Parashat Lekh Lekha: The Journey toward our own Vastness

Who are you?  How do you identify yourself to other people?  You might say something like -- I am a doctor and I grew up in Chicago; my parents were immigrants from Cuba and I now live in Atlanta with my husband and two children.  This is the kind of answer most people are looking for, and also the kind we are used to filling out on forms.    

But who are you really?  What is your essence, your true nature?  

Avram’s first command, lekh lekha, is famously interpreted by Hasidic commentaries as  “go to yourself” -- go on a journey toward your deepest self.   According to tradition, Avram had been engaged in a great search for the creator of the world; he had looked high and low and considered all external options, the sun, the moon, the idols around him.   Now God calls to him and says -- don’t look outside; look inside.   If you look deep enough inside, you’ll find your own Source, you’ll find the path to Me.  

But in order to find that truth, you are going to have to learn to let go of -- or at least to not hold on so tightly to -- certain aspects of “yourself,” all the outer trappings that you think define you, where you came from, who your parents were, how you were raised, the whole situatedness of your life, the stuff that makes you feel “grounded” -- artzhekha, moladetekha, bet avikha.  Your land, your birth place and your parent’s house.  All of those are true and helpful to some extent -- you can’t live in the world without them --  but now, in order to move forward, to really know your own truth, which is the truth of your connection to the Source --now, you need to loosen your grip on all this ground, all the stuff that makes you feel situated and know who and what you are in the world.   

Because all these trappings, they do ground you; they keep you firmly on the ground, static and moored and not free to move and fly and see the largeness of your self and the world around you.   All that ground is also baggage that weighs you down -- the legacy burdens we carry and the heaviness of our childhood wounds and all of the accumulated weight of our personal and communal history.  We are imprisoned by all of it, by the expectations of our parents and culture and by the habits we developed to protect us from our insecurities and vulnerabilities.  Strangely, one cannot journey lekha -- toward the true self -- while still holding on too tightly to our past, to artzekha, moladetekha and bet avikha.   

At the same time, we do not make the journey out of nowhere.  It is essential to begin here.  The Torah does not merely say lekh lekha and proceed.  It tells us where to start from; this ground, these trappings, these bags -- these are the starting point.     We begin here.   They are the gateway toward something larger.

If they are the starting point, what is the destination point in this journey toward the true self?  God tells Avram to go from these places, from this situatedness, el ha’aretz asher areka, to the land that I will show you.  The journey lekha, toward the self, does not have a clear destination point.   We are giving up a sense of groundedness for a journey toward the unknown, a place that God will -- continually -- show us, a place that is ever unfolding as we journey.   We can’t see this place to start with.   It requires great trust, a leap of faith, to move from the comfortable known environs of our external trappings toward a self that is as yet blurry and unstable, that will only reveal itself, slowly, in stages, like layers of an onion, as we make each step.  

This is an awesome, scary process.  We move from firm ground to something “we will be shown.”   But, God tells Avram and us, the rewards are enormous. This new land, this new capacity of ours to see -- to be shown (in Hebrew, the same root) -- will reveal to us unimaginable greatness and blessedness.   The words brachah, blessing, and gedulah, greatness, are repeated numerous times in the verses that follow, as if to create a sense of the incomprehensible vastness that we stand on the cusp of in taking such a journey.  

What we are being asked to do is to move from the starting place of our small, situated human selves toward a self that is a part of the vast groundless blessedness of the divine, to move from small self to large self.   

The large self is given privy to seeing and being shown vastness in all realms, to become a visionary of sorts.  This is Avram’s journey.  God asks him to look out on the land -- like Moshe, the ultimate visionary, who stands on a mountaintop at the end of his life and sees the entirety of Israel -- God asks Avram to look out east and west and north and south -- to take in the entirely of the land, the entirety of space, the sheer vastness of it.    

Space is but one aspect of this new vision.  In respect to time, too, God offers Avram the capacity to see beyond normal human boundaries, to see into the far future -- 400 years, the coming slavery and the redemption -- and even speaks to him of le’olam,  “eternity,”  And in respect to people, too, there is a vision of vastness, the vastness of the stars and the sand, and the vastness of God’s promise that Avram would become a blessing for “all the families of the earth.”  

