Hugged by a Sukkah

You may have heard people say that the sukkah is a divine embrace. When you sit inside a sukkah on Sukkot, those walls and that ceiling—that’s G‑d hugging you.

They didn’t make it up. It’s from a parable of the Baal Shem Tov, as told by Rabbi Shmuel of Lubavitch.

In short, the king sends off his only son, the crown prince, to learn what the real world is all about. Being an adolescent, the prince manages to shirk off his entourage and slip away into the land of Big Trouble.

Eventually, he arrives in a land of savage, hostile people who do not recognize his father as king, speak languages he does not understand, and take only cash. Being an adolescent, he becomes one of them.

After many years, he remembers his father, life in the palace, and his true identity as a prince. He yearns to return and so sets out on the long journey home.

Eventually, he arrives at the palace gates. He no longer looks anything like a prince. Worse, he has no means to communicate, no longer speaking the language. To the guards, he’s just an annoyance, so they toss him in a ditch.

Weary, broken, and frustrated, he breaks down in tears. From a deep, raw place inside of him emerges a sudden, loud cry, “Dad! Dad, I’m here!”

That’s Rosh Hashanah. You’re the prince. The cry is the shofar.

Dad, the king, hears his son’s calls from his private, inner chamber. Without a thought, he jumps up and rushes out of the palace, leaving every door open and bypassing all protocol.

That’s Yom Kippur.

The king grabs his son and takes him swiftly into that inner chamber where he gives him a big hug.

That’s Sukkot. The sukkah surrounds you from all sides. You’re inside a divine embrace. You are loved.

Hey, my house surrounds me from all sides. The walls and ceiling of my office surround me from all sides. The sky and the earth surround me from all sides. What’s special about a sukkah?

Unless, perhaps, the entire world is actually one grand sukkah-embrace…

How Big Can Be Small

Let’s back up. What is a divine hug, anyways? What’s this notion of entering into a relationship with the Creator of the Universe?

It sounds so warm and comforting. It also sounds absurd. G‑d is infinite. You are finite. Truth be told, the two of you don’t have much in common to chat about over a beer.

But it’s not like the nice rabbis and rebbetzins who told you about this G‑d hug hadn’t thought this through. They probably knew something we haven’t yet mentioned. Kind of counterintuitive at first, but makes sense when you think into it.

The greatest bigness is smallness.

Think of a brilliant teacher. A smart teacher can explain college-level science to high school students. An amazing teacher can explain anything to a five-year-old. G‑d can fit all of Himself anywhere He chooses.

As Rabbi Yochanan points out in the Talmud:

Anywhere in Torah you find mention of G‑d’s greatness, in the same place you’ll find mention of His humility.1

They’re talking about G‑d caring for the impoverished and the downtrodden. Yet, like all Talmudic insights, it’s a key that fits more than one door:

If you’re sort of big, or measurably big, or even really, really big, then small is small and big is big.

But if you are not just big, but Infinitely Big—well not you, but G‑d is Infinitely Big—then what’s the difference big and small? To the Absolutely, Infinitely Big, they’re all equally zeros. He can go anywhere He wants.

From another angle: True bigness is getting to choose where you want to be. And you really get to prove how super-big you are when you choose to be in the smallest places.

Guess what? You’ve been chosen. Not because you’re so great. Because you’re so small. And the smaller you make yourself, the more chosen you’re going to be.

Interface With Infinity

But how do you grab Him? Inside what cloak does He come to you?

You need an interface. A really good interface between finite and infinite.

Now, I know that sounds ridiculous. Every math 101 student knows there’s nothing between finite and infinite. But interfaces are the secret of the multiverse. They connect worlds.

Like you and the device you are reading this on.

Your device thinks—well, it doesn’t really think, it processes—in digital. You think—well, we really have no idea how humans think, but we’ve certainly given up on the digital model.

The point is, your soft and fuzzy human psyche is further from the cold and hard digital world than it is from an alternative universe. To work together, you need a bridge between worlds.

So some nice people in Silicon Valley built a graphic user interface to hook the two of you up together. You touch cute little boxes and drag them around on the display and your device receives all the zeros and ones it needs to process and deliver whatever result it needs to spit back.

That’s one sort of interface over one deep chasm. A yet more amazing interface is far older and bridges an even wider gap. It’s the interface between your psyche and the rest of the world. It’s called language.

Language takes raw ideas and emotions and transmits them to your conscious mind as brain chatter, to others as words, and into the physical world as meaningful action. It’s a truly awesome bridge/interface between the spiritual and the material. Listening to that chatter in your brain, you sit at the edge of the material world listening in on the world of the angels.

Okay, so those are two forms of interface: one between human and digital, the other between spiritual and physical. What is G‑d’s interface between infinite and finite? Where are the buttons, sliders, icons, and text fields for us to interact with our infinite Creator? In what language does He speak to us?

