Our succahs — to which we decamp with real joy despite the weather and inconvenience — are demonstrable signs of modern-day holiness

I

magine for a minute, that you’re a frequent-flying, fair-minded non-Jew, who spends a year observing us as we board the plane. Among all the unusual headgear, religious strings, and foil-wrapped sandwiches, what is the most outlandish thing that you notice about us?

The answer is probably: “Twigs.”

To outsiders, the fact that we wear fur hats — any hats actually — is all par for the course. After all, Jews are expected to dress differently. The fact that we try to stuff stacks of matzah boxes into the overhead compartment is already priced in. After all, Jews are known to eat differently.

But for the life of them, even the most philo of philo-Semites can’t fathom why we perambulate through airports holding a medieval knight’s lance, threatening to spear anyone not wearing a tactical vest.

Imagine these poor people’s confoundment when they peer inside the plastic cases and see what are clearly… a branch and some leafy twigs?

In a spirit of brutal honesty, we are — empirically speaking — an odd lot. But never more so than on Succos.

Bear with me for a minute, because there’s a serious point here.

Quite a few years ago, my parents hosted a distinguished old lady whose family had been one of the founders of the community in Manchester where my father was rabbi.

Sitting there in the succah, she told us of her own childhood memories of the Yom Tov. Sixty or so years before, her father was a pioneer — the first in the area to build a succah.

“It was our toolshed,” she remembered. “We cleared it out and decorated it, and it was a novelty in the community.”

Everything was perfect, except for one thing: They’d forgotten to tell the Irish gardener.

The man — known to indulge in the occasional pint or three — chose the first day of Yom Tov to do his job. Amid the Manchester drizzle, he strode up the garden path toward the toolshed and flung open the door.

Goggle-eyed, he stared at the sight that greeted him.

In place of the lawnmower and shears, there were the owner and his family. They sat around a table laid with the best china, bundled up in coats and ingesting hot chicken soup to ward off the cold.

Petrified, the Irish gardener passed his hand over his forehead and uttered this immortal line.

“I knew it,” he said. “I’ve had too much to drink!”

To me, that anecdote is both delightful and meaningful. In fact, it should be preserved as a Carlebachian ode to one of the most beautiful aspects of this time of year: the Jewish People’s enthusiasm for mitzvos, even when they’re hard.

“Dear friends, holy, holy friends — have you heard, have you heard? (strum, strum) of the Holy Tool Sheds? Of the Holy, Holy Tool Sheds?”

Because that’s what they are. Our succahs — to which we decamp with real joy despite the weather and inconvenience — are demonstrable signs of modern-day holiness.

That’s not just evident in the Jews who live in the “northern lands” — as the Maharam Schick and Aruch Hashulchan refer to the wastes of Europe — where the cold often halachically exempts people from sitting in the succah.

The same thing is on display in the balmy climes of the Holy Land. For those fortunate enough to spend the Yom Tov in Yerushalayim, take a stroll past the city’s most exclusive hotel, the Waldorf.

There you’ll see an incredible sight. On the balconies attached to each of the sumptuous suites is a clapboard succah.

I don’t know what New York hotel legends William Waldorf Astor or his cousin John Jacob Astor IV would have made of it, but to me, the ritzy establishment looks like a shanty town.

Is there anything holier than that?

This all begs a question: What possesses tycoons and tradesmen alike to abandon their homes with such joy? Where does this overflowing enthusiasm for Succos come from?

The Sfas Emes has an unusual take. Happiness, he writes is a feeling that comes from purity of soul, when the accretion of filth around the neshamah is washed away in the process of teshuvah and forgiveness.

When the soul is allowed to shine, we feel uplifted. Just as the forgiveness of Yom Kippur generates an overflow of joy for the days of Succos, so too the forgiveness of the wedding day results in the seven days of celebration that we call sheva brachos.

The joy of purification — it’s a phenomenal idea that tells us something encouraging about who we are.

Every year, we find ourselves in the same cycle. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we soar. Go into any shul in any frum community, and you find it on fire. Real, sincere tefillah, real desire to change — tempered with the sobering awareness that soon, reality will kick in. The spiritual adrenaline will fade and we’ll be left struggling.

Who are we — creatures of the Rosh Hashanah high, or those of the post-Chanukah slump? It makes you wonder. Over these elevated days when we rededicate ourselves — yet again — to the same old battle, are we just defrauding ourselves?

The answer is that we’re not fakes — and Succos is the proof.

Who doesn’t feel the lightness in the air, that distinctly Jewish happiness as Succos approaches? Who doesn’t feel the enthusiasm of a fresh dawn as we embark on a new path?

That spring in our step, that joy in building the succah — they’re a sign that something shifted during the days of introspection before.

If happiness comes from reconnecting to the soul, we pass that test amid the intensity of these special days.

How to build on that for the rest of the year is a different question. But as we sit in our Holy, Holy Tool Sheds, we can look around with hope.

We may not be Rabbeinu Yonah-style baalei teshuvah, but we’re not quite as lost as we think.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1081)