VeZoth HaBerackha: Sukkot, Wind, Rain and Vulnerable Trust

The basic statement of the Succah is that you can know all the problems intellectually very well, but change is only facilitated by vulnerable trust.

You go out to the Succah, with its holes in the roof, and you experience love in a place of vulnerability. The Succah is the image of unconditional love and individual attention.

Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur are corporate moments, experienced communally, but the Succah is an individual moment. Hashem takes each person alone into the Succah, and gives them unconditional love and attention.

The Succah space is the open heh that creates the space of the fruitful womb, and one gives birth to oneself, out of that womb.

The word regel from the shalosh regelim (three pilgrimage festivals – Pessach, Shavuot and Sukkot) is the source of the English word “regular”. The idea of the pilgrimage festivals is to “raise the regular”, to raise the mundane. And so, the real pilgrimage is based on the Torah of Rabbi Twerski, that the greatest tyranny is one’s habits. The oppression of one’s own habits is greater than the oppression of Pharaoh, or any external source of oppression.

Each regel/pilgrimage addresses a different habit structure. Pessach deals with food (all processed food contains bread, so on Pessach we are forced to break the habit of eating processed food). Shavuot forces us to confront our sleep patterns by staying up all night studying. Succot deals with habits relating to shelter. For me, the most powerful thing about the Succah is just eating and sleeping in it. Because of the ohr makif/surrounding light of the Succah, described by all the great commentators, all you have to do to perform the Mitzvah of Succah is just sit in it.

This act of being in a Succah, however, greatly confronts the issue of convenience. If I go on a camping trip, it’s not hard for me to sleep out, but to sleep in the Succah in below freezing temperatures when I know that my bed is just four steps away is very, very challenging.

This attitude has given rise to an entire genre of Hassidic stories that follow the tradition of Nachum Ish Gamzu – the Talmudic rabbi whose was so named because whatever befell him, he would say, “This also is for the good”.

Here is one such story:

In Russia, it is often very cold, way below freezing on Sukkoth.

Once, Rebbe Zusia and his brother Rebbe Elimelech were lying in the Succah. Elimelech had a pile of blankets on him. He offered some to Zusia, but Zusia, said, no, thank you, he didn’t want any blankets. In Zusia’s way of thinking, whatever he had was good enough.

Soon, Elimelech heard Zusia say, “Master of the Universe, Zusia is cold!”

The Succah warmed up a bit, and Elimelech took off one of his twelve blankets.

A few minutes later, he heard Zusia speak again, “Master of the Universe, Zusia is cold!”

The Succah warmed up some more. Each time Zusia spoke, the Succah got warmer, until Elimelech took off all the blankets, and the Succah was quite comfortable.

The next morning, Elimelech asked Zusia, “Zusia, why did you stop? You could have warmed up the whole world!”

There is an underlying question relating to this Torah.

Nachum Ish Gamzu amputated his own arms and legs because he believed he had been too slow in assisting a poor man who approached him for help.

The underlying question about Nachum Ish Gamzu is, how could he justify amputating his own arms and legs, when self-inflicted pain is not permitted? A Jewish person is not even allowed to tattoo himself, let alone amputate his arms and legs.

The answer is that he could do such a thing only with tremendous Simcha/joy. The “this also is for the good” attitude is very complicated.

The difference between the attitude of Nachum Ish Gamzu, and the pollyannish optimism of Voltaire’s Candide is that the former is grounded in reality, and the latter is based in denial and fantasy. Nachum Ish Gamzu said ‘also this is for the best’, and Candide said ‘this is the best of all possible worlds.’

In the word ‘also’ there is an acknowledgement that there is a hester panim/’hiding of the Face’ here. I don’t see God’s benevolence in what’s happening to me right now.

In the Grace After Meals we ask God that we should not have to depend on loans or gifts from other people. “Please, make us not needful – Hashem our God – of the gifts of human hands nor of their loans, but only of Your Hand that is full open, holy and generous...”

The whole idea of Avraham’s ‘small steps’ is to step into the void and not ask for help from other humans, and watch what happens.

