Sukkot: The Festival of Joy

Thank you, everyone. We have all had, I suppose, a good Yom Kippur, and we are now preparing for the festival of joy. The festival of joy, because, as I told you, the whole point is not simply to practice the mitzvot. One can practice the mitzvot without being permeated by them, and in the end that is a religious ritual no different, let us say, from those of other religions. The point is to arrive at settling oneself within an authentic, true spirituality, and to see in the mitzvot simply the instruments, or the landmarks, of the path I am walking, so as to live in intimacy with the divine. That is wonderful, because what matters in a loving relationship is not the gifts the two give one another, or the pleasures they treat themselves to here and there, but the intimacy they share, the complementarity that makes their joy. For joy lies precisely in a whole made of contradictions that complete one another harmoniously and give that fullness of being. That is Sukkot. On Sukkot I reach a level where I sense this nearness of G-d, let us put it that way, and let us simply give the word a capital letter, because, as I told you, each person realizes his G-d at his own level. Yet Sukkot gives unity to these different conceptions, which meet at their root and form an ideal geometric figure, the circle. For what will characterize Sukkot are the hakafot, the circuits we make around the Torah.

We make these circuits around the Torah because we no longer have a Sanctuary. In the past, they were made around the mizbeach (the altar). And what mattered in the ritual of the altar was that it brought together the mineral (water, ash, stone), the vegetable (flour, oil), the animal, and finally man, endowed with speech, who gives meaning to all of it and draws nourishment from it in order to serve an ideal of life. An ideal of life: you know, to bring children into life in times like these is a wager, isn’t it? It is not easy, it is not easy. What guarantees do we have? We already struggle very hard to take on the responsibility of prolonging this life through our children. When the times are uncertain, one needs a great deal of faith, and each person has faith at his own level.

Without this basic faith, which sometimes, quite often in fact, rests on the absurd… As for me, I prefer to ground it otherwise. For me there is one certainty, and the certainty is that this world has meaning. It is not possible that this world is truly the fruit of chance, and that I am here playing the lottery every day, not to win money but to lose it. Would it really be worth it? But if I tell myself that this world obeys a higher will, and that I am the partner of the Creator in the purpose of this world, then everything is justified. At that point the mineral, the vegetable and the animal are also there to answer a will to be, to serve a cause.

But a cause that is not limited, as I told you, to my little self, my little family, my nation: it is universal. This is the festival of the universal, the festival on which the Jewish people brings seventy offerings in the name of the seventy nations that make up humanity. You will ask me why seventy, and I will answer that man, the microcosm, is structured according to this attribute, this model of existence, and these models of existence are set within a structure of ten rungs, so that when seven is set within ten, we arrive at these seventy specimens of humanity, which are there to judge, to judge our development. For the court itself, the Great Sanhedrin, must have seventy members, representing the sensibilities that exist among the nations and that are contained within the cell of the Jewish people.

So the character of Sukkot is called Zeman Simchatenu, the time of our joy, because by this stage we have passed through the liberation from conditioning, which was Pesach, and the birth of moral conscience at Shavuot, and I finally come to build my house. My house is not the one I live in as a permanent dwelling, the one I aspire to and go into debt for all my life in order to give myself the best possible comfort. No: my true home is my sukkah, the one at the threshold of my house, on its roof, on its balcony, a pergola. It adjoins my house. It is vulnerable, it is fragile, fragile on the outside, but how solid on the inside.

It surrounds me, it clothes me, it clothes me as a wife clothes her husband. Do you remember the circles you made around your husband at the chuppah? You made circuits. Did you count those circuits? Why? Because the feminine is the wall of man. And the sukkah, just as the feminine dwells within man, surrounds him on every side and forms his wall, the sukkah is of the same nature. Whereas Pesach evokes freedom, and Shavuot the level of morality to which I commit, Sukkot is the dimension of responsibility: in total gratuitousness, expecting nothing, only the joy of being able to complete, even a little, what someone else lacks. It is in this spirit of openness and complementarity that I savor this joy. Our Sages said that there are two mitzvot in which a person immerses himself completely: the ritual bath (mikveh), which belongs to the feminine more than to the masculine, and the mitzvah of the sukkah, which belongs to the masculine more than to the feminine. In short, the inwardness of the sukkah is the feminine, and that is why women are exempt from it. Let us respect this; it is not an exclusion. And this feminine emerges from the water. Now you know that there is a mitzvah on Sukkot, among other mitzvot, for the sukkah is truly a source of many mitzvot: the four species, the lulav, the etrog, the hadas, the sukkah itself, the joy of the sukkah, the hakafot, the hoshanot; and added to all this, nisuch hamayim, the pouring of water on the altar. This ritual of pouring water on the altar on Sukkot was the summit of the joy of Sukkot, and it was called Simchat Beit HaShoevah. This joy is the joy of drawing water.

