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 good places everyone seems to be of noble and fine character --
they just mirror everything around them. Only when everything around them is falling apart, can inner light shine. When bad things happen then good things can happen. He, in His infinite wisdom, ruled that a grey cloud can produce a rainbow.
Does all this mean that we need to suffer in order that we flourish? No, says the Sukkah, but we must stop suffering flourishing illusions.
Egypt was the Garden of Eden, lush, vigorous, sensuous, stable, prosperous.
Decadent. The Jews wanted to melt, to dissolve and be absorbed into Egypt.
The triumph of the Exodus, say the masters, was not in His taking the Jews out of Egypt – the triumph was in his taking the Egypt out of the Jews. He took out the Egypt by demonstrating that everything they considered safe and secure was neither. Rivers ran bloody. Weather patterns devastated blue-chip commodities. Death obliterated blue-blood bloodlines.
In WWII, London's slummy East End was bombed and Buckingham Palace was bombed.
Looking at the rubble, people saw that palace and tenement are, ultimately, indistinguishable. Must you bomb a palace to see it is a slum? No, you must bomb your illusion of it. True aristocrats do that.
On the holiday Sukkos we abandon secure homes for roofless huts which share a name with their holiday: sukkos. Sukkos falls in autumn, the harvest season. The crops have come in, the storehouse is full, the bills are paid off, the logs are on the fire. You're about to slip into your slippers. That's when you leave your house. You go into your sukkah. You remember what happens to slippers in the rain and what happens to palaces in blitzkriegs.
Exodus was followed by Sukkos. For in Sukkos I housed the Jewish people, says the Torah. I housed them in Sukkos propound the masters: I housed them in the mindset of Sukkos. In the mindset that palace and slum lack permanence, that safety and security do not come from commodities, that salvation is not in savings and trust is not in funds.
More than a sinking ship reveals the aristocrat, the aristocrat reveals how sinkable is the ship. Aristocratic people, free from Egypt, are in the sukka. As Reb Leivik said, the sukkah is a very strong place to be.