This runs contrary to the teaching in the story of the shipwrecked man who, while drowning after refusing help from passing boats and helicopters, was asked by God, “Why didn’t you accept My help when I sent it?”

The dialectic of the Succah is the direct confrontation between Gog and Magog, where ‘Magog’ refers to people without a roof, and ‘Gog’ refers to people with a roof. The ‘roof people’ are in constant conflict with the ‘no-roof people’, and Hashem is in the synthesis of the dialectic.

Having the Succah three inches from your house is deliberate, because this creates the dialogue between the parts of you that are of the ‘roof world’ and the parts that are of the ‘no-roof world’. The roof represents security, but if that part of you becomes distorted, your house becomes a prison – an enclosed trap – like the letter chet - in which you accumulate things. The Succah is the letter heh, where you open a window to the sky. This is a place of vulnerable trust.

The idea of going outside the house at the onset of Fall, when the weather is getting colder, is really very profound. All the stories of the ‘Nachum Ish Gam Zu’ genre support this theme.

The anthem story of this genre is the story of Mitnagdim (Jews opposed to Hassidism) who went to the Maggid of Mezeritch (leader of the Hassidic Movement) and asked ‘why do righteous people suffer?’’

The Maggid said he couldn’t answer the question, and he directed them to Rebbe Zusia of Anapol. They traveled to Anapol, and passed through the rich neighborhood, then the middle class neighborhood, then the lower class area, and finally, in the poorest of all the poorest houses, with busted windows and no heat and children running everywhere, they found Reb Zusia, clearly living a life of terrible hardship. They said, “Reb Zusia, the Maggid sent us to ask you the question, why do righteous people suffer?”

Rebbe Zusia looked at them and said, “I have no idea. I’ve never suffered.”

The Succah is also connected to the homelessness of Shlomo (King Solomon) who wrote Kohelet during his time of homelessness, and it is contrasted to Jonah, who was furious at God for taking away his shade.

The main thing in the Succah is the shade of the Shechinah.

At the close of Grace After Meals we say “I was a youth and also have aged, and I have not seen a righteous man forsaken, with his children begging for bread.” (Lubavitch Hassidim do not recite these lines). The righteous man is not forsaken, because he doesn’t experience himself as forsaken – he is the Esh Kodesh in the Warsaw Ghetto who knows himself to be constantly in the presence of God.

This perception of abandonment is critical. It is such a common human emotion, and people get so stuck with it. I see it over and over – the feeling of being abandoned, and then the implosion of rage that comes from believing that you have no one to depend on. They feel backed into a corner, with no support – it’s like having emotional frostbite. With physical frostbite, all your blood goes to your heart, and with emotional frostbite, you become totally self-involved.

Rage here is distinguished from anger. Rage is in implosion, while anger is an explosion that can be used to solve problems. There are also physiological differences. With anger, you become flushed, whereas with rage you go pale, because the blood really does rush to your heart.

Jonah is reacting against God’s compassion. He’s upset because the shade is taken away. On the other hand, the basic idea of the Esh Kodesh is that the righteous person is not abandoned, because Avraham Aveinu taught us to say Adonai/my Lord in the time of Hester Panim.

A key question about Avraham is; why didn’t he pray for water when there was no water? Why did he go down to Egypt instead?

He had (successfully) prayed to be saved from King Nimrod’s fiery furnace, so he knew one hundred percent that he could get a miracle. Why then, when he arrived in Eretz Israel and there was no water, did he not pray for water?

Instead of praying for a miracle, he took this disastrous trip to Egypt, where he lost his nephew Lot and found Hagar, who became the mother of Ishmael and the Arab nation. We are still paying for Abraham’s trip to Egypt.

Avraham’s actions here set up the dialogue between nes/miracle and nes/test, through which we find God in the synthesis, which is nes/flag.

Even greater than the miracle of the splitting of the sea was the miracle of when the Jews ran out of water (Exodus 17:7), and Amalek came out of the toxic void of their despair.