One draws the water, one draws it from the very depths, from the lower waters, which were in a sense unjustly left behind for the needs of man here below, when the lower waters were separated from the upper waters, which are called shamayim, the heavens: sham mayim, “there is water there.” Now you know that water is an element that does not appear in the inventory of creation. We do not know when water was created. From the very outset, it seems, we are already in a world where water exists, since the spirit of G-d hovers over the waters. Where does the water come from? These are the waters essential to all life, and their existence is concurrent, simultaneous, with the appearance, the manifestation, of the divine spirit.

What was drawn? It was not the water that was drawn. It was the divine spirit that was drawn through this water, and it was poured on the altar as if to consecrate the altar. Ordinarily, what was poured on the altar with the daily offering was wine, not water. But this time it was a return to the water that engendered all of creation, because it purifies, it makes things sprout, and at the same time it nourishes. Nothing can be done without it. So the mitzvah of the water libation was performed with an extraordinary ceremony. They went down, went down the steps of the altar, and went to the waters of the Shiloach, and drew the water, singing and sounding the horn, with the Songs of Ascents, the fifteen Songs of Ascents corresponding to the fifteen steps.

And what characterizes this joy, which today we try, so to speak, to reproduce throughout the intermediate days of the festival with dancing in the synagogues and in the banquet halls […]? Circle dances, always forming this ideal geometric figure in which the entire Jewish people is inscribed, and not only the Jewish people but all of humanity, since we are the representatives of that humanity. And we join hands for this: to dance, to lift the foot. Let us say it: to dance is to lift the foot. Enough scratching at the ground with the foot, staying confined in one’s matter, in one’s shoes. The dance is an effort at levitation. That, in sum, is the joy of the festival of Sukkot, and it is our dearest wish when we say: HaRachaman hu yakim lanu et sukkat David hanofelet, “May the Merciful One raise up for us the fallen sukkah of David.”

We do not speak of an empire of David, we do not speak of a vast country. We call it Sukkat David, the hut of David. What David achieved in his life is a spirit: a house that is precisely not a prison-like shelter for man, but open, open to nature, open to people, open to every tendency, with the possibility of joining all the ingredients into one element in the service of G-d. That is what we do with the lulav and the etrog. The etrog is symbolic of the perfect man, the perfect being; the lulav, of the man who asserts himself through his uprightness; the hadas, of course, through its fragrance. And the aravah (willow) has, at base, neither fragrance nor taste, and yet it is there.

It has its word to say. Indeed, on the last day, Hoshana Rabbah, we use nothing but the aravah, to say that we are a little like the one who does not know how to ask: we do not know how to ask questions. But what unites us is first and foremost this will to merge into a community, to form a people, to form a humanity. That is Sukkot. It is a vision, because, as you know, the word sukkot comes from the verb meaning to cover, schach, covering. We want this covering, and we want to share this covering with everyone. I spoke earlier of responsibility: yes, we are responsible, we form a covering for one another. And when we are permeated by this duty to cover one another, then we have a vision, we attain a prophetic vision. For “she saw by the holy spirit”: Sarah bore the name Yiskah because she could indeed see beyond things, the other side, the sacred in every approach, in every movement of life. And that is why the emphasis is placed particularly on joy. By dint of sinking into daily worries and problems, and chewing them over every day with their share of disappointment and unpleasantness, we lose sight of the ideal in all things. Our vision becomes very narrow. We have given in to defeat, to despair. But holding the lulav on the day of Sukkot means saying: we have won, we have won. Certainly, we do not have an ideal life without fault; that is not possible.

But do not forget that we were given the second Tablets of the Law. We were the ones who broke the first Tablets, and it was a scandal, and G-d said: that is it, I will change this people, I will make a new people out of Moshe. Come now, Moshe said to Him, You are taking a risk: if this people, a table with three legs, did not hold up, how do You expect a table with a single leg to stand afterward? No, we will change direction, we will adopt another pedagogy, we will uphold our philosophy of life, and we will win. And that is what happened: on Yom Kippur we were given the second Tablets of the Law. And with these second Tablets of the Law we did indeed brave the threat of annihilation, of disappearance, of dissolution, from G-d Himself. And we won. We are glad, we are glad because we have overcome the obstacles, and we can say… you know what the chassidim (the pious) used to say in those days.

