As I sit here writing this article it is almost Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement for the Jewish people, and so much is stuck in my mind. During these past 10 days we Jews prepare our souls for the act of forgiveness in which we ask others to forgive us for wrongs we have committed and hope God will then give us forgiveness for not living up to full potential. This is a hard order to partake and as I write this I think about my own Day of Atonement that has past by the time of this article is published and focus on the forgiveness of others I hope I can achieve during this holiday season as we prepare for Sukkot.
We will soon be celebrating the third of the four festivals of our harvest season called Sukkot. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur having been the first two, during which we gleaned from our fields and from our insides what is good, and dispatched what is not so good to the compost pile of our lives for the hoped-for process of transformation in the struggle to be a better person and better connect with God. Sukkot is the climactic drama that encapsulates the deepest meanings and intentions of both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and everything in between. Literally, the festival of Sukkot is referred to in the Torah as “Cycle of the Ingathering in the Turning of the Year” (Exodus 23:16 and 34:22). It is the actual harvest gathering time, when we harvest our past deeds and choices, gleaning the good from the not-so-good, taking stock of our inner selves and struggles in life, whether in our fields or in our hearts, and in regards to our relationship with God. And if we have fields and orchards, it is the season during which we have in our homes more bounty from the harvesting than we had all year round. As such, it is a gluttonous time, as our tables are then filled with wide varieties of the produce we have gathered from the gifting of the earth.
Yom Kippur is very much a preparation of the joy of Sukkot because to truly repent on Yom Kippur one must make peace with the world and on Sukkot we find that peace under the Sukkah because we believe God has given us protection because he has given us forgiveness. To live in this world you must be able to do one important thing and that is to love what is mortal to hold it against your bones, squeezing it as hard as you can knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. We let our love go because that is the cycle of life, we must adhere to it however we recognize one aspect of this world will never leave us and that is God’s love. The great rabbis tell that us that God’s love will forever abide in the dwellings of the Sukkah.
Sukkot is that moment we recognize God’s true enduring love of us and we must find it in our soul to offer that love to others and give them a chance to embrace us in their lives and in return embrace them for wrongs they have committed. Rabbi Levi said, “God appeared to them like a mirror in which many faces can be reflected. A thousand may look at it and it reflects each of them. “God speaks to each person according to each person’s power to hear.” God can hear us best when we allow our souls to be vulnerable.
The vulnerability of the sukkah is what allows us to communicate with the divine and it’s that divine compassion overriding divine judgment we pray for on Yom Kippur, but we receive on Sukkot. Just as Jacob built Sukkot to shelter his animals, we too do so to embrace our negative animal qualities with compassion and remove our judgment of those qualities within ourselves, even though we can easily attribute to them most of our past wrong doings. This Yom Kippur is one in which much is on my mind, my love for my community and hope for its flourishing. I came to Wildwood almost 5 and a half years ago and that embrace has been special and unique in my life. As I pray this Yom Kippur my prayer is for my community at Beth Judah Temple that it can find strength and love of God through the power of forgiveness under the protection of the Sukkah.
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz is the spiritual leader Beth Judah Temple in Wildwood NJ. He welcomes your comments at dvjewish@rof.net
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