The splitting of the sea supported the kind of dependency exhibited by Noach, called ‘walking with God’. When you are walking with God, you can count on God to save you from tough situations. Of Avraham, the Torah writes hitalech lifanai/’walk yourself before Me’. (Genesis 17:1)

These two types of walking can be compared to how a child learns to walk, first with help, and then on his own.

Noach was a do-it-yourself guy. He invented the plow, he built a huge boat. He wasn’t sitting passively waiting for things to happen. But his whole idea was utopian. He was a victim of utopian seduction.

The Esh Kodesh (Sukkoth, October 1941) explains that Avraham was the first to say Adonai/my Lord in a case of Hester Panim.

In my wilderness experience I have found that stress is an important factor in helping people to change. Up to a certain point, the more stress they experience, the better it is for them. If they cross over that point, they become bitter and resentful, but still the level of stress that they can take is far greater than they think themselves capable of.

People tend to believe that they are much less able to deal with difficulty than they actually are. We are trying to extend their limits and capacities.

I taught this with a diving exercise. I had people hold their breath for as long as they could, while we timed them. If their capacity was one minute, the next time around, they had a partner who, after 50 seconds, gave them a very difficult math problem. Everyone was able to hold their breath for a much longer period while they were trying to figure out the math problem.

The first time around, they thought they were holding their breath for as long as they could, but they found out that they were wrong.

We don’t want to punish people. We don’t want to get into gratuitous pain. We don’t want to have pollyanish attitudes, but at the same time we want to increase people’s endurance. We want people to not be spoiled. We don’t want them to be addicted to convenience. We don’t want them to look for God to bail them out of their problems.

The yam suf/splitting of the sea played along with a basic weakness, which was the Jewish people’s unhealthy submission to Pharaoh. They were afraid of Pharaoh, and God bailing them out of their problems was just another version of that kind of dependency on a strong leader. The same problem arose in the Jewish people’s relationship with Moshe.

When they ran out of water, they had to face themselves.

I have directed situations where we deliberately run out of water. In the same way, we deliberately go into the Succah. We can engineer a situation of mild deprivation. This is the Torah’s theme. If we train people not to complain about it, but to see it as an empowerment, a maturation of self sufficiency and autonomy, then we can teach people how to be free.

This is the womb of the Succah – the feeling of love and support in a vulnerable, testing situation. If you don’t sleep in the Succah when it’s cold and wet, you really miss the whole value. The experience of sleeping in the Succah gives you the confidence that you can change your basic habits. When I see that I can eat and sleep in the Succah, even though it would be more comfortable to be inside, I get a terrific confidence boost, and it can help me to change other habits that are much more complicated and serious and destructive.

Here in Denver we had a bad windstorm for a few hours on Friday night, and a lot of Succahs blew over. People told me afterwards that they literally panicked and ran inside. From my standpoint, that’s ridiculous. They are addicted to convenience, always looking for the path of least resistance, and addiction to convenience is dangerous.

The sages didn’t create these festivals as air-tight chambers. They created them with enough latitude to enable people to get around them and miss the whole point.

The ideal is to be able to sit in a windstorm in the Succah and not be rattled by it.

The central idea is in attacking the basic habit structures. If you miss that point, you miss everything.

As I sit in the Succah, I can really dialogue with myself about my own needs. Two nights ago, it was below freezing, and I was saying to myself, look, we have a big day tomorrow, let’s go inside and go to our nice soft warm bed.

But the question that arises is the question of Nachum Ish Gam Zu, who was the ultimate minimalist. He could retain total simcha/joy without arms and legs. I don’t believe I could do that, but a more modest goal is, can I lie here in the Succah with a sleeping bag and enjoy the cold air, and go to sleep and have a decent night, without being ruffled by it.

If this ruffles me, I don’t really have a model for facing tough situations in life.

The question is, how do we kill ourselves with our own security needs? In our need for security, how do we ironically shut everybody and everything out? In their search for security, people end up cutting all connections with God and man.

Most people will try to find the easy way around Pessach, Shavuot and Succoth.

