by Rabbi Shlomy Levetov
As the High Holidays end, we are quick to usher in the holiday of Sukkot; a beautiful time when friends and family come together to sit in a Sukkah, rejoice, and shake the Lulav and Etrog (the four kinds). It’s a Holiday Marathon!
Throughout the year, the hustle and bustle of life can be very cumbersome that we forget to look at the bigger picture. Our jobs and careers are at the forefront of our minds and we can overlook that G‑d is the one who provides for us.
Therefore, G‑d blessed us with Holidays. Holidays are like a family vacation. We lock the office doors behind us to spend time with each other and enhance our relationships with the people we love. Similarly, on a Jewish holiday we attempt to shut down our smartphones in order to truly see and interact with our loved ones; to close our office in order to see our soul; to shut down the endless static in our lives in order to see G‑d and enhance our relationship with Him. And every Jewish holiday enhances a different facet of that relationship.
On the Rosh Hashana, we blow the shofar and crown G‑d as our king. We realign ourselves with our purpose in this world and accept upon ourselves to follow His directives (Mitzvot).
On Yom Kippur, we repent and reconnect. We dig down deep into our soul- a part of our Soul that is one with G‑d and doesn’t get effected by the tumult of our day to day life. Ultimately, we reveal our intimate relationship with G‑d.
Just as the High Holiday Marathon is ending and we are days away from being thrown right back into the whirlwind of life and our busy schedules, G‑d gives us Sukkot. A Sukkah is a four walled hut covered in greenery, that we sit in during the Holiday to commemorate G d sheltering our ancestors as they traveled from Egypt to the Promised Land. The Sages say, "For the entire holiday, a person should consider the Sukkah to be his permanent home and his house to be a temporary place." We eat and spend time in the Sukkah in the same way that we would in your house. Every single moment that we spend in the Sukkah is a mitzvah – a connection between us and G‑d.
This is the message of the Sukkah – Just like every mundane activity that is done in the sukkah is a mitzvah the same can be true in our everyday life: do whatever you normally do, all those mundane activities—but do it for the sake of G‑d. Search deep and find purpose and meaning in your everyday activities.
This is especially true after experiencing an inspiring and meaningful High Holidays. One can think that spirituality is for the synagogue. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are times that we come to Shul and we pray, we confess, we repent, and we return to G‑d. We are on a spiritual high and we feel very connected to G‑d and our heritage. However this doesn’t happen at our supper table with family, it doesn’t happen at our desk in the office. It happens in the synagogue.
Connecting to G‑d through sitting in our sukkah immediately after we connected to Him through sitting in synagogue, further emphasizes that G-liness is not just for once a year in shul. Every act of living can be holy, and no act is truly “mundane.”