Each year just before Sukkot, I am reminded of some of the first words of Torah I ever heard. I was 15 and was attending an educational seminar in Jerusalem. As we were about to eat, a girl named Daphna declared, “We can’t sit here and eat without a dvar Torah, even if it’s just something short.” I didn’t know what a “dvar Torah” was, but she explained: “There is a clear connection between Sukkot and Passover. Both of these festivals teach us to appreciate the most basic necessities of life. On Passover we learn to appreciate bread after a whole week without it, and on Sukkot we learn to appreciate our homes after a week of living in booths.”
This simple thought stayed with me for years. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, a recipient of the Israel Prize and one of the great scholars of our generations, adds depth to this idea. “In a life that is too settled and fixed, there is a danger of complacency, of an exaggerated sense of security. People and nations that feel too self-satisfied in their present situation can find themselves on the edge of an abyss. The sukkah jolts us out of our comfortable existence, takes us away from the stability of our homes and instills within us a feeling of transience. The sukkah liberates us from the feeling that “I deserve this” and that things are “mine,” feelings based on superficial perceptions. Instead, we live in the sukkah for an entire week with the sense that everything in life is, in fact, temporary.”
Happiness in Giving
Called “Zeman simchateinu— the time of our rejoicing,” Sukkot is supposed to be an especially happy festival. When we check to see where the word “simcha” appears in the Torah, we discover that it nearly always appears as a reminder to give to another, to share our personal joy with someone else.
Many are familiar with the song traditionally sung on Sukkot— “VeSamachta Bechagecha,” but someone has yet to compose music for the continuation of verse: “And you shall rejoice in your festival – you, and your son, and your daughter, and your manservant, and your maidservant, and the Levite, and the stranger, and the orphan, and the widow, who are within your cities” (Devarim 16:14).
True rejoicing occurs together with the family, the servant, the widow, the stranger, the orphan and the poor. Happiness takes us beyond our self-absorption and focuses on the collective, inherent in which is the inclination to give to others rather than to take for oneself.
Looking up to Heaven
It seems that the more the world becomes dependent on technology, the more revolutionary the idea of the sukkah becomes. The beauty of this holiday lies in being outside and connecting with nature; finding the wooden boards, fixing them together for the walls of a makeshift hut, laying leafy branches over the top and choosing the four species (lulav, etrog, myrtle and willow). For me personally, the sukkah is an annual encounter with the grass, the sun, the moon, the mosquitoes and the ants. There is no app that can do the job for us: We ourselves have to take the hammer and nails, grasp the etrog, shake the four species and, inside the sukkah, raise our heads to check that there is just the right amount of shade and light coming through the branches of the roof.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov passed away on the 18th of Tishrei, Chol HaMoed Sukkot 5571 (1810). He called upon us not only to connect with nature, but to what is above nature too. One of Rebbe Nachman’s famous questions to his students was, “Have you looked up at heaven today?” Two hundred years ago, he was already warning us not to run from the elevator to the office and from the parking lot to the mall, without lifting our heads for a moment to reflect on a reality that exists above the material world. The festival of Sukkot is one week in the year in which we have no choice: We stop looking down at a screen and look up instead — at the leafy green branches and the heavens above.
A Story of Three Mothers
Lotem, Inbal and Moriah were three roommates sharing a small apartment in Jerusalem. In their mid-thirties, the three single women had endured long, exhausting years searching for their intended, during which time despair would sometimes creep in.
“I wanted to share that within two months, all three of us got married, and about a year after our weddings, we all became mothers,” Lotem wrote. “It’s hard to put into words the completeness of our shared joy.”
The past year has been filled with challenges and sorrow for the Jewish people, and the three newly married women were no exception. They spent much of their pregnancies apart from their husbands, who were serving in the IDF.
“Several days ago, at the brit milah of the third baby, I looked back and felt compelled to write this message to say that anything is possible,” Lotem continued. “The Almighty doesn’t follow statistics. Nothing can hold Him back from bringing us salvation. May it be that just as in our small apartment, and in our personal story, all of Israel will experience unexpected blessings this year, beyond all dreams and expectations!”
Healing Our Broken Hearts
It will soon be Simchat Torah again, and recalling last year’s Oct. 7 massacre, our feelings are still so raw. It’s sometimes hard to grasp that this nightmare really occurred and we struggle to find the words to describe the enormity of the catastrophe that befell us. But how will we feel five years from now? And 50 years from now? Will we remember only the brutal attack, or will we recall how we were able to rise up from this trauma and how it became a catalyst for growth and healing?
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, zt”l expressed this idea most eloquently: “In the past Jews lived through catastrophes that would have spelled the end of most nations: the destruction of Solomon’s temple, the Babylonian exile, the Roman conquest, the Hadrianic persecutions, the massacres of the Crusades, the Spanish expulsion. They wrote elegies; they mourned; they prayed. But they did not give way to fear. They did not define themselves as victims. They did not see antisemitism written into the fabric of the universe. They knew they existed for a purpose, and it was not for themselves alone.
“Every tragedy in Jewish history was followed by a new wave of creativity. The destruction of the First Temple led to the renewal of the Torah in the life of the nation, exemplified by the work of Ezra and Nehemiah. The destruction of the Second Temple led to the great works of the oral tradition, Midrash, Mishnah and the two Talmuds. The massacres of Jewish communities in northern Europe during the First Crusade led to the emergence of Hassidei Ashkenaz, the German-Jewish pietists… The greatest catastrophe of all led to the greatest rebirth: a mere three years after standing eyeball to eyeball with the angel of death at Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen and Treblinka, the Jewish people responded by their greatest collective affirmation of life in two thousand years, with the proclamation of the state of Israel. … Jews [do not] give way to defeat or despair. They are the people of hope.
“The Hebrew word for crisis, mashber, also means a ‘childbirth chair.’ The Jewish reflex is to see difficult times as birth pangs. Something new is being born.
“We cannot change the past, but by remembering the past we can change the future. And though we cannot bring the dead back to life, we can help ensure that they did not die in vain.”
The above was excerpted from a booklet I was privileged to produce, “To Be a Jew: Faith and Hope in Challenging Times,” which contains selected passages from the writings of Rabbi Sacks on how to maintain hope and confront evil, interwoven with inspirational stories that I reported from Israel and the Jewish world.
You are invited to download the booklet free of charge. Read it and share its profound wisdom with others: https://www.sivanrahavmeir.com/to-be-a-jew/
* Translated by Yehoshua Siskin, Janine Muller Sherr
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Sivan Rahav Meir is a primetime news anchor with weekly broadcasts on television and radio. Her “Daily Thought” has a huge following on social media, with hundreds of thousands of followers, translated into 17 languages. She has a weekly podcast on Tablet, called “Sivan Says” and has published several books in English. Sivan was recognized by Globes newspaper as Israel’s most popular female media figure and by the Jerusalem Post as one of the 50 most influential Jews worldwide. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband Yedidya and their five children.
