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October 13, 2000/14 Tishri 5761, Vol. 53, No.3
Sukkah represents temple of God
Torah Study
RABBI SHLOMO RISKIN
First Day of Sukkot/Leviticus 23:33-44
Why doesn't the festival of Sukkot follow the festival of Passover? After all, as soon as the Israelites left Egypt they began wandering and erecting temporary dwellings in the desert.
We cannot overlook the fact that Sukkot follows Yom Kippur by only four days; certainly the proximity must reflect a deeper conceptual link between these two holidays.
In order to understand the connection, we must first take another look at Yom Kippur. One of its underlying motifs, both on a conscious and even more significantly on a sub-conscious level, is death - not death as a nightmare, but rather death as a pathway to a higher realm of God's reality, death as an extension of one's spiritual life in this world as it leads into the eternal world of the soul.
On this day, every Jew is commanded to enter into a special relationship with God, to stand before the divine reality and be purified. When the individual leaves the world of the living, he also stands in the presence of God.
Yom Kippur expresses a basic separation from the physical needs of our earthly existence in the sense that food, drink, bathing, sexual relations, and annointing oneself with oil are all forbidden. Neither are we permitted to wear leather shoes because we are standing in God's domain wherein leather shoes are superfluous. God tells Moses at the burning bush: "Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground." (Exodus 3:5)
Hence, Yom Kippur is a day when the dividing line between the living and the dead becomes blurred. By virtue of the spiritual intensity of the day devoted to prayer and study in the presence of the divine, we are privileged to sense a world beyond the physical.
If all year long death is seen as the enemy of life, on Yom Kippur we glimpse the possibility that this enemy is not only not all that dangerous, but may not be an enemy at all.
This idea is strikingly reinforced by Maimonides. For Maimonides, death is not the tragedy: everybody dies, some earlier, some later. What is really important is how the individual has lived, the state of spirituality he has achieved at the time of his death, the extent to which he has developed the spark of the divine within himself, the spark of eternity.
If Yom Kippur enables us to move from the physical world to the spiritual one, Sukkot completes the process. The individual leaves his secure and spacious home, and takes up residence in a fragile hut whose vulnerable roof can only be constructed from what grows in the ground but which enables the inhabitants to gaze up at the sky and stars.
The sukkah is the embodiment of our deepest prayer, recited twice daily from a month before Rosh Hashana until the conclusion of Sukkot: "One thing I ask of God, only that do I seek: to live in the house of God all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of God, to frequent God's Temple." (Psalms 27:4)
If I sense that I dwell in the house of God, I don't need the physical security of a fire-proofed mansion, the opulence of fancy chandeliers and lush gardens.
Experiencing the sweetness, love and eternity of God in a flimsy sukkah is experiencing the world-to-come in our present world; the ushpizin, sukkah guests, for the seven days of the Festival are none other than Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David - towering personalities who link us to 4,000 years of Jewish history and beyond.
On Yom Kippur we leave this world for the ethereal world-to-come; on Sukkot we bring the world to come into our world. On Yom Kippur we leave our homes to be with God and Jewish eternity; on Sukkot we bring God and eternity into our newly constructed homes. On Yom Kippur we find spirituality by separating ourselves from the physical; on Sukkot we sanctify the physical in our celebration of fruits, flowers and festivity.
Sukkot tells us how important it is to bring the world-to-come into our world.
Shlomo Riskin is the spiritual leader of Efrat, Israel.
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