The tekiah gedolah sounds calling you to remember, but remembering only reminds you of how much you’ve forgotten. You attempt to jog your memory, believing that this is your last chance and that you’ve run out of time. You stumble through the next 10 days, only to be confronted with the final blast of the shofar and the clanging shut of the gates. An uneasy sense of relief embraces you at this moment, only to serve as a threshold to the next hurdle of introspection. You think the hard part is over but it’s not. This journey, which continues still, actually began long ago, before you may have even realized – with Tish’a B’av.
Many often speak about the significance of the period of time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, with the intense soul-searching and atonement attempts of the aseret y’mei teshuvah (10 days of repentance), and the feelings of anxiety surrounding the question of who will be written in the book of life and who will not. But Rabbi Alan Lew, in his fascinating book entitled, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, highlights the primacy of a different period of time: that of the weeks between Tish’a B’av and Sukkot. Tisha B’av is traditionally the day when we commemorate the physical destruction of the Temple as we beheld the crumbling of its walls as well as the crumbling of the sole avenue for our connection to God. Tish’a B’av can be viewed as a moment to either recall the history of the tragedies that have befallen our people, or as a reminder of the fact that catastrophes will continue to happen to us as a people and as individuals until we learn from them. Tish’a B’av is the moment that we turn, start our formal process of teshuvah, at the moment that we were exiled and turned away from God in an effort to turn back towards God. Rambam says that the only way we have completed true and complete teshuvah is when we are presented with the same situation that we had erred in before and choose to act differently based on our learning. In this way, everytime the HHD season is upon us, we have the opportunities to check in and see how we have handled things differently – how we have handled the same difficulties that we struggle with year in and year out. It is our formal Jewish opportunity to perform cheshbon hanefesh, a spiritual checking in of sorts. But TB is only the beginning of this period for us and it stretches all the way to sukkot – and that entire period is the beginning of our yearlong journey back home, only to begin again.
The reason that this significant period of time culminates at Sukkot, is because while Tish’a B’av commemorates the destruction of a physical structure, Sukkot is based upon the yearly rebuilding of a temporary structure. Rabbi Lew writes that during Sukkot we situate ourselves 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. 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 material – the leaves and branches – that constitutes its roof. This is not a house; it is the bare outline of a house… 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… 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 see this everyday while torrential storms like Ike and Gustav roll in and crush not only the sturdiest of dwelling places, but the spirits of the dwellers as well.
Sukkot marks the first formal period of time that we not only commemorate the breaking down of the walls of the Temple and the building of the temporary walls of the Sukkah, but more importantly the first of many times that we will break down our own emotional walls and begin building them back up again. In the upcoming musaf amidah we read “bnei veitecha kvatchila, v’chonen mikdashecha al mechono, v’hareinu b’vinyano v’samcheinu b’tikuno.” Rebuild your Temple anew, reestablish your sanctuary there, so that we may see its building and rejoice in its repair. How fitting that this prayer centered around the notion of the physical rebuilding of the Temple would be recited specifically on Sukkot! While this prayer is fitting for the day, I often find it difficult to connect to the idea of actually rebuilding the beit hamikdash. I imagine the smell of the daily sacrificial BBQ would be very enticing and surely Hillel would be first in line for his medium rare steak, but the notion of someone taking my ability to connect with God on my own terms and wherever I please away from me is alarming. I know I may sound a bit radical but I think the idea is something that is, if not difficult, at least concerning, because of how such a construction project would change Jewish life forever. That’s not my vision of evocative worship anymore and it’s not my vision of meaningful spirituality.
But when I pray these words from musaf, “bnei veitecha kvatchila, v’chonen mikdashecha al mechono, v’hareinu b’vinyano v’samcheinu b’tikuno.” Rebuild your Temple anew, reestablish your sanctuary there, so that we may see its building and rejoice in its repair, my own struggle of connecting to the thought of having the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem is resolved by the ability to rejoice in the rebuilding of the walls of my own spiritual sukkah. It is throughout the weeks between Tish’a B’av and Sukkot that we are able to begin our yearlong process of teshuvah, repentance and our self-examination of our many pitfalls and successes.
Sukkot truly marks the beginning of the year’s cycle of teshuvah and self awareness as opposed to an end. Eventually “… 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.”
May we be privileged in the year to come not only to recognize the walls that need tearing down, but the courage to break them down ourselves and the perseverance to build them back up again. Amen.
