„And within the revealed life that takes place before our eyes, findin…”

A sukkah is a reality that contains poverty and wretchedness. We leave a beautiful, orderly stone house for a temporary dwelling. We try as much as possible to arrange the sukkah, but at the end of the day the sukkah is not a house, is not a permanent dwelling.

Rav Kook is aware of this matter; he compares it to the Land of Israel of the beginning of the last century, as opposed to the lands abroad of those years. The Israel of that time was a temporary place, a dangerous place, a place that was not always pleasant to be in.

In the sukkah, too, as in that Israel, there lay hidden a deep seed of strength, of connection, of spirituality, and of togetherness. Years after his passing it became clear that the permanent dwelling was the most temporary of all temporary things, with the outbreak of the terrible Holocaust. The sukkah of those years, which appeared dangerous and poor, became our only home in the world.

If we succeed in understanding the meaning of our private and national home through this festival, we will succeed in rejoicing both in the temporariness of the sukkah and in the permanence that we have all year round. And perhaps this year we will also succeed in understanding more the temporary and the stable in our lives, which have suddenly become full of question marks.

In memory of Shalom ben Regina

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