(13) After the ingathering from your threshing floor and your vat, you shall hold the Feast of Booths for seven days. (14) You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter, your male and female servant, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your communities. (15) You shall hold a festival for Hashem your God seven days, in the place that Hashem will choose; for Hashem your God will bless all your crops and all your undertakings, and you shall have nothing but joy.
- When have you felt "complete joy"?
- What does complete joy mean to you?
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Rabbi Alan Lew, From This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared ...We sit flush with the world, in a ‘house’ that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no shelter. It is not really a house. It is the interrupted idea of a house, a parody of a house… And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it [...] In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need. The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another.. . . . . .when we speak of joy here, we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, and any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy. |
- What do you make of the relationship between vulnerability and joy?
Rabbi Micah Weiss, “The Pathway to joy Begins in Discomfort” at https://truah.org/resources/micah-geurin-weiss-sukkot-moraltorah/
The rabbis of the Talmud interpret the Torah’s commandment to dwell in sukkot for seven days (Leviticus 23:42) as meaning that we should relate to the sukkah as we do to our permanent dwelling (Sukkah 27a). All the normal things we do in our houses year-round, mainly eating and sleeping, we should do in the sukkah. For those of us lucky enough to have stable, warm, dry, secure permanent dwellings, the exposed, impermanent sukkah is going to be a lot less comfortable as a home. Those sources of discomfort are intentional, and we’re supposed to relate to them as if they are our home; exactly the right place we are supposed to be. . .
Some of the most common halakhic questions of dwelling in a sukkah relate to moderating discomfort: Should I eat in the sukkah if it’s raining? Do I have to sleep in the sukkah if it’s cold, or potentially dangerous? As with every good Jewish question, the answer is “it depends,” but the answer is never “you should be comfortable on Sukkot, no matter what,” and it’s also never “you have to stay in your sukkah, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes you.”
My experience with Sukkot is that I rarely make a solo choice of embracing discomfort. If I’m with friends, I’m more likely to stay in the sukkah when it starts to rain because we decide together to put on raincoats and enjoy getting a little wet. I rarely sleep in a sukkah alone, but I’m always down to sleep out when folks invite me to bring a sleeping bag and camp in the sukkah together. I’ve never slept in a sukkah in the snow, but on a chilly night in the sukkah, I’m inspired by tales of Eastern European Chassidim sleeping in the sukkah through a blizzard as the heat of their piety melted the snow around them. Our comfort zones and positionalities are calibrated differently. Each of our growth through discomfort will look different at different times, but there is much to be learned from one another’s examples.
- What do you make of the relationship between discomfort and joy?
- How does partnership change our capacity to embrace discomfort?