If you’re looking for nobility search not among noblemen.
If you’re looking for royalty search not in palaces.
If you’re looking for aristocracy go to a sinking ship.
In good times and in good places
Everyone is noble and of fine character:
But maybe they only mirror everything around them.
When everything around is falling apart then inner light -- and strength – shine.
When bad things happen then good things can happen.
He, in His infinite wisdom, declared
That only a cloud can produce a rainbow.
Does that mean we have to suffer to flourish?
Sukkos tries to tell us no.
But let me work backwards through this thing for a minute.
Egypt was paradise – the Garden of Eden, lush, healthy, beautiful, stable, prosperous, decadent.
The Jews wanted only to melt, to dissolve and be absorbed into Egypt.
The more I learn of this slice of Jewish history
the more I feel that the triumph of the Exodus
was not His taking the Jews out of Egypt –
it was his taking the Egypt out of the Jews.
Fully 80% of the Jews refused to go.
(Yes, only 20% of the Jews joined Moses for the Exodus.) Those that went had to learn that everything called safety and security is neither. Rivers can turn bloody, pestilence can destroy blue-chip commodities, flocks can die, cities can be lost, legacies destroyed.
In WWII, when Buckingham Palace was bombed
People saw that palace rubble and tenement rubble is identical.
For if G-d does not build the house,
The Psalmist lets us know,
You’re working for nothing.
Does a palace have to be destroyed
For us to sense its vulnerability, its tenement-shared quality? No, we only have to destroy our allusions of it.
True aristocrats can do that.
On Sukkos we leave our secure and beautiful home
For a nearly roofless hut.
We have our meals there, even if the rain is so strong
The chicken soup turns to water before you finish eating it.
Significantly, Sukkos is in the fall, the harvest season,
After the crops have come in,
The bills have been paid off.
The storehouses are full,
The logs are on the fire
And you’re about to slip into your slippers.
That’s when you leave your house
And go into your sukkah
And remember what happens to slippers in the rain
And what happens to palaces in blitzkriegs.
For in Sukkos I housed the Jewish people, says the Torah.
I housed them in Sukkos;
In the knowledge of the Psalmist
That all is nothing if Hashem did not build it.
And to paraphrase Reb Leivik,
Who would rather be anywhere else?