Note that these three aspects, space, time and people, are considered by Hasidic thought to be the three categories that encompass everything, and the categories also correlate well with artzekhai, your land (space), moladetekha, your birth place (time) and  bet avikha, the house of your father (people).  God was showing Avram the vastness of everything that is, in all categories of existence.  He was taking him beyond the narrow confines of a situated human existence to the grandness of the divine plane.  

But do we even want such grandness?   When we begin to imagine such visions of eternity and endlessness, we feel the urge to step back; we are frightened and overwhelmed; we feel unmoored, like we have lost the ground under us; we have a sense of vertigo at the enormity of it all.  

There is something inside us, though, that is connected to all that vastness.   Haye olam nata betokheinu.  “God implanted in us eternal life”.   The journey is lekha, toward yourself, not the usual self that we normally inhabit -- the one that has ego needs and wounds, the one that bears the weight of all that baggage and carries an identity tied to a particular place and profession and role; that self is also precious and we don’t throw it away, but begin there -- that’s not the self we are journeying towards in lekh lekha, but another self, a self that is made of eternity, that is already a piece of the vastness, already and always tied to the Source of all.   

Taking the journey from the place of “your land” to the place of “the land that I will show you” does not mean giving up a sense of groundedness, but on the contrary, means replacing a false sense of groundedness -- tied to a particular place and situation, which we know to be ultimately transient and uncertain -- with a more secure feeling of eternal connection to all that exists.    We may come from a certain place, but we belong everywhere.  We may live for a certain time, but we are tied up in the bonds of eternal life.   We may feel like a particular person with a distinct identity, but we are linked to all of humanity.   We are a drop of water in an ocean.  We are already a part of the vastness.   Lekh lekha is the journey of remembering, being shown, again and again -- while at the very same moment living in and coming from this world of situatedness -- the truth of our self’s connection to all that vastness.  

A Meditation on Parashat Lekh Lekha

Click here to listen to an 8-minute meditation on Lekh Lekha.

A Song From My Father (on the occasion of his yahrtzeit)

 I want to tell you about a song I learned from my father.  (To hear me singing it, click here)

Koh Amar, Koh amar Hashem, Matza Hen Bamidbar . . .     

I learned this song from my father as a young child.   I didn’t understand the words at the time, but looking at them now, they seem to be speaking about my father and his life, and at the same time also about all of us and our lives.   

The words are from Jeremiah 31:1: 

כה אמר ה'

Thus said God:

מצא חן במדבר

They (the people) found favor in the desert

עם שרידי חרב

A people who had escaped the sword

הלוך להרגיעו ישראל

 I, God, am going to help them to rest, Israel

The literal sense of the pasuk is that the people of Israel, upon running away from Egypt with their lives in their hands -- escaping the sword -- go on to find favor in God’s eyes in the desert and eventually to be led to a place of peace and rest,  the land of Israel.

The pasuk describes a journey.  There is the backstory to the journey --  where the people came from -- and this backstory is one of trauma and suffering and persecution.  They -- we -- are a people defined by our constant surviving or escaping the sword.   Am seridi harev.  This phrase stands in the center of the pausk because it is the heart of the matter; these are survivors; they live with the sword running after them.  

With that suffering -- and survival -- as the backdrop to their story, the people’s journey forward is necessarily one of healing.  Their destination point, the last phrase of the verse -- halokh lehargi’o Yisrael --  is peace, and they are en route to this resting place.   In the meantime, they are in the desert, an in-between no man’s zone that is in some ways ideal for such a healing process, a barren place, yes, but also a place of quiet and contemplation and, for the Israelites, of divine protection and care, a spa-like existence away from the hassles of the world.

But how do they heal?  How do they get to that peace?   The pasuk, with the word halokh, meaning “walking” or “going,” makes it clear that it is a process, this getting to a place of peace.   And the key to this process, it seems, is the first phrase of this pasuk --- matza hen, “He found favor.”   The way you get from a place of being defined by the hanging sword to a place of peace -- the bridge between them -- is hen, “grace” or “divine favor.”   

