Sukkot is the holiday, not only for Jews but for the world. That is why we invite all to our sukkot. And we conclude the holiday season by dancing with the Torah not only in our synagogues but in the streets as well.
Now for a quick devar Torah.
Tonight we begin celebrating Sukkot. And when you stop and think about it, Sukkot is fascinating—not only because of what we do on the holiday, but because of when we celebrate it.
Logically, you might think Sukkot should come immediately after Pesach. After all, Pesach commemorates our leaving Egypt, and Sukkot recalls how God protected and sustained us as we traveled through the wilderness. Historically, those events follow one another.
Yet Sukkot comes in the fall, when the weather can be unpredictable. We leave our secure homes and go into a fragile sukkah, where there may be wind, rain and cold.
Why?
One answer is that Sukkot is part of a much larger progression in the Jewish calendar.
Pesach is about freedom. We leave Egypt and become a free people.
Shavuot is about law and responsibility. At Sinai, freedom is given direction. We receive the Torah and learn that being free does not mean simply doing whatever we want. A free society needs laws, responsibilities and values.
And then comes Sukkot.
Sukkot represents another stage: maturity.
There is something remarkable about the sacrifices offered on Sukkot. The Torah describes seventy bulls being offered over the course of the holiday. Jewish tradition famously connects those seventy offerings with the seventy nations of the world.
Suddenly, our concern is not only ourselves.
That idea connects beautifully with something we read just a few days earlier, on Yom Kippur: the Book of Jonah.
Jonah is sent to Nineveh, a great non-Jewish city, and he doesn’t want to go. He tries to escape his mission by boarding a ship. A terrible storm strikes, and eventually Jonah is thrown overboard and swallowed by a great fish.
But notice something remarkable about the story: again and again, it is the non-Jews who respond to God.
The sailors recognize that something extraordinary is happening. They pray, they change their behavior and they develop a new reverence for God.
Then Jonah finally reaches Nineveh and delivers God’s warning. What happens?
The people of Nineveh repent.
Jonah is unhappy with the result. He knew that God was compassionate, and he did not want Nineveh spared. But God teaches Jonah a profound lesson.
At the end of the book, Jonah is upset when the plant that had provided him shade dies. God essentially says: You care about this plant—and shouldn’t I care about the people of Nineveh?
They, too, are God’s creations.
That is an extraordinary message to read on Yom Kippur. Repentance, forgiveness and God’s concern are not exclusively Jewish ideas. The people of Nineveh can repent, and God accepts their repentance.
And then, only a few days later, we celebrate Sukkot—a holiday with a remarkably universal dimension.
Our sukkah is open. We invite guests inside. And symbolically, the offerings of Sukkot encompass not merely Israel but the nations of the world.
Even today you can see an echo of this in Jerusalem during Sukkot, when Christians from around the world come to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles and march through Jerusalem expressing their support for Israel and the Jewish people.
I once gave a tour to an evangelical Christian group, and the group’s leader asked me, completely seriously, “When are you building the Third Temple?”
I remember thinking that he seemed to believe in its eventual rebuilding more strongly than many Jews I knew!
But there is a deeper point here.
Judaism was never supposed to mean hiding from the world.
We were given the Torah not merely to possess it, but to live it. And by living it—through justice, honesty, compassion, holiness and the way we treat other human beings—we can bring its values into the world around us.
Perhaps that is the progression of our holidays.
Pesach: We become free.
Shavuot: We receive the law and learn how a free people should live.
Sukkot: We become mature enough to turn outward and ask what responsibility we have toward the rest of humanity.
And then we reach Simchat Torah. We take the Torah out of the ark, hold it in our arms, dance with it and celebrate it publicly.
In a sense, the Torah leaves the ark and enters the world.
That may be one of Sukkot’s most important messages. We should be secure enough in who we are that we don’t have to be afraid of the world around us. Instead, through the example we set and the lives we lead, we can have a positive influence upon it.
God didn’t give us the Torah simply to keep it to ourselves.
He gave it to us to live—and through the way we live, to bring a little more holiness into the world.
Something to think about.
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