Kehillat Ma'arav - Santa Monica, CA | Conservative Synagogue

Parsha by Gura

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Hol Ha-Moed Sukkot

Relative to the other holidays, Sukkot is one of the more liturgically and ritually complicated. Pesach of course is full of demanding details, clean the house, invite the seder guests, negotiate the acceptable haggadah, but the underlying liturgy and ritual, especially in the synagogue, is not so divergent from our "regular" holiday observance.

Sukkot, on the other hand, places in front of us a different set of ritual objects and liturgical actions. We need to build, and decorate, a sukkah, which often times require us to secure fresh vegetative material for our roofs. We purchase an etrog and lulav for both home and synagogue use. We punctuate the Hallel service with lulav and etrog waving, we recite the Hoshannas, all in addition to our standard liturgy.

At home, we move our meals, at the least, into our sukkot, bundled up against the weather.

What a contrast with the preceding Yom Kippur: from one seemingly in "body-denial" to the other intensely focused on our physical being. The first encouraging to ascent to the heights of the angels, the other about as down-to-earth as one can get, dirtying our hands as we build, threatening us, even in the most temperate weather, with an evening's chill.

We are enjoined to beginning building our sukkah immediately after the end of Yom Kippur. Back down to earth, as it were. Transform the spiritual heights into the mundane tasks.

Coming off of Yom Kippur, one would expect some attempt to cultivate and sustain the sense of the transcendent, the Awesome. Find a quiet place, withdraw, be inside one's self, seek out some immediate experience of divinity. Instead, we are thrust into the world: build the sukkah, go into the market and buy an etrog and lulav. Wrap around yourselves the complications of human life.

There are those who have simple lives. They evade the enticements of consumerism, maintain their equanimity in the face of family conflicts, avoid the endless dissatisfaction that capitalism thrives on. Maybe we grasp a moment of that during Yom Kippur. But, it isn't the way most of us live. There's a raw logic in the tradition pushing us back into the marketplace, into our family's lives, into a hut, into a stunning awareness of physical life.

As Jews, we navigate between the world-the-way-it-is and the world-the-way-it-should-be. We navigate the paradox of a L-rd personal and immanent and a G-d radically other and transcendent. If Yom Kippur gives us a sense of the latter, Sukkot of the former, a G-d caring for us, L-rd in Whom we depend. The world-as-it-should-be should be fully of the joyful peace of Yom Kippur-the world-as-it-is means we have to care for our physical selves. What we hope we can do is care for our physical selves as we retain a sense of the transcendent. Sukkot is that model---the transcendent G-d cares for us, wraps us in His Glory as we sit in the Sukkah.

As we leave Yom Kippur, Avinu Malkeinu echoes in our hearts. Our rituals and liturgy make concrete the paradoxical lessons of our tradition, the transcendent G-d is our Father. At Sukkot, the immanent G-d has us shiver in our sukkot.

The Yom Kippur service is long, but conceptually it is quite straight-forward. The Sukkot services envelope us, if we follow the tradition, for nine days (eight in Israel). And it literally envelope us: in the sukkah, with our lulav and etrog, under the stars. We in turn envelope our ritual life as we march about the Bima, a symbolic substitute of the Temple altar, reciting the Hoshannas.

What is our task as religious Jews but to give voice and appearance to a transcendent G-d in an inevitably failed world? Our sukkot are always humble and broken, even if decorated and beautified, to remind us of the humility we need to carry in the world as we carry the joy of being G-d's people. G-d's glory, Sukkot comes to teach in part, demands our humility -- and we learn best that humility in concrete fashion. Inside our sukkah, eating with our friends and family. To do the tasks holiness requires, we have to get our hands dirty. That is a lesson of Sukkot.

Hag Sameach!

Dennis