There seems to be a link between hen and peace elsewhere in the Torah as well.  In the priestly blessing, the second phrase talks about hen --  veyekhunekha, “May God deal graciously (with hen) with you” -- and the third, final phrase talks about peace -- veyasem likha shalom, “He will grant you peace.”    We get to peace somehow through the means of hen.  

In Parshat Noah, too, there is this association between hen and peace.   The first time we hear of Noah we are told that “Noah found favor (matza hen) in the eyes of God.”   Noah, the first person to be described as having hen , has a name that means “rest.”  What is so beautiful here is that his name actually contains the same letters as the word hen.  Written forwards, his name means “rest,” but written backwards it means “grace” or “favor.”   

Hen and Noah, grace and peace, are interrelated, flip sides of the same coin.  They are both about relaxing into what is without too much effort, feeling the calm that comes our way when we accept the gift of divine grace, when we accept that we are loved without or beyond reason. To “find favor” in someone’s eyes is not a rational process, but an inexplicable gift.   When Moshe begs God to enter the land, the word used for his beseeching is related to the word hen, va’ethanan.  Rashi explains that, although Moshe had plenty of good deeds he could have relied upon, he understood that the best way to approach God was not to say that he deserved the favor, but to ask for it to be given freely, hinam, to ask God to show him grace.  

To live with a sense of this divine grace in one’s life is to be at peace.  Our restlessness stems from a sense that there is something we desperately need to do in order to earn this life, in order to keep the earth turning, in order to make sure everything is ok.   Peace comes when we can feel the hen, feel the inexplicable favor we are held in above, know that we need do nothing to deserve or earn it, but simply learn to allow it.    And in a self-perpetuating cycle, this relaxing into divine grace also opens and magnifies in us the natural gifts and charms we have each been given, turning us into creatures of hen, charm and charisma, appealing to those around us through no effort other than that of being at peace with ourselves.  

For an am seridei harev, a nation that lives with the sword at its back, feeling the hen is especially important and difficult, and probably the only way to ever achieve peace.   To live with a memory of the sword and a sense of impending doom is to be anxious and restless; there is a constant need to control, an urgency and a striving even about small things, as if life itself depended upon them.   There is also a gnawing guilt at having survived and thrived while others did not, a feeling of not deserving and therefore needing to perpetually earn the right to one’s good fortune.  Hen removes these burdens, answering restlessness with the peace that comes from unearned love, asking us to relinquish control, feel the embrace of inexplicable divine grace, and relax into being ourselves without effort.    

Through an experience of hen , then, perhaps we can begin some kind of healing with respect to our traumatic history and begin to approach a place of peace.   But it feels important that we not abandon the pain, which is, as this pasuk makes physically clear, the essence, the middle, the heart.   The healing that happens is not one of abandonment, but one of embrace.  We surround the raw wound of being an am seridei harev with the unearned love of hen and with a never ending peace that is beyond the world of swords.   We surround pain with love and peace and in this way move forward.  

My father lived a life that mirrors the journey described in this pasuk.  His prehistory -- before I knew him -- was an escape from the sword of Europe.    That sword sat in the background of his and our lives, casting a pall, giving some urgency to the life that came afterwards.   I wouldn’t say we lived in a desert, but America felt like a haven for healing in its own way, fresh and clean and empty of the weighty resonances of either Poland or Russia or Germany or Israel, a relative no-man’s zone in terms of difficult Jewish history, a place to remake oneself.   

And my father had so much hen!   Hen carries the sense of being specially chosen --  in Noah’s case as in my father’s, specially chosen to survive a disaster -- but also specially chosen to carry some extra spark, a kind of charisma, a twinkle in the eye that shows a spirit of humor and wisdom and life force that is from another world, the kind of spirit that lights up a room with presence.  This is hen, a mark of God’s favor.   God favored my father.

And yet he still suffered.  There was, just behind the twinkle, anger, sadness, hurt, depression, anxiety.  He had escaped the sword but it still hung there in the background.  The hen helped.  It was a sign of a spirit that would not be dominated, a light that would not go out, a sense of -- yes, but beyond the sword there is still joy somehow, lightness, even, a relaxing into the grace of having survived and thrived.  

