Minyan Replay with Rabbi Lizzi — Sukkot!

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

0:00  
Hello and welcome to this half hour dose of weekly Jewish spirituality. Jews have a tradition of praying three times a day, and at Mishkan, we have a daily virtual minion at 8am Central to get your day started, folks join us from across the country and across the world as we begin each day with words and songs of gratitude, inspiration, healing and Torah. Without further ado, I invite you to breathe a little deeper, connect a little more with yourself, with God, with Torah, with this community and with the world around you, wherever you are, whatever your time zone. Good morning, everyone. Beautiful to see you in this new year, because tonight begins the holiday of Sukkot. This minion is going to be themed around one major theme of Sukkot, which is joy, which is joy? So, so I'm going to pull up words here, which are part of the commandment in the Torah about Sukkot, oh, a stunning full moon. Barb says to the group, yes, Sukkot begins on the full moon, as it always does, because it's a pilgrimage holiday. And pilgrimage holidays, with the exception of Shavuot, always happen when the moon is full, because you have to imagine that people were trekking through the desert in the middle of the night to be able to make it to Jerusalem to make their sacrifices and commune with the community, and they needed to, they and they needed to travel at all hours, and that included by the light of the moon. So I hope you all enjoy that tonight, and I hope the weather is like not freezing enough wherever you are, or at least hospitable wherever you are, to make it so that you can go outside tonight, whether you're under a sukkah, whether you're under the trees, but just to really be in nature, which is so much of what the joy of this holiday is about anyway. So here is, here is a, here's a line from the Torah. It is one. It is a one, literal line about Sukkot. It says visa Marta becha, the haita aksama, Visa master, and you will be joyful in your holiday. The haita aksama, and you will be completely joyful. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna play, I'm gonna play a version of it, and we're gonna talk a little bit about what is, what is joy? What is joy is distinct from happiness? What does Joy mean on this holiday for this week? How can we bring it with us into the new year? Let's see. I want to move this up here.

2:53  
Let's

3:00  
See the

3:41  
haita, Tai Tai Ta

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ayah,

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Aye

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that's an ear worm, right? Take that with you into your new week. So we'll shift from the SAM Marta beha, which is a great intro into the holiday of Sukkot, to. The just the standard, standard daily, daily joyfulness of ASHRAE. And as we're going into ASHRAE, which also means joy, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks translates Simcha as joy and ASHRAE as happiness. I don't know. I don't know the etymologies well enough to be able to say, you know, if that seems exactly right, or if that's enabling, enabling him to sort of make a distinction where maybe there isn't a strong one, but to make a point, but he does make a point, which is that joy is something that is felt in the moment, and happiness is something that you maybe strive for over a lifetime, or something but, but that joy you have to feel. You know that, like joy is fleeting, and so anyway, as we're singing ashtray here, I'd be curious for you to begin to noodle out loud like in the chat. Do you think there's a difference between joy and Happiness, and what is it?

6:18  
ASHRAE yoshvei, hallelujah.

6:41  
Oh. Yeah,

6:55  
hallelujah,

7:18  
I don't Night

7:40  
Shem could show Me

8:07  
ha, O, hmm. So Anne Merle says, I vote for joy as a more elevated frequency. I learned that joy comes from gratitude, okay? And Barb says, 100% different for me, joy can be simple the moment the full moon waking up, happiness seems more elusive, maybe a whole state of being. Lee, I think happiness is a spirit is an embodiment. Wow. If you look at some of the Palestinian children that are happy despite their circumstances, you can choose happiness. Joy is fleeting. Happiness is boiling over. In my humble opinion, emotion versus mood. Says Susan, I think joy is more quick and transient. Happiness can be peaceful contentment.

9:12  
Yeah, yeah.