The Torah dialectic is between bitachon/trusting in God and osem yadi/the strength of my hand. If the strength of my hand is my one step and trusting in God is God’s nine steps, how do I get the dialogue between the one and the nine? How does it work? What is the model?

The Esh Kodesh tells us that Avraham is the main model. Essentially, Esh Kodesh is saying that the example of Abraham saved him from succumbing to depression in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Every Sukkoth, my challenge is to sit out there, rain or shine, and to experience Hashem’s love.

The Gemara says that if it rains in the Succah, it is as if the king threw a glass of water in the face of the servant who just brought it to him.

This is a great description of the abandonment experienced by people. I can experience the Succah as a womb of unconditional love, or I can experience it as cute when it is convenient and a drag when it is a little bit uncomfortable.

This is what I learned from my rebbe, Rabbi Shloime Twersky z”l. He was out there, deathly ill with cancer, in the snow, still in the Succah, and he was Rebbe Zusia’s direct descendent.

Reb Zusia was able to say, I don’t know why righteous people suffer, because I have never suffered, because of his attitude.

The Esh Kodesh showed tremendous strength in being able to avoid depression and the listlessness and self-centeredness that comes with depression in an incredibly tough situation.

The Torah is one hundred percent against gratuitous pain, because that is a very angry process. Self punishment is very dangerous, and ultimately leads to a type of suicide, either figuratively or literally. The question is how do we avoid gratuitous pain, which is a very angry process, and make it a process of love?

All the secrets of this are in the Succah.

The story of Jonah is a powerful tale about how and why people try to run away from Hashem. Jonah didn’t want to save the people of Nineveh because he didn’t like God’s attribute of compassion. He was really running away from Hashem’s love. Jonah didn’t want to be the instrument of God’s compassion. He was much more comfortable in Noach’s role, telling people they were going to drown, and then having them actually drown. In Jonah’s view, God is too wimpy. But then Jonah became angry when the gourd died. (The gourd had provided shade for Jonah. See Jonah 4:6)

God then accuses Jonah of having double standards. Jonah had compassion for the gourd because it gave him a little shade, and he became angry when he had to sit in the heat. In the desert, it gets too hot, and heat and anger go together.

The Gemara tells us the same thing will happen at the end of days. All the nations of the world will go into the Succah, and then when Hashem turns up the heat, they will leave, kicking the door on their way out. This depicts a spoiled, tantrumy attitude.

The Jews will be the only ones who don’t kick the door on the way out. It’s not that they will like the heat, but they will be tuned in to the attitude of finding Hashem. The key idea is in finding God, being able to say my Lord, my Master, in the midst of Hester Panim.

This is how the Torah helps to turn you into somebody who isn’t so wimpy.

Is the Succah Gevurah or Hessed? The answer is, it is both, but if you water down the basic rules of eating and sleeping in the Succah, you really miss this point.

Barring extreme circumstances, most people can tolerate the average range of weather that we experience during Sukkoth.

The ultimate point of Sukkoth is in the liberation that takes place – the liberation from our own needs and habits. The degree to which modern man is spoiled and pampered is getting us into a lot of trouble.

Until Shlomo became a homeless beggar, after he had already been king, he had no way of understanding the bigger picture that he presented in Kohelet.

Kohelet is a very comprehensive view of life that is often misunderstood as cynical and bitter.

The dialogue of the Succah and the house helps us to deal with our own demons, which are some form of our own needs, and how they affect us.

The Esh Kodesh (Sukkoth 1941) asks how can the Gemara (Berachot 7b) say Abraham was the first person in the world to call God Adonai/my Lord, when elsewhere (Genesis Rabbah 17:5) we learn that Adam was the first to call God Adonai?

The Esh Kodesh explains the discrepancy by pointing out that Abraham “added to the sense in which Adam called God Adonai, because Abraham called God Adonai when he was being told that his descendents would go into exile, and become enslaved and oppressed. He also notes that we learn in the Gemara (Nedarim 32a) that the exile was a punishment for Abraham having previously asked, “Adonai, how do I know that I will inherit it?”