Did my father make it to the calm described at the end of the Jeremiah verse?  It was a process and he was certainly on his way.   I imagine him now, completely at peace, knowing and basking in the full experience of having divine grace, feeling the freely given love and never doubting it, finally resting in it.   

For him the journey is surely complete now; he is at peace.  But for us down on earth, it feels like we are still on the journey, still restlessly living in the shadow of the sword.  We continue this work and this journey, slowly healing the suffering through grace and love, slowly developing a sense that beyond it all, there is no earning or striving, but only free flowing favor.  I can feel my father looking down on us now and smiling with that special twinkle in his eye, sending some of his own hen and love so that we, too, can feel the peace.

For Parashat Breishit: On Loneliness

Lo tov heyot HaAdam levado.   It is not good for a person to be alone.   These are God’s words, in the second creation story, upon seeing Adam alone in the garden He has created for him.  It is not good to be alone.  What is remarkable about this declaration is that it is not preceded by any announcement about how Adam himself actually felt.  The Torah doesn’t tell us Adam was feeling lonely, but only that God looked at Adam and thought -- ah, loneliness, not good.  

It is a little like when I look at my son wearing short sleeves in the winter and think -- he must be cold; let me get him a jacket.   Or like, when we see our children in situations that we have found distressing for ourselves and we take on their suffering, assuming they feel the same way.    

There is projection here, and the projection tells us more about the person doing the projecting than about the object of projection.   Yes, God was surely right that Adam was suffering or would eventually suffer from his aloneness, but the statement actually tells us more about God than it does about Adam.  The implication is that God looked at Adam and saw loneliness because God knew about loneliness, that in some way, He Himself had experienced its ache.  

God’s solution for Adam’s loneliness is also very telling.   He creates beings to keep Adam company -- all kinds of animals, and finally --  fashioned from Adam’s own self -- a woman.   This description helps us understand God’s process in creation, as well; He, too, is searching for a partner, and so, in the first version of creation, He creates all kinds of creatures, one after another, until He finally creates human beings, and here He stops --  He has finally found His partner.    Indeed, Adam’s words on recognizing woman are “this one at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” not unlike God’s words in the creation of people -- “in our image, after our likeness.”  In each case, there is a recognition of kinship, a possibility of partnership, the hope of an end to loneliness.  

And so the world is created in response to loneliness.  In place of the lo tov (not good) of being alone, God creates a world which He, over and over again, looks upon and calls tov (good); it is the antidote to loneliness, a world built on love, a world built for the sake of connection.  

The strangeness of the word Breishit also fits this sense of searching for a partner.   The word is actually in construct form, literally meaning something like “in the beginning of”  but without an object for the preposition “of.”    It is a dangling word, a word in search of a partner, much like God Himself.  

God’s desire for a partnership -- for someone to love and take care of -- begins with His building of a house in preparation for such an anticipated partner, making everything just right.  He puts up a roof -- the firmament -- and a floor -- dry land; he hangs some lights above,  provides food and playmates, and later, when needed, clothing.

The search for a partner, though, is not met with immediate success.   Human beings turn out to be hard to partner with.     He calls out to them:  Ayeka -- where are you?   I want to connect to you!  But they hide from Him in shame.  They don’t really know how to partner with this awesome force; they are both not afraid enough and too afraid for intimacy.  (Later, Avraham will know how to respond -- hineni,  here I am!).  

It is a heart-rending story for God, Parashat Breishit.    By the end He looks down on humanity with disgust and sadness and disappointment.     Vayitatzev el libo  --  the Torah says --  God is saddened in His heart.   These humans are not fit partners.    

These humans are not fit partners.   Yet.   The story, of course, will unfold through Noah and Avraham and the people of Israel, and the story still continues to unfold right now, this story of God’s search for partnership in humanity.  .  

Does creation actually solve God’s loneliness?   Does it solve our loneliness?   It feels like, at the core of all of creation, are both the profound ache and call of loneliness and the response to it, at the very same moment.    Each bird song and each flower opening and each lonely human cry -- each of these contains both the pain and the balm, the call and the response, the yearning and the fulfillment.   God is in both sides -- in the loneliness and in the parallel possibility of commensurate connection -- both implanted in all of creation and in each of us. 