The answer is simple. It’s the universe in which you live.

Blueprint of the Universe

I’ll bet you thought I was going to say it’s the Torah. You figured Tzvi Freeman is always pushing Torah and mitzvahs. That’s his agenda. This was all a lead-up to just more of his mitzvah propaganda.

And now you’re thinking that maybe Tzvi Freeman is not such a fanatic after all.

Actually, I’m even more of a fanatic than you imagined.

I’m telling you that everything you will ever see, hear, touch, smell, taste or otherwise sense—anything that will affect you in any way—is all but an interface by which you grasp the infinite, divine wisdom that is Torah.

As the Baal Shem Tov would often say, no event occurs to you that is not commentary on that wisdom. You only need to open your soul to the language in which G‑d speaks to you.

And there is no instance of life that is not an opportunity to be embraced within a mitzvah—brought to you by the buttons and sliders of life’s interface.

What does Torah provide? Torah is light. When it’s dark, you don't know what's what. You could chomp into your kitchen sponge, mistaking it for a piece of cake. Always best to turn on the lights before a midnight snack.

That’s all that Torah is doing—illuminating the purpose of each of these user interface features, what they do and how to use them

That’s what the Midrash means when it says G‑d looked in the Torah and created the world. He designed every atom of it as a means for yet another mitzvah, another lesson. Another embrace.

Idolizing the Interface

Of course, you have free will. You can decide you’re not interested in hugging Him. You would rather embrace the interface. Pretend there’s nothing deeper than just the world you see and touch.

Interface-hugging. Also known as idolatry.

In a primordial era, at the dawn of digital connectivity, when dial-up connections were standard and everything was always plugged into a wall, it was then that the cult of interactive media conquered the hearts of many otherwise bright souls.

The received wisdom of the time was that the ultimate human experience was to interact with a machine. Children were to be taught by machines. People were to get their jollies from interactions with machines.

That era is past. Today, we all agree that the machines are for people to interact with people. A good app on a good device is one that feels invisible, as though all that exists is you and the people you interact with.

Well, almost. We now have AI interfaces that deceptively claim to be human, as in, “What would you like to chat with me about?”

Why am I telling you this? Because the same idolatry of interface abuse plays out with G‑d’s interface, the world.

You might not understand what the world is all about. You might think it’s a fun machine to interact with. Or a big scary one that is using you for its own fun.

It’s neither. It’s an interface. It’s not meant to be an app of its own. Immediately beneath its surface lies the absolute oneness of an infinite G‑d. That’s what you want to access through it.

Worshiping the world is like hugging a coat and ignoring the person inside.

Preschool Hugs

The question then is not how a flimsy structure with a roof of scattered branches constitutes a divine embrace. The question is why this structure alone? Why not all of heaven and earth?

And the answer is that there is no closeness like the closeness of the sukkah, no embrace like the embrace of those flimsy walls and scattered branches.

It’s a hostile world out there. To get to that embrace, you must put up a fight, yank out the sparks of goodness buried deep within it and discard the junk. Only then can you have a mitzvah, an embrace. Then you can hear the Torah speaking to you through the events of your life.

But when you walk into a sukkah on Sukkot, you are surrounded by a clear, clean signal of divine wisdom. Its very structure is Torah, in all the details discussed in the Talmud and Shulchan Aruch. Those branches up there—for these seven days, those are holy branches, an intense love from the highest heaven shining down on you.

You need only to sit there, doing whatever you need to do, and you are enveloped in a mitzvah.

We need that experience once a year. At the beginning of a new life, as newborn creatures in a newborn year, before we plunge headstrong into the turmoil of a cold, nasty universe, we need to be shown what can be done with that universe. That it, too, can become a sukkah.

Sitting cozy in your sukkah, you will learn that life is a holy space that you must enter with your entire being. You will learn that its ceiling is of flimsy materials that shade you from the light. That beyond this ceiling are the sun, the moon, and the stars.

And that if you use each thing for the purpose for which it was created, then every moment can be a divine embrace. Way beyond the stars.

The Embrace Yet To Come

True, for the current moment the interface is clumsy. Often counterintuitive. As I wrote, downright hostile and user-abusive. We have to keep looking in the manual to know what to do next.

But soon will come a time when, as Habakkuk prophesied, “A stone will cry out from the wall.”2 Not only will the world no longer oppose and challenge you. The purpose and meaning of each thing will scream out loud and clear.

At that time, as Rambam writes, “The occupation of the entire world will be only to know G‑d.”3

There will be worldly occupations. People will build, plant, write, create…all those things we do today.

But not to earn a living. Everything we do will then be only to know the infinite G‑d.

Why wait until then? Have you hugged an infinite Creator today?