A few years ago I went to a simchas beis hashoeiva at the shul of a very holy Yid, a Rav who’s a real mashpia. And I don’t know if it’s because I’m still (mostly) a kalta litvak, but all I could focus on the whole night was one thing.
Right next to a massive speaker, volume cranked up way too high, there was a five year old chassidishe boy. Fast asleep. I had earplugs in and my ears still hurt afterward. This kid was shluffing away like it was the quietest room in the world.
How do you explain that? The only conclusion I’ve been able to reach is that the more holy the Jew, or the community of Jews, the less they seem to actually live in this world. That kid had entered some other dimension where things were quiet, and he used the opportunity to catch up on some well-deserved rest.
Whether or not you agree with my theory about the chassidishe boy’s sleeping abilities (I’m not sure I fully agree with it either), I don’t think it would be heretical to say that the holiday of Sukkos demands something similar from the rest of us. We are somehow meant to make a truly drastic change in our lives.
We leave the large homes we’ll never pay off and spend a week in odd little structures that we also won’t pay off, fueled by some childhood dream of being a handyman we never got to live out. We buy strange looking plants for way too much money and shake them around, apparently to scare off bad rain for the coming winter. We eat (well) and sleep (not so well), and we invite in the greatest people of our history, who, for some reason, want to have a l’chaim with us.
You have to step outside reality to get into this world. For 347 days a year I’ve been enjoying my seichel, my mattress, my privacy, and my air conditioning. And then the Torah tells me to knock it off, watch out for that phantom bent wall over there, and make sure to be otherworldly happy the entire time. Why the total 180?
If we’re pushed to an extreme like this, it has to mean our regular life is putting us at some real risk. Something about the comfort, the walls, and the mattress, needs to step aside.
The Ramchal writes that the ananei hakavod, the clouds of glory, which the sukkah is meant to reflect, lifted the Jewish people off this world. In the literal sense, there was a cloud beneath them, so indeed, they were above the earth. But more than that, those clouds separated klal yisroel from all other nations and removed them from olam hazeh as much as a living human being can be removed from it. And that same heavenly hashpa’ah comes back around every year during Sukkos.
Indeed, it’s an extreme jump, but not a random one. It’s a change of pace with a destination, and the destination is where we really belong. The “regular” world, it turns out, is the one where we’re standing on the same ground as everyone else, no clouds underneath us, feet flat on the floor like the rest of creation, and that’s not where we’re meant to be. But for one week a year we get the clouds back, and we get hit over the head with the fact that this is actually where we belong.
The noise is only olam hazeh-dik, walls are what the Torah calls walls, shaking plants can indeed prevent bad weather if Hashem says so, the big fancy house we “need” isn’t what we need at all, and yes, this is the happiest way a Yid can live. We’re meant to be a nation that doesn’t touch the floor. It takes something drastic, some real distance from olam hazeh, to remember our actual position in the briah.
The sukkah is our real world. It just doesn’t feel that way, because we’ve spent 347 days convincing ourselves otherwise. Let’s remember our real place in this world, and try to keep the clouds with us well into the rest of the year.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Issue 100 – Sukkos.
