Sukkot 2010

Hello my friends and Chag Sameach!

Yesterday I had a wisdom tooth pulled. 'Pulling' may be a bit too soft a description. Obviously I'm very appreciated of novocain, but the image of the dentist with his foot on my shoulder for leverage as he sweated and grunted trying to dislodge this bastard tooth might just send me to therapy. At the end of it all, he scolded me. "In the Dental world, you're a great disappointment. Only 2% of the country has their mother's teeth and father's jaw to allow perfect placement of wisdom teeth, and you blew it through sheer negligence." I admit, there was a candy a year ago on purim that dislodged my filling back there and I did nothing about it. And now here I am on vicodin and ibuprofen and loving it ;-). But that wisdom tooth is now relegated to the realm of 'missed opportunities'. I let it slide and have paid the price. In a world of consequence (Divinely orchestrated as such), we need to take advantage of what we have and the messages life sends us. We need to internalize the truths we capture with our brains, bring them into our hearts and take them out into action. That's what Sukkot is all about and it begins tonight.

So we've presented our plan for the coming year on Rosh Hashanah, we've spent ten days auditing our naughty and nice lists, and finally a Yom Kippur of heart-wrenching atonement and tears. Now what? Now we have to put our money where our mouth is, or rather put it all to the test. The head and heart are on board - now to the body. The Mitzvoh right after Yom Kippur is to build the Sukkah. Here comes a holiday where the whole experience is physical. The Mitzvoh is really just to live in the Sukkah - eat, sleep, drink, breathe - whatever one does, he does it in the Sukkah. Our home becomes a flimsy, temporary dwelling which cannot on its own stand strong without Divine support. And that's precisely where we put ourselves. If we believe in everything we've done until now, the only place we should want to live is with the Almighty. The schach (okay, there's really no way in English to make this Hebrew word happen - try both "ch"s as guttural as you can get them and you'll be halfway there), or the palm frond roof, is called in Kabbalistic writings the Tzaila D'hemnusa - the Shade of Faith. We leave the brilliance of Rosh Hashahah and Yom Kippur by leaving our homes which feign stability and human accomplishment and live as one with the real Master of Ceremony.

If there's one message we're getting clear these days - it's that nothing you thought was stable truly is, especially the value of your home (who knows, at the rate mortgages are crumbling and the markets nosedive we may all be living permanently in straw huts). Jews live in their Sukkah for an entire week, just long enough that when you return to your home, you're basically still living in the Sukkah. You've been acclimated to a Divine existence and try very hard not to lose sight of it until next year. This was basically one of the intentions of 40 years 'wandering' the desert - to turn the lessons learned on Mt. Sinai into internalized instinct. And if that analogy doesn't work, think of all the phantom blackberry vibrations you still feel in your hip well after you've put the blackberry away. The Sukkah is there to keep the 'holiday spirit' with us for another 11.5 months. My family used to play a game after Yom Kippur growing up (wasn't the most religious household then) - who will sin last. Since we were all brothers, it usually flipped itself around and became who can sin first. But that's because we didn't have a Sukkah to go to. Try to make your spiritual achievements of Yom Kippur really count. Live them. Infuse your very being with them. Eat, sleep and drink them if you can. If you need a Sukkah's help, and we all do, we'll be happy to help you find one (ours is always open)! Have a lovely Chag (another guttural "ch" please)

Chag Sameach,
Rabbi Lynn