This was Avraham’s one moment of impatience. He wanted a little assurance, he wanted to get out of the Succah and go back in the house. He wanted God to give him some security.

The whole thing is a play on this very interesting security-seeking mechanism in human beings.

Once, when Rebbe Zusia was wandering in his self-imposed exile, a messenger came running up to him, saying, ‘Shmulik is in hospital and very, very sick.’

Rebbe Zusia ran home, screaming to his wife, ‘Where’s Shmulik, where’s Shmulik?’

‘He’s right here,’ she replied. ‘He’s fine.’

‘But I was just told Shmulik is in the hospital…’

‘No,’ replied his wife, ‘that’s the Shmulik from next door.’

Rebbe Zusia immediately packed his bags, telling his wife, ‘I haven’t learned my lesson. I need to go out into exile some more.’

The aim is to get people who know how to live in simcha/joy, but also who are not so tied to their own selfishness and ego that they are just setting themselves up for depression.

The Eastern philosophies teach us that if your ego is tied to the results of your actions, you are going to suffer a lot. The Torah says, once you claim that something belongs to you, you are already setting up the grounds of your suffering.

A life of simcha/joy is based on bitul hayesh/the nullification of ‘I have’.

What we are getting here is not robots, but people who will be involved without having their ego tied to the results of what they are doing. The Torah calls this bitul hayesh/the nullification of ‘I have’. If it is only my son that I worry about and get excited about, and I am totally relieved once I find that it is the next door neighbor’s son who is so desperately ill, then I need to go back into exile and work on myself some more. I need to be concerned at a broader level. I need to see a bigger picture.

Why is the Shechinah/Divine Presence in exile? Why doesn’t the Shechinah have a home? What does this have to do with anything?

The whole idea of the Succah is tied in with the idea of building the Temple, because we are trying to build a home for the Shechinah inside our own hearts. To do that we have to release the ego attachment that ensures our suffering.

With children, with a house, with all the things we think we own, we become very possessive, and this is a prescription for suffering. We have to have a certain level, not of diminished love, but of diminished attachment to our children, because if my ego rises and falls on what my child does, I am in trouble.

Nonetheless, once I approach the discipline of bitul hayesh with anger, I have to stop. The Torah tells us that if we practice these disciplines in a way that makes us angry, everyone will suffer. Doing this with simcha/joy is the secret of the Succah – the secret of simcha in a vulnerable situation where things are difficult. This is the Esh Kodesh. This is Nahum Ish Gam Zu. People really don’t get this Torah. They misjudge these people all the time, calling them masochists or pollyannas.

By changing turf, by putting your turf in the Succah and really pushing yourself a bit, you can learn a lot about yourself. There is no doubt about that.

Shlomo didn’t really confront himself until he went out on this homeless, begging expedition. This is why Abraham didn’t pray. He had to go down to Egypt in order to search for himself. He was already a spiritual giant, but if God bailed him out, he would be back on square one with Noach.

Just as we emanate from the Tzimtzum, the entire sojourn of the Jewish people in Egypt emanates out of Avraham’s one moment of impatience.

The Esh Kodesh explains that in the Garden of Eden, where Adam called God Adonai/my Lord, God’s mastery was obvious. ‘To this, Abraham added that also in times of exile, darkness, and suffering, God is Adonai/my Lord, and will always be called by the name Adonai. Not only when it is evident that God is Master of all will the Jewish people call Him Adonai…we will also make it a point of worship to call God Adonai, accepting His mastery and ownership over us, even in times of concealment when all the good is hidden.’

Is the Succah a hester panim/concealment, or a giluyi panim/revelation of Hashem?

It depends on your perspective. For some people, the idea of sleeping on hard ground in below freezing weather is hester panim. For me it is the giluyi, because I am negotiating with my own needs and discovering the meaning of this whole comfort and security thing. I am learning so much from being in the Succah.

We are trying to make real changes during Sukkoth. We each want to birth a new person, who is more functional and more alive than the person of last year. As the Esh Kodesh says, we have a revelation of growth from all this effort, all these rituals we have been performing from Tisha b’Av, through Rosh Hashannah, Yom Kippur and Sukkoth. The ultimate futility is to do all of this and not get anywhere.

