This Is Real (7): Sukkot

The Particularity of Time (p.28-30)
Judaism believes in the particularity of time, that certain times have special properties: that Shabbat has an extra degree of holiness; that Passover is the time of our liberation; that Shavuot is a time unusually conducive to revelation. (p.28)
...What our tradition is affirming with these claims is the healing power of time. What our tradition is affirming is that when we reach the point of awareness, everything in time - everything in the year, everything in our life - conspires to help us. Everything becomes the instrument of our redemption. (p.29)
...The passage of time brings awareness, and the two together, time and consciousness, heal... This is precisely the journey we take every year during the High Holidays - a journey of transformation and healing, a time which together with consciousness heals and transforms us. And the urge to return, that primal impulse buried deep in our psyche, is the current that propels us down this river. It is the impulse that launches the healing process. (pp.29-30)

Tisha b'Av: Destruction Precedes Renewal (pp.53, 55)
Fullness and decline are intimately linked. The end of one is the beginning of the other. Conversely, decline and destruction necessarily precede renewal; tearing down is necessary before rebuilding is possible...
The walls come down and suddenly we can see, suddenly we recognize the nature of our estrangement from God, and this recognition is the beginning of our reconciliation...
Even while it stood, the Great Temple was a structure that was centered around emptiness. The Holy of Holies, the Sacred Center upon which all the elaborate structural elegance of the Temple served to focus, was primarily a vacated space. It was defined that way in the Torah. The Holy of Holies was the space no one could enter except the high priest, and even he could only enter for a few moments on Yom Kippur. If anyone else entered this place, or if the high priest entered on any other day, the charged emptiness at the Sacred Center, the powerful nothingness there, would break out on him and he would die.
So Yom Kippur is, among other things, the day we enter the vacated space, even if only by proxy, the day we experience the charged emptiness at the Sacred Center.
On Tisha b'Av it is as if this emptiness has broken loose from its bounds and swallowed everything up. The Temple burns. The emptiness once confined to the center of the Temple now characterizes it completely.

The Idea of a House (p.5; pp.265-6)
The gate clangs shut, the great horn sounds one last time. You feel curiously lighthearted and clean.
Some days later you find yourself building a house; a curious house, an incomplete house, a house that suggests the idea of a house without actually being one. This house has no roof. There are a few twigs and branches on top, but you can see the stars and feel the wind through them. And the walls of this house don't go all the way round either. Yet as you sit in this house eating the bounty of the earth, you feel a deep sense of security and joy. Here in this mere idea of a house, you finally feel as if you are home. The journey is over. (p.5)
So now 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 ideas of a house, a parody of a house. According to Jewish law, this booth we must dwell in for seven days need only have closed walls on two and a half sides, and we must be able to see the stars through the organic materials - the leaves and branches - that constitutes its roof. This is not a house, it is the bare outline of a house. It is like the architectural feature called the broken pediment, the notch in the roofline of the façade of a house which leaves the mind to complete the line, and thus implants the idea of a line in the mind even more forcefully than an unbroken line would. So it is that the sukkah, with its broken lines, its open roof, its walls that don't quite surround us, calls the idea of the house to mind more forcefully than a house itself might do.
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 offers 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 security from it. And we know this. (pp.255-6)

Full Body Joy (p.264; 267)
"You shall dwell in booths for seven days," the Torah enjoins us, "so that you will know with every fiber of your being that your ancestors dwelt in booths during their sojourn in the wilderness when they were leaving Egypt." This is a commandment we fulfill not with a gesture or a word, but with our entire body. We sit in the sukkah with our entire body. ...
Only the body can know what it felt like to be born. Only the body can know the fullness of joy, and this is a commandment that can only be fulfilled with joy. All the holidays and all their rituals are to be observed with joy, but there is a special joy, an extra measure of joy, connected to Sukkot.
...
And 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, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy.

Emptiness, Vulnerability and Joy (pp.270-1)
Once a year, after several months of reconnecting with the emptiness at the core of form, we leave the formal world behind.We sit in a house that is only the idea of a house, a house that calls attention to the illusory nature of all houses.
And there is a joy in this, a joy born of the realization that nothing can protect us. Nothing can save us from death, so it's no use defending ourselves. We may as well give up, and there is a wonderful release in this giving up.
...
Tomorrow morning I will walk around the synagogue celebrating both our power and our impotence, our miraculous capacity to bear and nurture life, and our utter dependence on God for it, and I will feel a deep sense of joy as I do, because this is the truth of my life. This is the cusp I actually stand on at every moment of my life. Every moment of my life, I am inescapably hammered into place by everything that has ever happened since the creation of the universe, and every moment I am free to act in a way that will alter the course of that great flow of being forever.
And here at the core of our life, here at its paradoxical center, there is a mysterious, inexplicable, senseless joy.

Closing Words (p.272)
This is the overwhelming, senseless gratitude we feel when we are finally fully awake. And it makes no difference what we awaken to, whether it is to pain or to pleasure, to life or to death; it is all of a piece, all the ground of a deep joy when fully inhabited, when wholly attended to.
Nor does it make any difference that we will inevitably sleep again, that we will drift back into our house or one remarkably like it without even realizing that we have. It makes no difference that there will once again be walls between us and the rest of the world.
In the fullness of time, these walls will also fall down, and a great horn will sound, calling us to wakefulness again.

Evaluating Life Before It's Too Late (pp.227-8; p.230)
We Jews aren't supposed to wait for the end before we ask ourselves those questions. We are supposed to ask them all the time, and especially on Yom Kippur. ... Turn one day before your death, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi tells us in the Talmud, and we never know when that day may be, so we have to turn every day... We are supposed to ask these questions all the time, and at least once a year, at least on this solemn day. What is my life really about? What is the truth of my life?
...
This is why ... we intone the funereal liturgy, "Who will live and who will die?" The rabbis wanted to bring us to the point of existential crisis. They wanted to bring us to the point of asking the crucial question, What is my life all about?

And they knew, as Rabbi Yehudah haNasi and Mayor Giuliani knew, that few of us ask this question until it's too late; few of us ask this question until the last moments of our life. So they have us stage a dramatic re-creation of our death on this day.
...
We shouldn't wait until the moment of our death to seek the answers. At the moment of death, there may be nothing we can do about it but feel regret. But if we seek the answers now, we can act in the coming year to bring ourselves closer to the our core.

Emptiness (p.222)
We need a taste of this emptiness, to give us a sense of what will go with us, what will endure as we make this great crossing. What's important? What is at the core of our life? What will live on after we are wind and space? What will be worthy if that endless, infinitely powerful silence? And what are we clinging on to that isn't important, won't endure, that isn't worthy?
...
We taste death on Yom Kippur to remind us of what we must hold on to, and what we must let go of, of who we are, and where we come from.

Denying the Denial of Death (pp.118-119)
Earlier I mentioned The Denial of Death, by the philosopher Ernest Becker, and Becker's observation that we human beings seem to be the only creatures afflicted with the mysterious capacity to understand that we are going to die, and that it is precisely this fact that seems to call us to the world, to our life's work, and to God.
We try to compensate for this dread intelligence by constructing what Becker calls affirmation systems.
We see the void and it terrifies us; it looks to us like utter negation. So we try to set up something in life that affirms our existence.
Against death, which we see as the ultimate failure, we offer up success.
Against death, which we see as the ultimate emptiness, we offer up the acquisition of objects.
Against death, which we see as the end of all feeling, we offer up the pursuit of pleasure.
Against death, which we see as the final stillness, we offer up a ceaseless rage of activity.
Against death, which we see as the ultimate impotence, we offer up the glorification of our own power.