire to know the patterns of being that surround us and to glimpse, as if through the branches, a bit of eternity.

To everything (Turn! Turn! Turn!) there is a season (Turn! Turn! Turn!), and a time to every purpose under heaven!

Yom Kippur is exhausting. By the end of the fast, I feel like I have probed and dissected every part of my being. I have tried to knock my closed hand to my chest for every flaw within me I can think of. It has taken me apart.

But then, just in time, comes Sukkot, the festival for restoring me back to wholeness. It is the holiday that, according to tradition, is made for reviving our spirit. It is a mitzvah to be joyful on Sukkot.

Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, known as the S'fat Emet, observed words of Isaiah that he applied to Yom Kippur  (S'fat Emet 5:236): "Your sins have been a barrier between you and your God" (Isaiah 59:2). There are sins, he said, that are a barrier that separate you from yourself and sins that separate you from God. Wherever we experience sin, we experience disunity. The purification of Yom Kippur is intended to repair our fractured selves, but the holiday leaves us feeling like a jigsaw puzzle with its intense focus on all that creates barriers and separation within us.

In contrast, he said, on Sukkot, everything is seen as unity from its beginning. The four species of the Lulav symbolize the unity of Sukkot—willow, myrtle, palm and etrog all come together to form a single entity. Under the sukkah, all our souls are united with God.  The S'fat Emet says that this is why the holiday is called the “Festival of Ingathering.” It is not just the harvest that we bring in on Sukkot. This is the festival in which we gather in ourselves as whole and complete beings after the fracturing of Yom Kippur.

Chag sameach!

The Temple Men's Club put up our sukkah this morning while I was teaching Confirmation class. I didn't hammer a single nail or put up a single palm frond on the roof. My job was just to admire the wonderful job they did. It looks great, and I told them so.

However, that didn't stop one of the men from reminding me: "Sure, if it doesn't get blown down before Sukkot!"  It has been very windy the past few days in Southern Florida and, in this territory at this time of year, you never know when a hurricane will come to visit.

That seems to me to be the main point of a sukkah. According to the Talmud (B. Sukkot 28b), we are supposed to consider the sukkah to be our home during the days of Sukkot. For the holiday, a flimsy shack that could be blown over by a stiff wind becomes our permanent home. That other house—the one built out of concrete, brick and steel—is a glorified outhouse. The sukkah becomes the home that reminds us of the true meaning of security and permanence.

What things give us true security in life? We live as if it were the trivial details of our lives—our jobs, the banks where we keep or money, an insurance policy, and our brick and mortar homes. The sukkah is there to remind us that none of those things provides any real security. The things in life that are lasting and real are the things that we usually think of as ephemeral—friendships, community, and love.

We build a sukkah half with sticks and half with hope. It is a testament to our belief that, even in a world filled with all sorts of hurricanes, we discover true security and permanence in the way we treat each other.