As Mary Oliver writes in her poem, “Wild Geese”:  

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

God cries out to us for connection through each and every blade of grass; in each is sown the call -- ayeka?  Where are you?  Do you see Me?   Do you feel My presence here in this world of hiddenness?  Do you hear My call at every single moment to come close?   Tov, tov, the wind whistles through the trees.  Tov, tov.  Come close.  Come close.  You are not alone. Through these words God built this world; out of the ache of His own lonely heart He built a world that yearns for nothing more than to be connected.   Through creation, God turned the essential lo tov of being alone into the tov  of a created world.   We are the good that comes out of a broken yearning heart.    Our own loneliness --planted deep inside us, a piece of the divine -- is itself a call to bring forth that tov, to heed the call for connection in each of God’s precious creations, to hear God’s own heart calling to us and know that we are not alone in our loneliness.  

Talk for the Women's Simchat Torah Celebration at Ohr HaTorah: On Living in a Circle

Moshe dies without achieving his final goal -- bringing the people into the Promised Land.   From the start of the mission, God makes the land the destination point, telling Moshe that the goal is to take the people out of Egypt in order to bring them into the land of their ancestors.  Moshe never gets there.  The Torah ends and neither Moshe nor the people have gotten there.

This is important, this not getting there.   We live our lives in the shadow of a “there” that we reach for and plan for -- that we will arrive at tomorrow and tomorrow, when we finally get “there.”   But this “there” is something of a moving target; once we achieve one goal, another appears.   God says to Moshe about the land -- I have shown it to you with your eyes but shamah lo ta’avor, “there you will not cross” (Deut. 34:4).   You won’t get “there.”    “There” is a place that maybe we never do reach.  

But all is not lost.  Moshe doesn’t get “there” but we learn something else about him at his death.   We are told that he is an eved Hashem, “a servant of God” and that God communicated with him panim el panim, “face to face.”   Moshe was a person who lived in relationship with God, an intimate constant relationship of service.    In the end what matters is not whether he arrived at the destination point, but that he lived a life of daily divine service and connection.  

The difference between these two ways of being is like the difference between a line and a circle.   A line has a beginning and an end, a destination point.  A circle just keeps going round and round, no beginning, no end, no goal other than to be.    A circle is all about relationship; if we all stand in a circle, we are facing each other -- panim el panim -- and we can see everyone.  In a line, though, we have our backs towards each other, all lined up to march forward to achieve something.  Linear time moves forward; there is past. present and future, an endpoint.   But circular time stands still, living eternally in the present, in a present that -- precisely because of its presence -- taps into a time that is beyond this world.    Moshe didn’t reach the endpoint of a line; he spent his life in the circle of relationship to the One beyond time. 

This is a circle holiday, Simchat Torah.  We dance in circles around the Torah.  And when we read from the end of the Torah, we don’t stop there, but begin again from Breishit, as if erasing the destination point, and turning the whole Torah itself into a circle, end and beginning flowing naturally into each other in a continuous cycle.  

We need both circular and linear thinking, of course.  We have to be able to both move forward and stand still.  The ideal is probably some kind of spiral that includes both motions.   But for this holiday, it feels like the emphasis is the circle; it also feels like this emphasis is what most of us need hearing. 

Let us pause to feel the full strength of the circle -- its wholeness, its presence, its sense of nothing to do, nowhere to go, its inclusiveness, its clarity about the centrality of relationship over accomplishment.   The circle does not get anywhere, but it does serve one clear function; it puts people into relationship with each other.  

There is a famous rabbinic tradition about the purpose of Shmini Atzeret.   Really, what is this holiday?  We’ve been through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; and then seven days of Sukkot.   Seven days complete a holiday. What is this eighth day tacked on for?  According to tradition, what God is saying on this eighth day is:  kashah alay predatkhem.   Your leaving is hard for Me. This last holiday is here just because God wants some more time with us.  It serves no purpose other than the relationship itself, just to be together.   We have thrown away our lulavs and abandoned our sukkot and long since put away our shofars.   We have gotten rid of the props.  All that is left is us and God, sitting together in the quiet that follows big events, enjoying each other’s company.   We are not trying to get anywhere or accomplish anything; no special mitzvot; we are in the circle mentality; it is all about relationship and nothing else.   It is as if God, after all those special mitzvot, now turns to us and says -- you know what, it’s you that really matters to me and nothing else.  Just you.  You don’t have to do anything to earn that mattering.  Just stand still and be with me in my circle of connection.

