The Sukkah Is Now

The sukkah, when done by the book, is incongruence itself: Live in a temporary structure as though it were permanent. Throw together three or four walls, toss some disposable organic inedibles over it for a roof…and then move in your most elegant furniture, fine linen, silverware and candelabra to live there as though it were your permanent home. Properly achieved, from the outside it should appear a shack, from within it should look and feel no different than your living room.

Until you look up. And you must look up.

Tell me, of what does this remind you? What other temporary structure do we live in as though it were permanent? I can think of two such structures.

One is our bodies.

Most of us, for at least the first forty years of life, scarcely think of our last stop. Even of those who already stand by the exit door, only a handful have resigned to their mortality. It is simply too overwhelming for any of us to digest: I am not here forever. There was a time when I did not exist, and there will be a time when I will be no longer. My soul may continue, but the "I" will die and be as though it never was. Indeed, it dies and is resurrected at every moment—until the moment shall come when it will die forever.

And so, rather than come to terms with such a jarring reality, most of us choose to sit through life as though it were a movie that never ends.

The other such structure is the biosphere. Something about it—or about us—seduces us to believe that there will always be water to drink, oxygen to breathe, fish in the sea and elephants roaming the savanna; the earth will never cease to grant us its bounty or to accept the garbage we bury in its bowels. We surrender to the data that screams otherwise, bow our heads to the experts—yet something of our internal logic does not allow us to absorb the idea that our world could be somehow vulnerable to our actions. And so we continue living upon it as though it were an absolute, as though the very act of existence assumes that this shall always be.

Until we look up. And there will always be those events in life that force us to look up.

So once you look up and come to the realization that we are only travelers on a finite road, that nothing shall ever return as it was, there is not a single object onto which you can grasp and rely with utter confidence; for that which is will be not and that which is not will be and none of it will ever be truly real—once you know all this, how then should you live?

You might say, "If so, for what do I need this transitory world, this dark pit into which my soul has been cast? Let my mind at least stay absorbed in the higher reality transcending change and ignore as much as possible this mirage of life." As many before you, enlightened and brilliant men and women, indeed have said.

Yet that is not the halacha. The halacha is that—even after looking up to see the flimsy roof of your sukkah that renders it a temporary dwelling—even then you must continue to live within it as though it were your permanent home, with your furniture and silverware, your fine linen tablecloth and your candelabra. To live this fleeting moment, to celebrate it, to squeeze all you can out of it and to cherish it as though nothing else exists, believing with all your heart that everything was created for this moment alone. For in truth, all of time and all of space came into being with the thought of the act of beauty you might do here and now within this body and with these things.

In truth, there is no contradiction. For only once you know this moment shall never return, only then will you treasure it as though it were forever.

And so too the water you drink, the oxygen you breathe, the fish in the sea and the elephant herd roaming the savanna.

Know that which is above you; rejoice with your portion in life.