9:15  
So I'm going to, I'm going to pull this off the screen for a moment. I'm gonna, I'm gonna read in sections here, Rabbi Alan Lou in his book. Now we're like, coming to the end of an, you know, a 10 week journey, and the journey begins with Tisha Bob, and where and what is Tisha Bob? Tisha is the mourning of the destruction of a physical building, right of stones and walls and a fortress and and it's the the sitting on the floor and mourning of the coming down of The Walls Around Us. And by Sukkot, we are being joyful inside of a space that is admittedly and obviously not secure, not a place where you can actually even expect to find protection from the elements, but rather open to the elements. And so he writes, this is this is quoting from the Torah you shall dwell in booths for seven days. The Torah enjoins us so that you will know with every fiber of your being that your ancestors dwelt in booths during their sojourn in the wilderness, when they were leaving Egypt. This is a commandment we fill not with a gesture or a word, but with our entire body. We sit in the sukkah with our entire body, only our entire body is capable of knowing what it felt like to leave the burden of Egyptian oppression behind, to let go of it. Egypt in Hebrew, is mitzraim narrowness. Egypt was the narrow place. Only our entire body can know what it felt like to be pushed from a place of dire constriction into a wilderness, into a spacious, open world. Only the body can know what it felt like to be born. Only the body can no fullness of joy, and this commandment can only be fulfilled with joy. All the holidays and all their rituals are to be observed with joy. But there is a special joy, an extra measure of joy, connected to Sukkot. The torah mentions this requirement three different times in connection to Sukkot. And when we like, raise a glass and say Kiddush for Sukkot the designation, whereas, like, Passover is zmanu, the time of our freedom, and Shavuot is ZMan toratenu, the time of the giving of our Torah, the time of ZMan Matan toratenu At the time of the giving of our Torah. Sukh is not ZMan, you know booth, it's ZMan simatenu, the time of our joy. Perhaps this is because Sukkot is the holiday of the Fall Harvest. Well, we rejoice at Passover. It's not a full joy because the spring seedlings are just beginning to come up, just beginning to break the plane of the Earth, just beginning to show themselves in the world. We don't know if they'll make harvest or not. We rejoice at Shavuot, but it's only the early harvest that's the time of the first fruits. Although there is special joy in this, there is also anxiety, the full harvest won't be until fall, until Sukkot. By Sukkot, there's no anxiety. There's nothing to hold back. There's only rejoicing the full harvest has come. Or maybe this special joy is precisely the joy of being stripped naked, the joy of being flush with life, of having nothing between our skin and the wind and the starlight, nothing between us and the world. We have spent the past many weeks stripping ourselves naked, acknowledging our brokenness, allowing ourselves to see what we don't usually look at, embracing the emptiness at the core of our existence, reducing our lives to a series of impulses that rise up and then fall away again. We talked about that with Kol Nidre. And we even have let the reins of denial slip a little. We have relaxed our fierce determination to ward off death at any cost. We have invited ourselves to entertain the possibility that we might die on Rosh Hashanah, it is written we acknowledge who will live and who will die. And by Yom Kippur, we have acknowledged that it may very well be us who dies. And so now we sit in the with flush with the world, in a house in air quotes that calls attention to the fact that it gives no shelter. It's not really a house. It's the interrupted idea of a house, a parody of a house. According to Jewish law, this booth that 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 the branches that constitute its roof. This is not a house. It's a bare outline of a house. It's the architectural feature known as a broken pediment, the notch in the roof line the facade of a house, which leaves the mind to complete the line and thus implants the idea of the line in the mind even more forcefully than an unbroken line would. So it is with the sukkah with its broken lines, its open roofs, its walls that don't quite surround us, the idea of a house comes to mind more forcefully than a house itself might do, and it therefore exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house that gives us security and shelter and haven from the storm, but no house can really offer us this, no building of. Wood and stone can ever offer us protection from the disorder that is always lurking around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from this. And we know this. We never really believed in this illusion. That's probably why we never felt truly secure in it. And I want to pause here for a moment. You know, last week we, last week, we sent love and blessings and prayers for protection to Susanna, who's, you know, who was on her way evacuating from st, Peter st, Pete's Clearwater, Florida, and she texted me this morning to say, you know, I had planned to make minion. She's back in her house. She said, I plan to make minion, but I'm dropping off my wife, who's helping a friend whose house on the waterfront has to be razed to the ground. They had just finished a two year rehab on their house, and, you know, it has to be completely dismantled, and so, and that, obviously, that is just one story. That's just the story that happens to be closest to our Minion this morning. You know, of all of the people who in this world full of chaos and increasing chaos because of climate chaos, we'll be experiencing precisely this, precisely what Rabbi Lizzi was talking about, the illusion of protection in our houses. And so we practice Sukkot is going out in the backyard, practicing letting go of the security of a house, practicing doing what Susanna described last week, looking around our house and saying, I like all this stuff, but I don't need it. I can be okay in the backyard. I can be okay in the elements. I've done it before. Our people has done it before. We know what this is like. And we can even find joy. We can even find joy in it. So we practice it in a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security. We let go of the need. This illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we're flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance one step after another, and when we speak of joy, here he writes, We are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling, fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain. But the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling, fully felt, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy, such is the testimony of Heschel, one of the elderly Jews of Venice, California, whose wisdom is collected in Barbara Meyerhoff book number our days. So she writes, I'll tell you how I survive, but you won't like it. Every time I say anything about it, people shudder, but you couldn't get away from it. The thing that I'm talking about the word is pain.