The chassidim of that time said: happy is our youth, which did not shame our old age. Those are the people who had a quiet life, a gentle life. But those who made mistakes and then pulled themselves together, they too had a happy life, and they said: happy is our old age, which covers all the straying of our youth. That is wonderful. […]

[…] Happy is the one who makes no mistakes, but happy the one who has managed to be forgiven for his straying. So you see why the festival of Sukkot is truly one of fullness of being, in joy. Nowhere has the Torah placed the emphasis on the joy of living except on Sukkot. On Pesach the term joy does not appear at all; on Shavuot, only once; on Sukkot, three times. And Sukkot, you know, has an attribute of its own: Chag. If you simply say “Chag,” without saying Pesach, Shavuot or Sukkot, it is certainly Sukkot. Why? Because where does the word chag come from? Chag comes from chug, circle; a mechugah is a compass.

In fact, you trace the circle, which is what we call chug. The chug is indeed the cycle of the light, of the illumination that each festival brings, each in its own measure. But in the measure of Sukkot, the radiance, the irradiation of light, is immense. Do you know why it is immense? Because we have given a positive meaning even to our straying. In sum, we have turned even our straying into something positive and integrated it into a curve of life in which it, too, has its place. So on Sukkot we are indeed this openness, which makes the festival of Sukkot Chag HaAsif, the festival of the ingathering, the festival of the harvest, the festival of taking stock. What have we done with our freedom from Pesach? What have we done with the Torah we received at Shavuot? The fullness of being of Sukkot will give meaning to that freedom, because liberation without conscience, without moral conscience, would be dangerous. A moral conscience that was not shared with the other, and that confined itself to reinforcing one’s personal being, would also be a deviation of life. But a moral conscience that breathes openness to the outside, going out toward nature, going out toward the outer world, with man’s full responsibility for this world, which is ephemeral but to which we give such faith that it can at no moment disappear, and it can only be a source of joy.

So you understand that we are bound to associate all the nations with this joy, and that, paradoxically, the only festival the nations are later required to celebrate is Sukkot. Not Shavuot, not Pesach: Sukkot, because it is the one that is within their reach. What we seek is this joy of life, this complementarity of life. But it must not be an ephemeral joy, a petty joy, forgive the expression, with a hangover the next day and a return to a sad reality a few hours later. No, it is not the joy of a drug. It is a joy that allows a person to regenerate completely and to apprehend the world differently, precisely when we stand on the eve of autumn, once again at the decline of nature, at the start of a period in which nature enters its hibernation.

Well, we are the watchmen of the night, the watchmen of this night, full of faith, full of joy. I will stop here to wish you, dear friends, that you may attain this joy through your festival of Sukkot. I place a particular emphasis on celebrating the festival of Sukkot because that is the true philosophy: we stand on the threshold of being within society, inside and outside at once, inside the house and outside the house, inside time and outside time. Because, as I once explained to you, throughout the month of Tishrei we are in a bubble of time, a bubble of time similar to bein hashmashot.

Bein hashmashot, you know, is the waning of the day, the waning of the day between evening and nightfall. There is still this waning of the day, and it is full of promise. And we do not know whether this waning of the day belongs to the day that has passed or to the day to come. It hangs in the balance between the two; it is at once in the past and in the future. That is in time. In space, it is the sukkah: we are at once in the arai, the temporary, and in the fixed. Aseh sukkah keva, aseh keva arai: make the sukkah fixed, make the fixed temporary; the fixed becomes the temporary, and the temporary becomes the fixed in which one settles. That is in space.

In the human dimension, as I have already told you, there are the periods we share at once with the grandparents, the past, our forebears, and with the grandchildren, the future. And our own years, the years that are ours alone, which do not encroach on the past of my parents and grandparents, nor on the years of my children and grandchildren, are this fleeting present. For the present has no real substance; it is ephemeral, it lies at the crossing of past and future. But that is where I stand, and that is my well of joy, my secret of being. And on that note, Chag sameach.

