Dear friends,
As Sukkot approaches, I’ve been thinking about something that struck me in the very first place where the Torah mentions a sukkah.
It is when Yaakov returns home. The Torah tells us that he builds a bayit for himself, but makes sukkot for his animals.
I find that distinction fascinating. Yaakov needs a house for himself – a place that is solid, stable and protective. But the animals get a sukkah.
Animals have an important place in Torah thought. We draw close to Hashem through the animal world; after all, animals are what we bring as korbanot. There is something very deep about taking the animal part of creation and directing it upward.
But there is another side to it. We also have to be careful that the “animal self” doesn’t end up directing us instead of the other way around. Perhaps this is part of what we are thinking about during Sukkot, when the seventy bulls decrease day by day until, at the end, there is only one. We move from the many nations toward the one nation that has its own particular relationship with Hashem.
So perhaps there are two things happening at once: the bayit that Yaakov builds for himself symbolizes strength and protection, while the sukkah reminds us that even the animal part of ourselves can be brought into the relationship with Hashem.
And that made me think about a different question: What actually protects a person?
I’ve been thinking about three foundations: metziut Hashem – Hashem’s presence and reality; Torah; and hashgachah pratis.
They are really three different dimensions of living with Hashem.
First: Metziut – Hashem is really there
The first thing we need is the most basic thing of all: the awareness that Hashem is not an idea. He is there.
That sounds obvious, but perhaps it is the hardest thing to live with consistently.
There are times when Hashem’s presence is easy to feel. There are moments of beauty, of unexpected kindness, of tefillah that suddenly feels real. And then there are other times when the world seems almost designed to make His presence difficult to see.
Water is a wonderful metaphor for this. It has no fixed form. It moves, changes shape and refuses to be held in place.
Sometimes life feels like that. We know what we thought Hashem was going to do, and then He does something completely different. We ask, “Where is He?” Not because we have stopped believing, but because the reality in front of us doesn’t look anything like the reality we expected.
Moshe asked questions. Rabbi Akiva had to confront a world that seemed impossible to understand. The fact that we have questions does not mean that Hashem has disappeared. Perhaps one of the deepest forms of emunah is learning that His presence does not depend on my ability to see what He is doing.
The sukkah itself is an interesting response to this. We leave the house – the place where we feel that we are protected by walls, locks, furniture and all the things we have arranged ourselves – and sit in a structure that is deliberately temporary.
And somehow, that is where we are supposed to feel safe.
Second: Torah – Hashem has something to say to us
But knowing that Hashem exists is not enough.
If Hashem is there, the next question is: What does He want from me?
That is where Torah comes in.
The midbar is almost the opposite of water. Water is everywhere but has no form. The midbar is a place where there seems to be nothing. No civilization, no obvious resources, no comfortable infrastructure.
And yet that is precisely where we received the Torah.
Perhaps one of the challenges of living in the modern world is the feeling that Torah is somehow impossible. We look around and see a society with completely different assumptions about what matters, what is desirable, what constitutes success, and even what it means to be a good person.
Sometimes the question isn’t, “Does Hashem exist?”
It is, “Can I actually live according to what He asks of me?”
The answer of the midbar is that Torah doesn’t depend on the environment being friendly to it.
The Torah was given in a desert.
And perhaps that is why the Torah is not merely a book of information. It is a way of turning the awareness of Hashem into a way of life. It tells us what to do with our hands, our money, our speech, our relationships, our appetites, our anger, our time and our homes.
It takes the belief that Hashem is there and turns it into something concrete.
Third: Hashgachah pratis – and Hashem is there in my particular life
But there is still one more step.
It is possible to believe that Hashem created the world, that He gave us the Torah, and still feel that somehow my little life is just one tiny piece of an enormous machine.
That is where hashgachah pratis comes in.
Yerushalayim and the Beit HaMikdash give us a beautiful picture of this.
Thousands of people could be standing in the same place, looking at the same Mikdash, participating in the same avodah – and yet each person stood there as an individual.
Hashem’s relationship with us is not only with “the Jewish people” in some abstract sense.
It is with me.
My particular life. My particular circumstances. The people I happen to meet. The opportunities that come my way. The disappointments I didn’t plan. The things that open unexpectedly. The things that don’t open no matter how hard I try.
Hashgachah pratis is the belief that my life is not just a collection of unrelated events.
That doesn’t mean that I understand the reason for everything that happens. Quite the opposite. Very often I have absolutely no idea why something happened.
But I don’t have to understand the whole picture in order to believe that there is a picture.
And perhaps this is where the three ideas come together.
Metziut tells me: Hashem is here.
Torah tells me: Hashem has something to say to me.
Hashgachah pratis tells me: What happens in my particular life is not outside the relationship.
Together they create a very different way of seeing the world.
And perhaps that is what bitachon really means. Not that I know that everything will turn out the way I want. Not that I can predict what Hashem is going to do. Rather, I can live with the conviction that I am not alone in the world.
Hashem has given us a world that can be used. Everything that comes toward us can somehow become part of our relationship with Him. We can take what happens to us and, instead of allowing it simply to happen to us, direct it toward Him.
And that may be one of the beautiful lessons of the sukkah.
We leave the solidity of our houses and sit under something temporary and vulnerable. We deliberately put ourselves into a place where we cannot pretend that we are completely in control.
And yet we are not abandoned.
We are sitting under the schach.
Under the clouds of glory.
Even the animal self has a place there.
Maybe that is why Sukkot feels so different from the other Yamim Tovim. There is something wonderfully physical about it. We don’t just think about bitachon. We sit in it. We eat in it. We talk in it. We invite people into it. We sleep in it.
For seven days, we make our temporary shelter into our home.
And perhaps Yaakov’s two structures capture something we all need.
We need a bayit – a place of strength, stability and protection.
But we also need a sukkah – a place that reminds us that ultimately our security does not come from the walls we have built.
Maybe real security is not knowing exactly what is going to happen.
Maybe it is knowing Who is with us while it happens.
Anyway, these are some of the thoughts that have been wandering around my head as Sukkot gets closer.
And now I’d love to hear from you.
What does your sukkah look like this year? Is it the same one you’ve had for years, or did something change? Is it beautifully decorated, completely simple, or somewhere in between? Is there one thing in it that somehow makes it unmistakably your sukkah?
And when you sit there – especially in those quieter moments when everyone has finally stopped talking – what do you find yourself thinking about?
Wishing all of you a beautiful, peaceful and very happy Sukkot.
May we all have the privilege of sitting in our sukkot with the people we love, enjoying the extraordinary mitzvah of simply being there – and feeling, at least for a little while, that we are sitting under Hashem’s protection.
Much love,
Tziporah
