Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour throughout the entire Babylonian Talmud. And now we are doing one tractate a week, where every week, on Monday, we give you the concepts;on Tuesday, we give you a little bit of the deeper meaning;on Wednesday, we give you some daily practices that emerge from the tractate; and on Thursday, we give you the history that emerges from the tractate;and then, on Friday, we kind of highlight voices that give classes of their own. This isn’t just about, God forbid, me. I want to introduce our listeners to some of the great Talmud educators, the great Torah educators throughout the world. And this week, we are talking about Tractate Sukkah.
I do want to say one thing. Somebody sent it to me. Somebody said they love listening to Talmud Daily because it makes them [laughs]…. It makes them feel like they’re listening to Mr. Rogers explain the Talmud. And I want, whoever had that description, it warmed my heart, and I hope more people feel that way. I am a great, honestly, a great lover and admirer of Mr. Rogers. I wrote a book called Sin-a-gogue, Sin-a-gogue, about sin and failure in Jewish thought. If you look at the acknowledgments, I have my favorite Mr. Rogers quote at the very end of the acknowledgments there.
But continuing today on Tractate Sukkah. Tractate Sukkah is all about the holiday of Sukkos, which if you look at the 23rd chapter of Leviticus, what’s known as Sefer Vayikra, the third book in the five books of the Torah. At the 23rd chapter, we are given a commandment that we are supposed to sit for seven days inside of a sukkah, and during this holiday, especially on the first day, there is a commandment to bring what is known as a lulav, which includes the lulav, it’s that that long myrtle branch. I don’t know if people are more familiar with myrtle. I just know lulav. And then on each side you have the aravah, that’s, I think it’s called a willow branch, and the hadassim. I don’t even remember what the hadassim are called in real life, but it’s this ringlet, these three little leaves that each touch the next. It’s beautiful. And that’s the lulav, where you have the lulav in the center, hadassim and aravos on the sides, and then you also bring the esrog, which is this beautiful fruit. [It] looks like a like a lemon, if people are familiar with it. It’s yellow, but it’s bumpier, and we bring those and use for these seven days.
Now, what this tractate is really about is divided really into halves. This is a very welcoming tractate. A lot of people start, myself included, real in-depth Talmud learning with Tractate Sukkah. I started on page 25a. That’s where I started. Started in the middle. But the way the tractate is broken down is really in two halves.
The first two chapters talk about all of the laws involving the building of a sukkah. We’re not really given a description of the sukkah in the Torah. What does it mean to build a sukkah? And the watchword throughout is the idea that the sukkah should be a temporary dwelling place. In the language of the Talmud, it’s tzei mideiras keva, leave, tzei, leave, mideiras keva, from your permanent dwelling, and go to a diras arai, to a temporary dwelling place.
And you’ll see in many of the laws of the sukkah—on how tall it can be, on how large it has to be, on how many walls it needs—it’s all kind of wrapped around this idea that it’s a temporary structure, could definitely last seven days, and that you’re sitting underneath, the most important part of the sukkah is the schach, which can really be made from anything that is a natural, that grows from the ground, and is no longer attached from the ground. The schach have a lot more rules and regulation, while the walls of the sukkah:you need a minimum of three walls, and that last wall doesn’t have to even be an entire wall.
There’s actually a very beautiful idea that is cited from the Arizal. The Arizal was really the founder of a new movement in Kabbalah, in Jewish mysticism. He’s not mentioned in the Talmud. He lived more than 500 years after the canonization of the Talmud, but he has many ideas that relate to the Talmud. And the Arizal has an idea that is too sweet not to mention, who explains why is it that the sukkah, like a normal structure, doesn’t require four walls? It doesn’t even require three walls. It needs two strong walls and a third that at least juts out a little bit.
And the Arizal says, you want to know the reason why? Because the sukkah is literally like a hug. If you look, and you ever hug somebody, you have one arm over here, you have a second arm over here, and then a little bit of the hand reaches out and gives you a hug, and that is the idea of the sukkah. The sukkah is, so to speak, this divine hug that we have. And really, at the heart of Sukkah, before you even get into the details of how you make a sukkah, before you get into the details of what the lulav and the esrog, what the hadassim and the aravos are really all about, you have to really understand what role this holiday plays in the calendar of Jewish history. And I want to really highlight something very, very important, which many commentators point out.
Now, Sukkos, the Torah tells us, is on the 15th of Tishrei. It’s five days after Yom Kippur. But, it’s really unclear, as opposed to a lot of our other major holidays, what exactly is this commemorating? What is the holiday about? And you may have a difficult time even understanding that within the tractate itself. What’s Sukkos about?
Now we’ll take a step back, and this is very important. We have three holidays that are kind of the pillars of Jewish identity. They are known as the Shalosh Regalim, the three legs. These were the three holidays that Jews throughout the world would go to Jerusalem, and there where they’d bring sacrifices, they would participate in that central event. What are those three holidays? Passover, that’s on the 15th of Nissan. And that makes sense, that’s commemorating our redemption from Egypt, our exit from Egypt.
