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September 24, 1999/14 Tishri 5760, Vol. 52, No.4
Sukkot teaches joy
Torah Study
RABBI SHLOMO RISKIN
Sukkot
Each Jewish festival has a distinct appellation. Passover is called the festival of our freedom, Shavuot the festival of the giving of the Torah, both apt descriptions. But how are we to understand Sukkot as the festival of our rejoicing? Does "joy" define Sukkot in the way that "freedom" defines Passover?
The major commandment of the festival - to live in a sukkah (temporary dwelling booth) for seven days - seems a far cry from rejoicing. How does leaving one's spacious home for a small hut express a specific time of joy?
One answer is suggested by Maimonides, who in the Laws of Repentance (Chapter 2), describes the stages of a person undertaking penitence. He explains that the process of repentance concludes with the need to be golah mimkomo (exiled from one's own home to a strange place). Since Sukkot falls only four days after Yom Kippur, the day of repentance and purity, our exile into a fragile, temporary dwelling may represent the final stage in our own penitential and redemptive process. And if penitence ultimately leads to a rejoicing of the soul, therein may lie the special joy of the sukkah hut.
Secondly, the sages may be teaching a lesson concerning the fundamental nature of joy. Many people define joy in terms of what they have, while in reality, joy can only be measured by who we are, what we have accomplished and the relationships we have developed. In effect, the sukkah teaches, joy has little to do with the size, spaciousness and decorations of our dwelling place. As the Talmud teaches: "When love between two individuals is strong, they can sleep on the edge of a plow; when their love is not strong, a bed of 60 cubits is not large enough" (B.T. Sanhedrin 7a).
A third explanation for the unique joy of Sukkot may become clear through recounting a story about Rav Aryeh Levin. One year, Rabbi Levin went out to buy an etrog (lemon-like fruit used in a Sukkot prayer ritual). Since the Torah identifies this fruit with the phrase pri etz hadar (fruit of a tree which is beautiful), we traditionally seek out the most nearly perfect etrog, thereby fulfilling the commandment of hidur (to beautify). Yet the venerated rabbi made his choice in less than two minutes.
An onlooker followed the rabbi to try to understand the reason for his haste. When the rabbi reached his destination, a nursing home, the man explained his dilemma. He could understand Rabbi Levin's acting in haste if he had an emergency call, but since the person in the nursing home "was not going anywhere," couldn't the visit have been put off for another 20 minutes to allow for a more effective choice of an etrog?
Rabbi Levin explained that the word hidur appears in the Torah in regard to only two commandments - the pri etz hadar of the etrog (Leviticus 23:40) and v'hadarta pnai zakain of paying honor to the elderly (Deuteronomy 19:32). Since joy is biblically defined as making other people, especially those who are less fortunate, happy, then honoring an old person takes precedence over choosing an etrog.
Throughout the Torah, the command to rejoice is accompanied by an injunction to display concern for those who are less likely to be happy: "You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your communities" (Deuteronomy 16:14).
Maimonides ruled that a person who makes a feast on the festival but invites only his family, disregarding the stranger, the poor, the widow and the orphan, is expressing the joy of the keres (belly) but not the divinely mandated joy of the festival. When a homeowner leaves his spacious house for the sukkah, a fragile hut exposed to the discomforts of wind, rain and sun, he can identify with those who lack protective surroundings, with the poor and the homeless. Such an experience should lead to heightened sensitivity for the have-less and have-nots, and to more invitations and sharing, especially with the less fortunate. The commitment to give from whatever we have to those who have less, this fundamental identification with the less fortunate, is the essence of Jewish joy.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is the spiritual leader of the Jewish community in Efrat, Israel.
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