As the “eighth” day, Shmini Atzeret participates in the circle way of being in another way as well.  Our calendar marks linear time from day 1 to day 7.  There is no eighth day.   It is as if we have taken ourselves out of normal linear time into some other form of time, this circle time -- a time of presence and eternity, outside of the concrete counting world.

It is easy to talk about this circle way of being, but it is very difficult to sustain it in our lives.  We are driven to do and achieve and set goals and these are all good and necessary activities.   The problem is that often getting “there” becomes an end in itself and we never do get there.  We get lost on our journey; instead of focusing on relationship -- with the people around us and with God -- we focus on accomplishment, as if what matters is the project we are involved in instead of the person right in front of us.  

And we are so busy preparing for tomorrow, it is often at the expense of tuning in to the now.  We give up a taste of eternity for a neverending run after a tomorrow that is always “there” and never here.  We miss out on the deepest moments of the present.  God’s last words to Moshe were shamah lo ta’avor.   There you will not cross.    On the surface God was telling Moshe that he would not be able to enter the land.    But maybe God was also saying something else -- the “there” that you humans all seek -- the one that is always just out of your grasp -- you don’t need to get there.  You can let it go now.  You can just stay right here with Me and that is enough.   You are enough just as you are.   No need to run around building sukkot and buying lulavim anymore; just sit still and be with me. 

So today is a holiday of circles.  This year, there are no physical dancing circles for us to be part of, and yet, in a way I think maybe we can feel the power of the circle even more.  We have been forced to varying degrees to stop our relentless forward drive and, even if we are back on track now, that stopping has made many of us pause and rethink what matters to us.    Like Moshe, we have been physically restricted in our movement, told at times not to go there.   But by not going there, there has also been an opening of a space that is beyond geography and beyond time, a kind of circle space of no boundaries and eternity.  In that circle we can be connected with anyone and everyone.   People from across the globe can suddenly participate in our smachot.  Families can reunite.  Our invitation to the ushpizin this year to join our sukkah -- in the absence of many other guests -- felt different; guests from another time made sense in this new circle we live in, less tied to the physical constraints of geography and time.  

Let us feel the power of that new kind of circle right now.  Now is always the only time you can feel it.   So at this moment I want you to imagine that you are in a circle with every other woman here, all linking arms and standing together around our precious beyond this world Torah.   

We are going to expand our circle now.  This circle is also one of great inclusiveness.  Circles generally are -- all facing each other; no person farther from the center than any other, no hierarchy, no one out of the loop.   The Torah ends with the words kol yisrael, all of Israel.  As we read the end of the Torah, we are building a circle that can hold us all.  

So feel the circle we have built with all the women right here.   And now feel it expand and grow..   Invite some others who are not here right now to join our circle, others in the community who normally come but could not make it this year, children and older adults who had to stay home, those in the community who have passed away recently or long ago, others in your own family from near and far, still alive or no longer with us, our people’s ancestors, Sarah and Rivka and Rachel and Leah, and their husbands, too, if you want, and any others who seem important to you from any other time and place.  The angels who are always around us, the malakhei hasharet -- invite them in, too.  They strengthen the circle with their sense of constant presence. Invite in anyone else you can think of that embodies this sense of presence, that can link arms with us and help us hold it together.  Invite in, too, anyone who really needs this circle right now, anyone who is struggling or suffering, anyone who needs the circle’s strength.  Let them in; we need them, too.  Invite in, too, all parts of yourself -- the parts of yourself that are strong and also the parts that are needy, so needy; invite them in to feel part of our circle of presence.   

So here we are, a big circle -- a kehillat Yaakov.    Feel the power of connectedness; the power of simply being together, not going anywhere or doing anything.  We are here with each other, and we are here with our Torah and with the God whose Presence is running through us all.    Kudsha brikh hu ve orayta veyisrael Had hu.  God and the Torah and the people of Israel are all one entity.   One Presence, one circle. Feel the power of simply being present right at this moment to this sense of eternal connection.   There is no to-do list for tomorrow’s event.   Just each other right here at this moment.    Present and connected.