The next of the Shalosh Regalim, of these three pillar holidays, is known as Shavuos. Shavuos is on the sixth of Sivan and commemorates the giving of the Torah, also very clear. Though it should be noted, Shavuos, because it’s so Torah-centric, doesn’t have a lot of rituals, and that’s one of the reasons why there is no tractate on the holiday of Shavuos. We have a tractate called Shavuos, but it is not about the holiday Shavuos. Now I don’t want to get anybody too confused. That tractate is about a shevuah, meaning taking an oath. We’ll get there in a second.
So the first is Passover, the second is Shavuos, and the third is Sukkos on the 15th of Tishrei. What is going on over here? I get Passover.I get Shavuos. What is Sukkos about?
This was a issue that a lot of commentators were kind of like stuck on. Like shouldn’t Sukkos also be around kind of Passover time when we left Egypt? And the Talmud says there are two opinions for why we build a sukkah.
One opinion says that it is after what is known as the ananei hakavod, the clouds of glory. This was the cloud of God that protected the Jewish people from the moment they exited Egypt until entering the land of Israel. The other says that during their journey in the desert they actually built actual sukkos. They stayed in these little booths. It doesn’t really explain, so why now? Why on the 15th of Tishrei?
So to really understand this we have to deepen our map of biblical history and we really have to understand more deeply what this cycle is about. There is a cycle that repeats itself throughout Jewish practice, Jewish thought, and Jewish history, and it’s the cycle of creation, revelation, redemption. Creation, revelation, redemption.
Creation, we’re given options. We’re first born. This is the holiday of Passover. This is the creation of the world. This is when we first start. We’re given options.
The next step is always revelation. Not all the options are the same. Some are better than others. This is the world of revelation. This is the holiday of Shavuos. It’s in the world of revelation that things start to fall apart. And we know that this actually happened in Jewish history. The moment somebody says what you should be doing is when we recoil. So what happened? After we received the Torah, in the Torah, we’re given the story of the golden calf. The story of the golden calf took place on the 17th of Tammuz, which actually is still a Jewish fast day to this very day. Many Jews fast on the 17th of Tammuz.It was after that that Moses goes up to Sinai and beseeches God, says, “Please forgive the Jewish people for worshipping the golden calf, for this cataclysmic mistake.”
One of the consequences of serving the golden calf, of this kind of idolatrous experience right in the aftermath of receiving the Torah, one of the consequences was that the clouds of glory left the Jewish people. They left. That God says, “Okay, I’m not I’m not wanted, and I’m out of here.” And the clouds of glory kind of left the Jewish people as they were encamped at Sinai waiting for like, what’s going to happen next? Moshe goes up to Sinai and beseeches God, pleads, begs, please forgive the Jewish people. God forgives the Jewish people on Yom Kippur. That is the day of forgiveness. It is after Yom Kippur that the Jews they start building the Tabernacle, what’s known as the Mishkan. And it was five days later, and this is the explanation that’s given by the Vilna Gaon, where the clouds of glory finally returned, and now the Jewish people know that we are forgiven.
So this cycle from Passover to Shavuos, then after Shavuos, after revelation, there’s a breakdown. There’s a breakdown. Once you’re told what you should be doing, this is throughout all of life, that’s when all the mistakes, that’s when all the chaos happens, that’s where things start to fall apart. The Jewish people worship the golden calf, Moses goes up to get forgiveness. That happens on Yom Kippur. And the clouds of glory, the protection, the sign that the Jewish people are worthy of protection begins on Sukkos.
And that is what our tractate is about. We go through the cycle of the three holidays. Passover is the creation of the Jewish people, the options of just like Jewish life, Jewish peoplehood. And then we have revelation. There is a way that Jews are supposed to live. There is a should to our existence. That’s when all Jews, even now, they’re like, “What? Who’s telling me? The rabbis? Who’s telling me what I should be doing?” That’s where we all recoil, and we look for other options—the golden calf—and then we realize, this doesn’t work. I want I want to come back. I want to heal. That’s Yom Kippur, the day of forgiveness. And then finally, on Sukkos, the clouds of glory come back, and that’s where we have redemption.
And that is why you’ll notice in this tractate:a lot of the stories in this tractate relate to redemption itself. In fact, one of the only places where the Talmud really gives an in-depth interpretation of the notion of Mashiach, of Messiah—Who is going to be the Messiah? When is Messiah coming?—appears, believe it or not, in Tractate Sukkah.
Why of all tractates? Because the three regalim, the three holidays that kind of are the formation of Jewish identity—Passover, Shavuos, Sukkos—is this recurring cycle of creation, revelation, redemption. Passover is the creation of the Jewish people, Shavuos is the revelation to the Jewish people, and Sukkos is where we finally feel that redemption, is where our options and our choices finally align, and we love our life as it is.
And that’s the experience of Sukkos itself, where we leave our homes and we just want to be. We just want to be with God. We’re inside of the sukkah whether you’re eating, whether you’re chilling, whether you’re shmoozing. It’s all part of the mitzvah, because God wants the entirety of the Jewish people together with Him, and this is what we’re going to explore this week in Tractate Sukkah.
So let’s together keep making Torah sweet.