SUKKOT: Marinating Takes Time

We've made it: the third event of the Fall 5772 Spiritual Triathlon.  

After spending the month of Elul in training for the Triathlon through self-reflection, self-assessment, and prayer, with Sephardim waking up early to say Slichot, and Ashkenazim daily trying to awaken their hearts with the sound of the Shofar...

...After the two days of Rosh Hashana, with double the normal Shabbat-hours in synagogue, digging deep to let the voice of the Teruah in, celebrating the year to come with multi-course meals...

...Finally, Yom Kippur -- one would think this would be the culmination, with its physical rigor of praying while standing for long periods of time in thin-soled shoes, sitting down, standing up, sitting down, standing up, and all the while fasting.  What could possibly top this steep 40-day climb to Yom Kippur?  Could there be anything higher than standing like angels before G!d, with no food, no drink, and praying for the majority of a 24-hour period?  What mitzvah could possibly mark the pinnacle of this process???

Sukkot. 

After all the early rising, the sitting, the standing, the praying, the fasting, the sitting, the standing...The mitzvah that crowns them all is literally just to be in the sukkah.  

"Dwell in it the same way you would in your own house."

-Sukka 26a

   

I don't know if you can spot a good deal when you see one, but this is a good deal!  Eating in the sukka is a mitzvah.  Drinking is a mitzvah.  Even sleeping is a mitzvah (we don't make a bracha on sleeping only because one cannot control precisely when he will fall asleep).  

Not that one should do this often, but looking at it from a business perspective: we can understand G!d "paying" us for educating our children, for overcoming our egos and giving charity, for controlling ourselves from gossiping -- all of these require effort, and one can begin to grasp why the Alm!ghty values them.  But what is the "value added" by us eating and sleeping -- doing what we would be doing anyway -- in a designated space?

If we keep our mental kettle on the fire a little longer, we will begin to reveal hidden depths of the Sukka experience...you see, there is a distinctive feature of the mitzvah of Sukka which allows for what we've described until now.  A Sukka is essentially a space.  It is one of two mitzvot we have today in which one is physically inside the object of the mitzvah.  A Talit is wrapped around the majority of one's body, so it doesn't quite cut it.  A mikva, on the other hand, requires one's full body to be immersed.  However, it is functionally slightly different from a sukka in that one immerses in the mikva in order to become pure, whereas, "immersion" in the sukka is a mitzvah and therefore an end onto itself -- making the mitzvah of sukka entirely unique.

Now that we've isolated this facet of the "soul" of Sukkot, let's replay the tapes:  

On Rosh Hashana, the primary mitzvah is to "remember the shofar," to go to a place before time and space -- to see the world and oneself a priori from Hashem's perspective -- to tap into the primordial cry of the shofar.  It is a "Rosh," a "head," the nascent beginnings of new thoughts for a different, better year.   

On Yom Kippur, one is in a space of time.  Yom Kippur is called the "Day of One" by the midrash, connoting a unity of the day unlike any other (Bereishit Rabba 3:8).  It is a sea of prayer and introspection from beginning to end.  It is the only day like it in the Jewish calendar.  With trepidation, we step in one side of the day hoping to come out on the other side changed by the encounter.  The day itself brings renewal for those who tap into it (Yoma 85b).

Finally, during Sukkot, what began 2 weeks prior as sublime, even non-verbal thoughts during the blowing of the shofar has evolved into the physical space of the Sukka in which we dwell for 7 days making it a space-time of a mitzvah.

Math-science jargon is nice, but what does it mean?


It means the following: the currents of time pull us inexorably towards the next minute, hour, day, month and year, as our professional, social, and personal calendars fill up with things to do.  When we finally arrive at the event or meeting that was planned for weeks or months in advance, we find ourselves texting or e-mailing about the next thing on the agenda.  Our successes can similarly not be savored while salivating for the next success. We're biting into lunch and thinking about what we're having for dinner.  Technology, which makes up such a large chunk of our lives is the same way -- the day we buy the iPhone 4 is the day rumors surface about the iPhone 5.  This is not just a critique of our times; the modern world simply brings into high-contrast this aspect of human nature to be swept out of the present into the future -- moment by moment.


In spirituality, this phenomenon may even be more pronounced.  Because spirituality, by definition, cannot be seen, heard, or touched, the tendency further diminished to "stop and smell the roses," but instead to run to the next conquest.  This is in turn even more of  a problem because spirituality and meaning, of all things, demand our contemplation and internalization the most...


Rosh Hashana teaches us that we need to be woken up from the outside.  On our own, we get stuck in old scripts and need to be startled into making a fresh start.  


From Yom Kippur we learn that our high-flying thoughts on Rosh Hashana need commitment -- time needs to be set aside for contemplation; a person needs to literally speak out mistakes he has made in order to leave them behind; one needs to resolve within himself to make changes.  All of this is just to achieve mental clarity.  But even mental clarity is not enough.


Finally, at Sukkot, at the summit of the mountain, one needs to stop.  Stay in that space!  Don't run off anywhere!  Sure, you see more mountains now that you're up there, but stay a while!  One needs bottle the clarity and inspiration he has and build it into a place in which he can live in it and absorb it.  This is what we say just before beginning the evening prayer:

ופרוס עלינו סוכת שלומך ותקננו מלכנו עצה טובה מלפניך

~

...Spread over us the Sukka of your Peace-Wholeness, 

and fortify, Our King, the good counsel [we've gleaned] from You...

An idea takes time to get into one's head, but it takes even longer -- marinating in it experientially, for it to filter into his heart.    