Pain is an avenue to getting a soul, getting getting quality from yourself. Now if you would like to hear a little more, I could give you an example. When I start to talk about pain, it leaves me that's why I don't talk about it so much. All that I have to say is painful, and when I tell somebody about it, then I feel better. But that's no good. It comes back to you when you're not looking. Whoosh. It jumps out to you from behind the stove, and it grabs you so that when the pain comes, I'm patient. I shut up, active, silence. I bear it. Wait even overnight. But I mean, I bear it. I don't take a tranquilizer or a sleeping pill, some Schnabel. Watch television. I stand before it. I call the pain out. After you go through this, you discover you got choices. You become whole. This is the task of our life. I want to live this kind of life so that I can be alive at every minute, so that I want to know that I'm awake, that I'm altogether awake when I'm asleep, I'm asleep. He writes, few of us could bear to be this awake in our lives. As laudable as this relationship to our experience may be, we will likely find the experience of being flush with reality every single second of our lives to be unbearable and otherwise impossible. I

and so he says, Look, once a year, after several months of reconnecting with the emptiness of the core of form, we leave the formal world behind, and we sit in a house that's only the idea of a house that calls attention to the illusory nature. Of all houses. And there is a joy in this born of the realization that nothing can protect us save us from death, so it's no use defending ourselves. We may as well give up. And there is a wonderful release in this giving up. And so this is for us right now, because he's writing on air of Sukkot, and he writes tomorrow morning, I will wave the lulav and etrog, the four species we are commanded to take up during Sukkot. In my right hand I will hold the long spine of the palm branch with its two Willow sprigs tied to its left and three sprigs of Myrtle to its right. And in my left hand I will hold a yellow Citron full of pox and ridges, and I will wave these things twice, once, as I sing hymns of joy, a praise to God, and once, as I march around the synagogue in solemn procession, Crying hoshiana. Hoshiana, save me. Please. Please save me. He writes, the sexual imagery couldn't be clearer, the palm frond phallus, with the Myrtle and Willow testes, the ridged and speckled yellow fruit. Nor could it be more appropriate. What sex and agriculture have in common is that they point simultaneously to the power and the impetus, excuse me, the impotence of the human condition. We have no idea how to independently form a human life. We can't make it happen by ourselves. Yet, we are indispensable to the process. We have no idea how a seed bears fruit. We can't make that happen either. Yet, if we don't plant and nurture and water seeds and harvest then no fruit will come. These things can't happen without us, but neither can we make them happen on our own. So tomorrow, I will walk around the synagogue celebrating both our power and our impotence, our miraculous capacity to bear and nurture life and our utter dependence on God for it, and I will feel a deep sense of joy, as I do for this is the truth of my life. This is the cusp. I actually stand on it every moment of my life, every moment of my life, I am utterly powerless and infinitely powerful. Every moment of my life I'm inescapably hammered into place by everything that has ever happened since creation, and every moment I am free to act in the way that will alter that great flow of being forever. The poet Gerald stern captures this joy precisely in the poem, lucky life. So here's that poem, dear waves, what will you do for me this year? Will you drown out my scream? Will you let me rise through the fog? Will you filled me? Will you fill me with that old salt feeling. Will you take my long steps in the cold sand? Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study the black clouds with the blue holes in them? Will you let me see the rusty trees and old monoplanes one more year? Will you let me draw my sacred figures and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind. Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to. Lucky you can judge yourself in this water. Lucky you can be purified over and over again. Lucky, there is this same cleanliness for everyone. Lucky life is like that. Lucky life Oh, lucky life Oh, lucky, lucky life, lucky life. So the last two paragraphs of the book are, this is the overwhelming, senseless gratitude we feel when we are finally awake, and it makes no difference what we awaken to, whether it is pain or pleasure, life or death, it is all of a peace, all grounded in the deep joy when fully inhabited, when wholly attended to. Nor does it make any difference that we will inevitably sleep again, drifting back into our house or one remarkably like it, without ever 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. I'll just read what people wrote here. Joy. Feeling of freedom makes me feel very peaceful. Yeah. It's like life come full circle, like the whole the whole season, bittersweet, a little bit like, for those of you who heard Aiden's sermon on on Yom Kippur, we'll put. Not on the podcast. For those of you who heard it, he spoke really beautifully and powerfully about how he finds joy in all of these little moments of living, knowing that he has a life compromising, eventually, life ending, autoimmune illness, and there are so many things that he can't do anymore, right? These these structures, these houses of our bodies that we trust so much to take care of us and let us do all the things that bring us joy in the world. And then we realize, even if we can't do most of those things, we can still find joy. All right, with all of that hanging together, all of that, just the everything of it. I'm going to Shima. I'm pulling together the four corners of my seat seat and holding them over my eyes. Shima. Yisrael, Adonai,

26:02  
I

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don't know.