If you have any questions, I will be glad to take them. [A participant:] Hello, I had a question, but not about today’s lecture, not about the Sukkot lecture, but… [The Rav:] I can’t hear you, you are still muted. That’s the ephemeral for you. [The participant:] I wanted to ask a question, not about today’s lecture on Sukkot, but about last week’s lecture on Yom Kippur. You drew a kind of parallel between the destiny of the Jewish people, the destiny or what the Jewish people must take upon itself, and a kind of antisemitism in the world, saying that in the end, when the Jewish people does not behave as it should, this gives rise to antisemitism.

In a certain way it gives rise to antisemitism when the Jewish people does not assume its destiny and does not behave as it should, the Jewish people as a whole. You said that, or something like it, last week, and it troubled me. [The Rav:] That is what G-d says through Moshe: that He raised up peoples to be like thorns at our sides, to wake us from our torpor, from our laxity, from our temptation to be like the others at any price. For we have a responsibility. It is in this capacity that we are kohanim, priests of the nations. We are charged with preserving the moral foundation of society. We are, on the one hand, its security agents, and we are its leaders; I would not say its supervisors. You will agree with me that when a head of government commits a fault, when he does not keep his word and has, in a sense, betrayed his electorate, that is far more serious than a tradesman who made you a promise he did not keep and left you in a fix.

Because there, in sum, you are dealing as equals: the question is who is more morally conscientious or who is more cunning. But if the nation’s elected representatives already allow themselves what the common people violates every day, then these representatives are far from being worthy of the nation. What will the nation do? It will denounce them, it will jeer at them, it will reject them, it will denounce them. That is our heavy lot among the nations. It is a very heavy yoke, and at the same time… We are the elect. […] It is not we who say so; it is they, in fact. They are the ones who say it, they are the ones who acknowledge it.

Except that they seek, on account of our conduct or our behavior, to snatch this title from us. That is what the great religions attempted, but they acknowledged that we were the first, that we were the elder brothers of this universal moral conscience. Listen, this is borne out, unfortunately, it is borne out, and one must not deny it. For I always say that the wrongs are shared: when something goes wrong in a couple, one must not condemn the wife or the husband without extenuating circumstances. [The participant:] Certainly. [The Rav:] And if love has turned into hatred, there was an original love; if it turned into hatred, one must look for where the germ, the poison, the virus lay, the “COVID,” as we would say today.

[The participant:] But perhaps even if the Jewish people were perfection itself, there would still be this antisemitism, probably. [The Rav:] But that is already, you know, like a pupil, a lazy pupil at the back of the class, who will always hate the top of the class, though with a certain admiration. Well, that is less serious, much less serious, because that is only a touch of jealousy, and not the claim that you do not represent what you claim to be, that you are not doing your duty. In joy, in joy and health. […] So have a good festival, and know that our classes are open to you.

I believe our moderator wanted to ask a question. We will not take it too far; it is already late, we could ask it on another occasion. […] [The moderator:] Just one thing I want to say: in fact, it is a kind of balance, antisemitism in relation to Judaism. That is, antisemitism has a role. I believe that if we had ever been perfect, there would be no antisemitism, and the purpose of antisemitism is to perfect us. That is my idea; I don’t know whether you share it. [The Rav:] Take the example, as we will have occasion to see, of Avraham. He waged war against idolatry and decided to take another direction, to lead a solitary life in a land that was pointed out to him, a land that belongs to no one but is reserved for him.

Yet, by the turn of events, I won’t call it good fortune, there is a shortage, there is a famine. As soon as he goes down to Egypt, they seek to swallow him up, to dilute him; they seek to snatch away his source of inspiration, which is his wife. What had he done? He had done nothing yet. He came with money to feed himself, because, well, there was a crisis in the land; that is perfectly normal. Go and ask Pharaoh what his initial temptation was; we do not know. But in any case, through this very event Hashem signals to him: know that it is not only against idolatry that you must wage your struggle, but against those who are there trying to snatch your title, seeking to strip you of your title in order to keep it for themselves.

That is what the passage meant to convey. There we are. [A participant:] Thank you very much, Rav Benizri. Chag sameach to all. [The Rav:] Chag sameach. Thank you very much. Chag sameach to all. There is no class next week; we will be back in two weeks. [A participant:] But last week’s lecture, could you put it on YouTube? [Reply:] We have not put it up yet; I hope to be able to do so this evening, otherwise it will be Thursday. [The participant:] That is kind, because I am not always able to join the classes at 8 p.m. [Reply:] No problem. In any case, all the classes will always be posted, but with the festivals we are running a little behind. Thank you all. Chag sameach to all, chag sameach.

Chag sameach.