To do this we have enjoy the moment "ושמחת בחגך" "Rejoice in your holiday" (Dvarim 16:14).  This is another mitzvah of Sukkot.  Joy is the feeling of bringing thoughts into action (Gur Aryeh, Shemot 15:1), which hopefully, between Rosh Hashana and Sukkot is exactly what one has done.  And, of course, joy is not only the result of this process, but like a good opening joke to a speech, it serves to further open the pathways of our hearts for spirituality to enter.
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Based on Rav Dessler's Michtav MeEliyahu II p 106-7.

YOM KIPPUR: The Symphony of Return

"[Psychology] is vastly more than fixing what is wrong with [people].  It is about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can best live out these strengths."

-Martin Seligman, PhD, Leading Authority in Positive Psychology 

"Penitence" just doesn't have the same ring it used to in an era yearning for well-being, happiness, and self-confidence.  "Repentance" isn't much better, etymologically seeming to indicate that whatever penitence is, one should do it more than once.  If you go down the list of synonyms, "contriteness," "shame," "self-reproach," it just sound terrible.  

It's a good thing none of these have anything to do with Judaism.  The word the Torah uses is "תשובה" "Tshuva" and it means "Return."

Right now, we are in the home stretch of the "10 Days of Tshuva" that was introduced with a running start by the month of Elul, began with Rosh Hashana, and crescendos with Yom Kippur.  Aside from the Catholic terminology which messes up our grasp of concepts which are authentically rooted in the Torah, we generally-speaking don't intellectually understand why things like Yom Kippur work, and therefore deep-down, we maybe don't believe it does.  How can this process of tshuva erase mistakes I've made, terrible things I've thought, said and done?  A years worth of negativity, and "zap" it's gone? 

Most of us look inside ourselves and see some good, some bad, some neutral.  Good traits, bad traits, good things we did, bad things we did...On the Doppler radar we'll see some white, some black, some gray...overall, if you step way back to look at your own spiritual map, you will see a more-or-less gray satellite image.  

This is incorrect, inaccurate, and empirically and metaphysically false.

Every human being at his core pines "to be good."  

When we watch movies, we project ourselves into the role of the hero, wishing we had that opportunity to save those people in the burning building, or take a stand against the criminals, or not miss the chance to express our love before it's too late.

I challenge any person to say that he values an 18-year single-malt whiskey more than those couple of weeks that he stretched himself for that friend who was going through a hard time.  No one will say that he has more long-lasting fulfillment from the spring break in Cozumel, than even a single time he was able to stop himself from saying something hurtful to another person.  A lifetime of putting on tefillin, lighting Shabbat candles, running an honest business -- these are, by far, the most precious possessions we have. Undoubtedly.  

The problem is that we forget this...

And the point here is of course not to toss the Glenlivet or cancel the trip to the beach, rather that we don't distinguish clearly enough between the pleasures in our life.  "I like being honest and I like a good scotch."  Obviously, no one would ever utter such a stupid sentence, but because we do not take a stand for the great pleasures of life, we effectively identify equally with both.

We're not just gray blobs of good and bad stuff mixed together!  We are good people!  More than that, we are tsaddikim righteous, giving people -- at the very least, we want to be!  We all want loved ones to remember us when we're gone for our uprightness, honesty, kindness, empathy for others, and wisdom.

The institution of positive psychology has thankfully given us empirical data to prove that all of this is accurate.  But what is beyond the scope of academia is that the reason this is true is because, in reality, we are neshamot-souls that try throughout the year with trial and tribulation to shine through our bodies.  That soul is nothing less than a "chelek Eloki miMaal" unique rays of G!d's Light from above.  Our goodness is our essence -- not an accident.  (If you're wondering, "what happened to Original Sin?" you've got the wrong religion.)

Only the clarity from this awareness can pierce the gray inside of us, revealing our goodness as our essence, and consequently, making any "bad" within us a mistake, accidental and incidental.  By identifying with certainty with the good, we effectively say, "I could never do something like that, and would never do it again."  This is the return to our essence. 

Everything revolves around this principle on Yom Kippur.  Contrary to popular belief, fasting and not showering is not a punishment to rectify our sins, rather a method to re-identify with who we are.  The neshama-soul has five different aspects: the lifeforce, the oneness, the illumination, the spirit, and the pure identity.  Normally we live a double-life as souls and bodies, getting what we need from both, but on Yom Kippur, we go back to our source to remind ourselves of ourselves.  This is executed through the five things we abstain from on Yom Kippur:  

Instead of gleaning our life energy from food and drink, we turn to the lifeforce within us.   

Instead of the unity of intimacy of husband and wife, we turn inwards to our oneness with the Infinite.    

Instead of the clean, shining feeling of stepping freshly out of the shower, we look to the illumination of our soul. 

Instead of the feeling the uplift of comfortable shoes, we let our feet hit the ground in thin-soled shoes, so that our soul seeks the uplift within.

Instead of the purity of scent produced by perfume, we turn to our soul where our identity stands pristine.

The day is a day of communal prayer and introspection, of a community returning.  After finding ourselves again, we of course go back to eating, drinking, and everything else because we now have the clarity to make all of those actions holy and spiritually enriched.


Over the last decade or so, the idea of flashmobs has captured the imagination of many around the world.  Even when they do things as mundane as standing still in a train station; when so many people do one thing it in concert, it is stunningly powerful.  If we look at Yom Kippur as a day of self-flagellation, it is hardly a flashmob any of us would want to be a part of.  But if we see it for what it is, a community worldwide returning to their Divine roots, to the sublime values with which we define ourselves in our hearts but forget through the vicissitudes of time, habit, and error -- we will see the beautiful symphony of tshuva which we have the privilege to join in together -- a global symphony which could never be captured on youTube because it occurs in the hearts of a nation.  
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This piece is based on the end of the Maharal's Drush leShabbat Tshuva normally printed in the back of Be'er haGola.