For the Love of God

My father is very handy. His instinct, when there’s something to be fixed, is that he can do it himself, and nine times out of ten, he’s right. So when my parents moved into their current house and they had the space for a big sukkah, my father knew right away that he wanted to build one from scratch that would be a perfect fit.

It wasn’t until our third Sukkot living in that house that he was ready to tackle the project. He had big plans for it: stained wood panels, windows that would open to let in a breeze, doors on either side, and a huge tarp that we could roll up and down if it rained which would keep the sukkah usable even in case of inclement weather. He even planned an easy-to-install frame that would make putting up and taking down the sukkah an absolute breeze.

Time got away from him, and suddenly it was the week of Sukkot, yet my father was still determined. That year, the holiday started on a Wednesday night. The Sunday evening prior—three days before Sukkot would start, whether we were ready for it or not—my father and I took a trip to Home Depot to get the raw material he needed to start building. And they didn’t have anything.

The next morning (for those keeping track at home, that means we’re now two and a half days away), my father went to a different Home Depot and found what he needed. He came home, rolled up his sleeves, got to work, and basically worked nonstop until about two hours before candle lighting.

That story is now a legend in my family, and we laugh about it every year as we prepare for Sukkot. (The sukkah would not have been complete, by the way, if not for my mother, angel that she is, volunteering to go pick up the bamboo mats that we needed for the roof of the sukkah.) I may now be six thousand miles away, but that did not stop me from reminiscing while on the phone with my father the other day. Looking back now, he said, he can’t believe how crazy he was to think that he could pull that off. I countered: “I think the key was that you didn’t think about it. You just went for it.”

Our conversation got me thinking about the nature of the holiday of Sukkot. We are now coming off of the intensity of the Days of Awe, with Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur spent immersed in prayer and repentance. The capstone to this holiday period is the joy of Sukkot, where we are, quite literally, commanded to celebrate.

In instructing the Jewish people about the holiday, though, God gives the reason for moving out of our homes and into these somewhat flimsy, definitely-not-weatherproof huts: “You shall dwell in huts for seven days; all members of Israel will dwell in huts so that generations will know that I settled the Israelites in huts when I took them out of Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 23:42-3). There’s an argument in the Talmud whether that refers to actual huts in the desert or if it refers to God enclosing the Israelites with protective clouds on all sides. Regardless, though, it seems like a trivial detail in the general story of the Exodus that we should be celebrating, and specifically now as we reach the peak of the holiday season.

Of course, God knows what He is doing, and it is not trivial at all. The key lies in the fact that it was God Who settled us in the huts, whether they were made of stone or cloud. We were in the desert. There was nothing—no food, no water, no shelter. It is, to put it simply, an extremely inhospitable place. And yet, there we were.

The prophet Jeremiah, in a verse that we cite in our prayers on Rosh Hashana, explains our sojourn in the desert perhaps the most beautifully: “I remember the kindness of your youth, the love of when you were a bride: you followed after Me in the desert, in a land that is unsown” (2:2). We were there because of our deep, unwavering love for God. It was crazy, but love makes you do crazy things, including just not thinking it through. (The times, for the record, that the Jewish people did think about it too deeply led to near-disastrous consequences.) And God reciprocated, giving us the food, water, and shelter that we needed to survive.

It’s very easy, in the intensity of this season, to lose sight of that love. The prayer, the repentance, the fasting can make us get lost in the fear of God. And that fear is important, but it must be accompanied by love.

There’s a beautiful custom that many people have to put up their sukkah immediately following Yom Kippur. Because after ten intense days of focus on Divine judgement, we cap it all off with returning to our roots as a bride who followed God through the desert, wandering through the most inhospitable terrain because we could not contain our love. That, in my estimation, is the perfect capstone to this holiday season.

Because as we declare every year when we move out into those huts that neither protect us from the rain nor the heat, we still love God. That is the foundation of our relationship with Him that has carried us through generation after generation.

And love still makes us do some crazy things.

Wishing everyone a joyous, peaceful, and beautiful Sukkot.