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As I play I'm gonna play via hafta, just the chant that we often sing here. And if you would like to send love and healing as I play this to anybody in your circle, in your life, anybody who needs healing from illness, from loneliness, anybody who's struggling with addiction, mental health, depression, anybody who needs a prayer Right now, anybody recovering from devastation,

26:58  
They have time. Hey, have

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to

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live

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Aha, you

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will

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love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with All your mind. Set these words, which I speak to you today on your heart. Remind them to your children. Speak of them when you sit in your home and when you lock on your way, when you lie down and when you rise up. Bind them as a sign on your hand. Let them be symbols before your eyes. Ride them on the house, on your doorposts and on your gates, so that you remember to Love behold.

28:58  
Sending rifu shalema to every single person on every one of your lists scrolling down now just seeing how many people were sending love to this morning. Rifuash, Leymah, bemi, Rabbi amino, I am going to Kadisha, tome, mourners, Kaddish,

29:30  
all right.

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Who this morning are we remembering? Yes, Theresa, Owen and Mark, minerlove, Sylvia, herring. I Harry rose Lindsey, John vine Nathan Pollock, Bernard Makowski, Noam shy and Nancy Pryor. Is there anybody this morning who would like to lead us in CAD. Chateau, mourners, Kaddish,

I can lead, thanks. Leia kadash, Rabbi, belma divra Here, say,

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I

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Schnabel,

who

31:00  
Schnabel, amen.

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Amen, may their memories be blessings. Oh. Aiden, you're here. Did you see the love in the chat for you? Go ahead.

31:29  
I'm I made it Dominion yesterday. I made it today. I'm feeling better today. Excited for the day. It's going to be sunny.

31:40  
How did, how did it feel to stand up and give that DEVAR in front of 2500 people? There were, there were about 1300 in person, and then another like 1000 or so that heard it online.

31:55  
The feeling I had greatest after at the end of that sermon was just an overwhelming love for every inch of this community. It was life changing. God, what a great mug. Oh, this, yes,

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this whole thing,

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which I can't see, what it says,

32:26  
it just says, it says, Mama, I really like big mugs. I don't I don't like having to refill. I just like nursing a cup. For a long time.

32:35  
I have mug envy as well. Mug

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envy, it's my mug and David, there is this. There's a section of the book that I didn't that I didn't read because I knew I had limited time, but that I love the connection he makes. Can I? Can I read one more little section of this book in the Sukkot, in the Sukkot section? Okay, this is right. This is from right after the very intense paragraph from Barbara Meyerhoff book number our days. So when he says, like very few of us could bear to be this awake in our lives. So in deshield hammetz, The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade tells the story of his first case as a private detective, he was called in by a woman to trace the whereabouts of her husband, who had suddenly gone missing. The man had been one of Seattle's leading insurance salesmen. He and his wife lived in a beautiful house and were well respected in the Seattle Community. Then one day, he disappeared without a trace. Sam Spade tracked this man doggedly for years. Finally, he found him in Tacoma, a half an hour's drive from Seattle now. Now he had one of tacoma's leading real estate practices. He was married again, and he had a new wife, and lived in a beautiful house and were among the pillars of Tacoma society. Spade was mystified. The man seemed to have stepped out of one life and then replicated it precisely less than half an hour's drive away. Why had he done it? One day at lunchtime, the man explained he had been walking back to his office in downtown Seattle when a brick fell out of the window of a tall building and came so close to him it actually grazed his face. The man was thunderstruck. He had very carefully constructed a life that in no way took account of the possibility of a brick falling from a window and killing him. So he left that life straight away. He hitchhiked to the coast, caught a tramp steamer bound for the South Pacific, sailed around the world several times. He had adventures in all the great cities of the world, and then, little by little, without even realizing what he was doing, he drifted back to. The States settled into coma, became enormously successful again, married another lovely wife, built another beautiful house. Sam Spade gave this story as the following moral. He adjusted his life to take into account that bricks fell out of windows, but then bricks stopped falling out of windows. In other words, we cannot bear too much reality. From the Buddhists. We learn emptiness, yesh, beingness is what the Jewish mystics talk about, and it's, it's a compliment AYin nothingness, but AYin is also Yesh. Emptiness is form. The forms from which we derive comfort and security may well be an illusion, and may well be a shell that stand between us and our experience. But they are an inescapable illusion, an inevitable shell. Form is an inevitable part of our spiritual landscape. We can't live apart from it. So you see what he's doing here, like the both and right, the both and of joy and loss, of happiness and grief of form and emptiness and that and that connects us to Sukkot like like Yom Kippur, being the ultimate, the ultimate in relinquishing all physical everything, and saying, you know, you can survive this Sukkot being kind of the joyful, the joyful synthesis you've been listening To contact Hai, a production of Mishkan Chicago. If you were inspired or informed by this episode, please leave us a five star rating on Apple podcasts so that others can encounter our work. And if you appreciate what Mishkan is doing, I invite you to join as a builder or make a donation on our website@mishkanchicago.org Shabbat, shalom. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai