The gemara in Avoda Zara 3b describes how at the End of Days the non-Jewish nations will protest having been deprived of the opportunity to fulfill Hashem’s mitzvos. In response Hashem will give them none other than the mitzvah of Succah to prove their mettle as mitzvah observers.

The non-Jews will enter their respective succahs only to depart in a huff moments later when Hashem harnesses the sun’s intense rays to make those temporary abodes unbearably hot. And the gemara foretells as they storm out of their huts each non-Jew will deliver a frustrated disdainful kick at his succah’s walls. 

But doesn’t the halachah itself exempt from this mitzvah one who experiences discomfort in the succah due to heat or cold? The gemara itself poses this question and its rhetorical response is an incisive one: “Exempt they may be — but need they kick at the succah too on their way out?” 

In a piyut appearing in the Succos machzor the paytan speaks of Klal Yisrael fulfilling mitzvas Succah “with its measurements … its walls … its s’chach its shade its enterings and exitings.” Its exitings? 

In his Divrei Chaim Rav Chaim Sanzer writes that even someone who is exempt from this mitzvah for reasons of distress sits nonetheless — wherever he may be — in the “holy shade of the succah.” The essence of the mitzvah he explains is “teishvu k’ein toduru ” to regard the succah as one does his year-round home. When we leave our homes no matter for how long and no matter how far we’ve gone it’s still to us our home.

And precisely that too is the succah. Be it ever so humble with its flimsy walls and fragile roofing so porous and vulnerable to the elements so lacking in the ostensible security of the house situated just footsteps away there’s no place else we call home on this Yom Tov — even Rav Chaim says after we’ve temporarily taken leave of its hallowed space.

Alas if the succah is indeed our home whether we are within it or without is there any reason at all for a fit of pique not to mention an assault on the succah itself over having to leave it due to a temporary heat wave? That reaction can only stem from a profound misperception of the nature of the succah — and with it all mitzvos.

For the outsider to Torah the succah can be understood as a place of prayer study and contemplation. And in this he is not wrong for Chazal indeed refer to the succah as a structure upon which “the Divine Name rests ” where all those sacred activities ought rightfully to take place.

But the notion that the succah is our home in which we are bidden to in the Shulchan Aruch’s words “eat and drink and sleep and relax and live ” is a foreign concept to him. What after all have all those things to do with the life of the spirit with a space in which the Shechinah Itself sees fit to repose? Yet it is precisely our homes — both on Succos and year-round — that can be worthy of the Divine Name and specifically as a result of the distinctively refined way in which we conduct those very quotidian activities.

The notion of the physical as the enabler of the spiritual is one that even the angels On High could not grasp. They petitioned Hashem to keep the Torah in the Heavens until Moshe bested them by marshaling the manifold mitzvos requiring a body a family and a home for their fulfillment — proof positive that Torah was destined to be entrusted to man rather than malach. 

“Let not the mitzvah of succah be light in your eyes for its laws are equal to all the mitzvos of the Torah” says the paytan elsewhere in Shacharis of the second Yom Tov day. With its goal of bringing even the most mundane aspects of human living under the umbrella of the Divine this mitzvah is emblematic of the overarching purpose of the mitzvos as a whole. And in times yet to come one kick at the succah walls will crystallize how the nations of the world misapprehend not just this mitzvah but every other one as well. 

MARRYING IN Once upon a time the prospect of one’s child marrying out of the faith was an unthinkable tragedy for Jewish parents whatever their religious orientation. As one comedian described his parents’ reaction “They proceeded directly to the window of their tenth-floor apartment and began competing for jumping space.”

Readingof such reactions always triggered two feelings. First sympathy for the young Jew contemplating intermarriage who’s surely bewildered to hear his parents invoke for the first time ever Judaism or the future of the Jewish people as reasons to forego his personal freedom to do as he pleases. Second wonderment at the stubborn resilience of the Jewish neshamah. Underneath a veneer that claims to have no use for tribalistic notions of particularity that soul gives a parent no rest when his child is about to sever forever the last link in his family’s generational chain of Jewishness.

In an imagined monologue of a young baal teshuvah standing at the graveside of his frum grandfather Rav Nota Schiller once described just such a scene:

I was thinking of marrying out … and your son and his wife could not find the words to tell me why I should not … and I began to marvel at these 20^th century emancipated liberal agnostic parents of mine — like why … should it bother them so much.… Not that their arguments held water on the contrary they were porous but what grabbed me was the energy — what was it that bothered them so much something they couldn’t even articulate … they even involved your presence they downright waved you like a flag — funny them needing you.…

The current issue of Mosaic magazine features an essay entitled Intermarriage: Can Anything Be Done? by Conservative Jewish historian Jack Wertheimer who details the skyrocketing intermarriage rates; the communal resignation tolerance and even celebration of out-marriage; and the fear of offending non-Jewish spouses and losing congregants that drives many temples and schools to welcome non-Jews into their services classrooms and even their leadership (he reports the befuddlement of one clergyman “when a member of his synagogue’s religious-education committee appeared at a meeting one Ash Wednesday evening with a cross etched on her forehead”).  

Yet Wertheimer believes there’s a “silent majority” opposing intermarriage consisting of “the families who join and attend synagogues support federation campaigns and participate as activists in Jewish organizations.” How he asks “can Jewish leaders work together with this silent majority to overthrow the regnant approaches to intermarriage?” In his answer he spends precisely 12 words on Jewish education — “invest heavily in intensive forms of Jewish education through the college years” — but spends the bulk of this section on “encouraging as many single Jews as possible to marry within the community” through initiatives like Birthright Israel “confronting single Jews who are contemplating [intermarriage] with some of the complications they can expect to encounter ” and telling young Jews “the truth: the American Jewish community is in a fight for its life and the younger generation is expected to shoulder its share of responsibility.”

This is all so deeply saddening. In a heterodox Jewish world rife with Holocaust denial — denial that is of the unfolding Holocaust of American Jewish souls and its causes — Jack Wertheimer has consistently been a voice of sanity willing to face up to harsh realities engage in self-critique and even to call out anti-Orthodox bias and praise Orthodoxy’s successes. And yet he spends almost all of an essay entitled Intermarriage: Can Anything Be Done? avoiding the only real answer to that question. Like the Jewish parents who never gave their child a single good reason to reject intermarriage but are viscerally repulsed by it nonetheless Jack Wertheimer opposes intermarriage in his gut but can hardly explain why with his brain. 

Here’s the simple truth of the matter: Appeals to exalt group interest over one’s own self-interest are hopelessly futile; people can’t be “encouraged” or guilt-tripped en masse into marrying Jewish. Only healthy self-interest can possibly succeed when marrying Jewish is the natural outgrowth of seeing Jewish belief and practice as so central to one’s being that it would be simply illogical to share a life with someone who doesn’t believe and practice similarly. And only the Jewish education that teaches how G-d showed His way to His special people Israel — can guarantee it.