This is the work of the heart.   When we join the last letter of the Torah, a lamed, and the first letter of Breishit, a bet -- when we turn the Torah into a circle -- what we get is the word lev, heart.   When we create circles -- places of relationship and timeless presence and wholeness -- we are doing the work of the heart, we are continuing Moshe’s divine service.  We may never get “there” but that’s ok; we are already there; we are right here together.  

For Sukkot: A Container that Can Hold it All

Both of the principle mitzvot of Sukkot involve creating a sacred space around yourself.   We shake the lulav and etrog in six directions around us -- to the four sides, and above and below -- as if designating a circle around us; this is where God is, we are saying, all around us.  And in the sukkah, we strangely fulfill a mitzvah by simply sitting in the center of a space -- walls all around and a roof above -- a space that represents our continual dwelling in God’s house.

What we seem to be doing here, in both mitzvot, is creating for ourselves a force-field of divine presence that we can carry with us through the year, that will serve as a kind of “cloud of glory” (the original sukkah, according to one opinion) that will continuously hover around us, making us feel connected and embraced by God.   

Take a minute to feel the full power of such a force-field.   Wherever you go, whatever happens to you on this desert-like journey of life, you are held inside this circle; you are bathed in its light and its love, calmed by its sense of security, and buoyed by its steadfast faith. 

Inside this circle you can bring anyone or anything.  Sukkot is a time of great openness and hospitality.  All are welcome -- all kinds of people and all kinds of emotions.  There is room here for anxiety, for loneliness, and even for despair.    Whatever comes into the circle is embraced in love and faith and strength.   

The sukkah can welcome all of these burdensome guests because the sukkah is incredibly strong, ironically so, since it is made of less sturdy materials than our houses, is built to be temporary and has a roof that is mandated to have holes.   But no.  Precisely here -- in its weakness -- we see the strength of the sukkah; the sukkah does not derive its strength from these concrete materials of the human world, but from a source beyond this world.  The sukkah, like a cloud of glory, is intentionally ephemeral, as if to represent for us both our very fleeting human existence on the one hand, and on the other, the unending strength and resilience of the non-human plane we are also always connected to.  

So yes, we bring to the sukkah all of our weaknesses and vulnerabilities and very human suffering; we bring them all into the sukkah, and the sukkah holds them.   For a long time I have been looking for something in this world that can hold intense emotional suffering; the sukkah represents just such a container; it is a container that will not break under the strain of stress, will not sag under the weight of depression, and will not run off in the face of loneliness.   Here is a space that can hold it all, a circle of love so strong and so everlasting that the pain, whatever it is, can finally relax inside it, neither denied nor fixed, but simply held in all its intensity with compassion.

We have been building this sukkah for the past two to six weeks (or maybe our whole lives), strengthening our faith and trust and sense of God’s presence, partnering with Him to create a structure that can withstand any weather.    For these past few weeks, we have been holed up with God, away from the world.   On Sukkot we go out of God’s sanctuary into the world, but instead of just leaving, we bring that sanctuary  -- in a mobile form, like the mishkan -- out with us into the world, to carry with us wherever we go.   

This is important, that we come back into the world.  We can’t just remain with God, spiritually bypassing all of the real-life suffering we see and feel.  We have to go back outside, armed with our mobile cloud of glory, and invite into the circle all that need its love and its strength; there are many.

But what do such guests of suffering have to do with Sukkot?  This is our holiday of joy!   Keep them out!  Ah, but there is no real joy when one is hiding from something, when one is fearfully pushing away intruders and keeping the doors locked.  True joy is inclusion, nothing held back, windows wide open to feel the fresh air.   True joy comes from the knowledge that we can indeed open the windows and the doors and allow in what we had feared because now we know that there is a place that can hold it all; now we know that there is a circle of light strong enough to shine through all the darkness.  “The Lord is my light and my help; whom should I fear (Ps 27:1)?”  Whom should I fear?   There is nothing to fear when I am encircled by light; the dawning revelation of the existence of this circle, of a container that can truly hold it all -- brings peace, brings freedom, and yes, brings great joy.    Chag Sameach!