Just traveling through...

Shalom everyone! These past several days has been the holiday of Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival, a time when Jewish people around the world celebrate with festive meals and parties, extra prayers and songs, and the construction of huts called sukkahs. A sukkah is usually made with temporary materials (i.e. plywood and cornstalk roofs) and is a place where people eat, study, sleep, and just hang out in general. What exactly is the point of this seemingly random structure? In order to clarify this, I have a chasidic story that I heard on the first night of Sukkot to share with you all.
There was once a rich Russian merchant who heard of the Magid of Mezeritch, a very prominant rabbi and the second Chassidic rebbe, and decided to go on a trip to visit him in the next town over. When he knocked on the Magid's door and the Magid answered, the merchant saw that the inside of the house was bare of fancy furniture, aesthetic beauty, or luxuries. There was a chair, a desk, a bed, a table; incredible simple and humble. The merchant asked "Rabbi, I don't mean to be rude, but for such an illustrious man as yourself, where is all of your furniture?" The Magid smiled and answered "In your house, is there a lot of fancy furniture and luxuries?" The merchant nodded. "And now that you are in Mezeritch, do you have all of your furniture with you?" The merchant laughed and replied, "Not at all Rabbi, but I'm only just traveling through!" At the merchant's words, the Magid gave an "aha!" and replied "You see, I too am just traveling through. One day, I will finally come home and on that day, I hope that you will be able to come visit me and see how amazing it is."
What is this story supposed to mean? The Magid had a house, so why did he say that he was only traveling through? How is this story connected to Sukkot? As I said before, we build our sukkahs with temporary materials: flimsy plywood for the walls and brittle cornstalk for the roof. This is meant to remind us that everything we have, our house, car, fancy furniture, job, education, family, friends, even our very lives, they all come from G-d. Although we may work incredibly hard for the money with which to pay for all our material possesions, it really all comes from G-d and if G-d were to will it, He could take it all away. Now, this doesn't mean that we should cower in fear our entire lives, worried sick that G-d will just one day decided to play a sick joke and take everything back, leaving us homeless without a friend, fated to walk the streets for food. But what it does mean is that we should be able to look beyond the material and to see what's really important. Nothing is permanent and yet we constantly decide to base our lives around the illusion of stability. By recognizing that all we have is makeshift and temporary just as with someone who is on the road, we are able to attach ourselves to what's really important and to truly live.
This sense of a makeshift life can be seen in the history of the Jewish people: Abraham's journey from his hometown to go to Cana'an, the Jewish people's mass exodus out of Egypt, the first and present exile of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel, all the times that we were kicked out of different countries (England, Spain, etc.), the boat fulls of Jewish immigrants that set off for a new life in America, the countless that were forced out of their homes and into small cramped ghettos and concentration camps, the many who decided to take a stand against religious opression in Communist Russia and were sent off to die in Siberian labor camps. We are a people that have constantly been on the road, forced to live out of a suitcase, to nourish our souls with tireless tradition, a patchwork quilt of memories, and a faith in G-d and His Torah . One story of Jewish traveling particularly stands out in my mind as an excellent example of the role of not just the Jewish people, but all of humanity as migrants in this world.
When the Jewish people were traveling through the Sinai desert for 40 years on their way to Cana'an, G-d provided them with the clouds of glory, a protecting force that provided them with manah from heaven, made sure that their clothes didn't tatter, and shielded them from the sun. The way in which this is connected to Sukkot is that the cornstalk roof is considered not just to be a symbol of thoses original clouds of glory, but to be the physical manifestation of them! What does this come to teach us? We're on a journey, whether you recognize it or it remains unspoken in the back of your mind. It's not so much a physical journey as it is a spiritual one. It's a journey away from materialism, depression, sorrow, and suffering and towards a time of peace and prosperity, brotherhood, love, happiness, a higher consciousness. This time is refered to as the age of Moshiach, the Messianic period, a time when "the lion will lay down with the lamb" and "the nations will beat their swords into ploughshares." As I've mentioned before in previous posts, we are all broken, all finite, all flawed. We make mistakes, hurt the ones we love, take things for granted, obssess over things that are petty and meaningless instead of using our energy for things that are positive and productive. All our lives we have been on this journey towards a meaningful life, this road towards the promised land. We're really only just traveling through. While we are on this journey, G-d is constantly providing for us with His clouds of glory, fixing all the cracks in our soul until we can finally become whole again and in doing so, finally come home. Have an amazingly meaningful rest of Sukkot.
All of my love,
Zach