The Solace to Discover Purpose: Sukkot
"While material abundance may be appreciated, it cannot deliver either the peace of mind or the tranquility of spirit for which we all ultimately long."
By Andrew Rashkow
The world is in search of a room.
For some, it is a master bedroom on the highest floor with a waterline view, swaddled in sheets with a thread count requiring scientific notation and an expanse wide enough to open a side café.
It could be a perfectly lit, spacious living room with exquisite Italian leather furniture so comfortable that one’s body melts into its soft cushions like butter on a hot biscuit, marbled floors quarried to ensure that the tinted grain of their mineral wash appears like a gentle, incoming tide, and an unplayed grand piano nestled in the corner — out of the way but not out of view.
For others, the dream entails room service with the latest generative AI that not only anticipates what you are about to order, but also, what you immediately regret having not ordered, and has both freshly made and awaiting your first voice-recognized stomach grumbling. Of course these room requests come in many other varieties as well: glamping in the sand on the French Riviera, a log cabin with a wood-burning fireplace on a desolate ridge-line, a quaint, well-kept cottage ensconced in a colony of artists and writers, or an updated version of Batman’s lair with the very latest tech buried in the heart of a downtown metropolis amid all the action.
And yet one stubborn question persists regardless of any of these idealized surroundings: What to do in that room?
After a week of being pampered with nearly every imaginable creature comfort and having his every appetite promptly attended to, David Foster Wallace commented in his famous 1996 cruise travelogue “Shipping Out,” published in HARPER’S, “the insatiable-infant part of me simply adjusts its desires upward until it once again it levels out at a homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction.” This same sentiment was expressed more concisely, more memorably, and with a better beat when sung by Mick Jagger 30 years earlier.
The truth is that the wisest of men, King Solomon, arrived at this realization nearly three millennium before both examples above, when he encapsulated this concept even more precisely in Proverbs as, “Someone who has a hundred, wants two hundred.
While material abundance may be appreciated, it cannot deliver either the peace of mind or the tranquility of spirit for which we all ultimately long. These features can only come as outgrowths from within and remain oblivious to all externalities, no matter how pleasant or alluring they may be.
The Jewish soul can, however, find a shelter that fosters this internal reckoning and awakening. It is an abode that is only available once a year and for one week only. It’s a simple hut that is called a “sukkah.” The temporary thatch that serves as its makeshift roof allows both the rain to penetrate and a glimpse of the stars above at night, which seems to emphasize that the big picture is never lost. Inside this transitory lodging, we find a mode of existence that embodies a faith beyond what we easily understand, and every moment in its environs is eternal since that which can easily be rebuilt can never be destroyed.
May our nation come together soon inside a sukkah and celebrate while basking beneath the shadow of our faith!
ANDREW RASHKOW is the CEO of Imbibe, Co-founder of Heaven’s Door Spirits, and a Jerusalem-based Teacher and Adviser.
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