As we mentioned in an earlier chapter, Gematria Succah is 91, which is the sum of Havaya – 26, and Adonai – 65. Havaya (representing God’s love) is the name of God that can only be written, but not spoken, and Adonai/my Lord is the name that is spoken.

From the writings of the Esh Kodesh, I believe Avraham is not only calling God Adonai in the face of his vision of the Egyptian slavery, but also in the face of the Holocaust.

Ironically, many people do not experience Rosh Hashannah as yom hadin/Day of Judgment, because they are sitting in a warm, comfortable environment, while on Sukkoth they do have the experience of judgment and discomfort.

Psychologically, the most stressful thing for people to do is to move, so changing an abode is the major stress of the human personality. Therefore, moving out into your Succah is tremendously useful. This is a time of year when the nights are starting to become cold, and most non-Jews are moving into their houses and putting on the storm windows. We are moving out when other people are moving in.

We are not doing this, however, to experience gratuitous suffering. We are doing it to experience unconditional love.

People tend to confuse these. Sukkoth can be very confusing. Kohelet, the book of Sukkoth, is a very confusing book. Is it cynical? Is it a call to faith? What is it? What is the meaning of ‘vanity, vanity, all is vanity’? It sounds like the ultimate cynicism, yet we believe it is a call to faith, just like Abraham calling God Adonai when he learns of the exile.

It’s very difficult. It raises a lot of questions, so say the least. It’s all built around a time to be born and a time to die. In Kohelet, the words “a time to” appear twenty eight times. The commentators say this corresponds to the days of a woman’s cycle, which brings us back to the connection between pain and birth and the phases of the moon.

The question is, can you live a life of simcha when the moon is waning, and not fall apart? And when the moon is waxing, can you avoid becoming complacent and arrogant?

The whole object is love – it’s not about torture. It’s not love with whips and chains.

Where I grew up, one Succah was built for the whole shul, and only children went into it. It was a children’s holiday, it was totally infantalized, and yet to me, Sukkoth is the most profound festival of all. Why did they do that? Why did they make a big day out of Yom Kippur and totally emasculate Sukkoth?

It could be that since the Holocaust Gevurah has dominated people’s emotions, and we have forgotten how to really find simcha. This is what angered people about the movie ‘Life Is Beautiful’ – because it creates simcha in a concentration camp. People resent this.

The Ben Ish Chai explains the complexity of this kind of love in the following verse from Parshat VeZoth HaBerakhah (Deuteronomy 33:13): ‘To Joseph he said: His land is a blessing of God, with the sweetness of the heaven’s dew, and the depths that lie below.”

Joseph represents the Sephirah of Yessod/sexuality, because he resisted Potiphar’s wife and he married Osnath and fathered the first two siblings in Torah who didn’t want to kill each other. He rejected the prospect of short term gratification and held out for a functional relationship. Joseph was actually able to implement all of the insights of his ancestors, and to change the way he raised a family. Osnath and Joseph, who had both suffered the terrible abandonment of being sent out into exile by their own families, said to each other, whatever has been going on in this family can’t continue. We have had enough pain in our lives, we can’t keep doing this. It is a very delicate combination of regret, critique, honesty and tremendous love and support that effectuates this combination.

The Ben Ish Chai explains that there are thirty-nine letters in the name of Haviya in its four milluim (various ways of spelling out each letter.) He connects the word ahava/love, which has the numerical value of thirteen, and the word echad/which also has the numerical value of thirteen, and points out that thrice echad and thrice ahava is tal/dew, thirty-nine.

With the Hakafot/Circuits of Simchat Torah, we are actually consummating our marriage with Hashem. We are not studying the Torah, we are mamash bringing it down to earth. This means that we are actually bringing the changes in our lives that we have made during this time down to earth by dancing the energy into the earth and experiencing this tremendous unity and love (echad and ahava), which are thirteen, and through three times thirteen, which is the gentle caressing of the dew.

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