Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour throughout the entire Talmud Bavli, the Babylonian Talmud. And this week, we are exploring Tractate Sukkah, which is all about Sukkos.
I want to explore for our daily practice, I want to read one little passage, and then we’re going to talk about an idea that really emerges for every single day from this particular passage. The Talmud wants to know, if you’ve ever seen a lulav and esrog being held, you’ll notice that there’s usually some sort of like binding that keeps the lulav in the middle, and then the hadassim and the aravos, the two other plants right next to it, all connected together. And the Talmud wants to know, like why do we have to do this? Why do we have to actually have them, this little binding together, that brings them all together?
So the Talmud asks, man tanna, who is the opinion, who is the rabbi, who is the author of the opinion, leha, to that which, detannu rabbanan, that we have been taught, lulav mitzvah le’ogdo, that there is a commandment, there is a mitzvah to have a binding for the lulav along with the hadassim and aravos? Who says you have to do that? Ve’im lo ogdo, and even if you don’t do it, our teaching is kasher, it’s still good. It’s still okay. You don’t have to do it, but you should do it. Whose opinion is this? So the Talmud says, mani? Whose opinion is this?
I Rebbi Yehudah, if it’s Rebbi Yehudah’s opinion, that doesn’t make sense. Ki lo agdo amai kasher? Why would he still say it’s okay even if you don’t bind it? Rebbi Yehudah is of the opinion that the binding is absolutely necessary. So the Talmud concludes, it’s not Rebbi Yehudah, and the Talmud says, le’olam, you know what, it’s not Rebbi Yehudah. It’s the rabbanan. It’s the people who argue on him. So why is it? They don’t insist on it. They don’t make it necessary. They think it’s kasher one way or the other. It’s kosher even if you don’t have it, so why even insist on it in the first place? So the Talmud answers, umitzvah, the reason why it’s better, though not necessary, to have this binding, is mishum, because there is a principle that applies to all mitzvos, not just lulav, and that is zeh Eili veanveihu.
The Talmud quotes three words from a verse in the Torah, and this appears in the book of Exodus, in the 15th chapter, what is known as Parshas Beshalach, and this is right after the Jewish people are crossing over the split sea. After they leave Egypt, they come to the Yam Suf, the Red Sea. They’re like, “Oh no, what are we supposed to do over here?” God splits the sea. The Jewish people walk through it, and then they sing this song giving praise to God. And one of the words in this song is, I’ll read the whole thing for you, Ozi vezimras Yah, God is my strength and my might, vayehi li lishuah, and is going to be for me for redemption, for salvation. And then it says, zeh Eili, this is my God, veanveihu, and I’m going to make it beautiful, Elohei avi, the God of my fathers, va’aromemenhu, and I am going to uplift it and exalt it.
So the verse talks about God in two different ways, which I think is very important and interesting. First, it talks about, zeh Eili, this is my God, veanveihu, and I’m going to make it beautiful. And then it says, ve-Elohei avi, this is my parents’ God, va’aromemenhu, I’m going to exalt.
It’s very important to understand, before we get into the religion of our parents, we have to make it ourselves first. We have to figure out, where’s zeh Eili? Where’s my God? And then afterwards, then we can think about Elohei avi, the God of our forefathers, of our ancestors. But first, we have to figure out the Judaism and the Jewish life that works for us. Don’t just assume whatever my parents did is what I’m going to do. We have to take agency and responsibility for our own Jewish life.
How do we make Judaism ours? How do we take Yiddishkeit and the principles and the practices of Yiddishkeit and make it ours? We beautify it. And this is a principle that appears throughout the Torah and throughout daily practice, which is called hiddur mitzvah. Hiddur means beautifying, the beauty of mitzvos, of commandments, of the practices of Jewish life. And we’re supposed to make them beautiful in a deliberately subjective and creative way.
We’re not given the rules of how we’re supposed to make it beautiful. This is for us to figure out. For many people, and this is something specifically that’s discussed as it relates to sukkah, if you may notice, a lot of sukkahs have decorations. Not everybody has this custom, but a lot of people, they make decorations. They have those like little chains that go across, and they might have plastic fruit everywhere. They’ll have posters on the wall. It’s because of this principle the Talmud says: no, sukkahs, it’s supposed to be beautiful. It’s not supposed to be dark and damp and gross. You want to make it beautiful.
Same with the lulav and esrog, it’s supposed to be beautiful. You’re supposed to love it. The whole idea is that the esrog is described as a pri eitz hadar, a beautiful fruit. So it’s not just the one beautiful fruit. We’re trying to figure out how do we make everything beautiful?
And it doesn’t just end with Sukkos. We have to find ways to make Jewish life feel beautiful, feel prestigious for us. One way in which we do this that you’re probably already familiar with: if you ever open up and you see a Torah scroll, a Torah scroll sometimes has a crown on it, has a beautiful like a cloth cover for it. We don’t store our sifrei Torah, a sefer Torah, the Torah scroll, in some haphazard or gross way. We want it to look beautiful, we want it to be beautiful.
This is especially true when it comes to Shabbos. We love a beautiful Shabbos table. Think about where is the place where you light Shabbos candles? Make it beautiful. Have a picture. I always like, I think this is very beautiful, where you light Shabbos candles:one is a custom to have like a nice tzedakah box. We’ve spoken about this before. Another is like have a beautiful picture frame where you have your family, where you have maybe your own parents, your own ancestors, the Elohei avi, the God of your forefathers. But you want it to be beautiful.
We have in so many other areas of our life—we insist, whether it’s our cars, our homes, our objects—we want it to look gorgeous. And what I always try to remind myself and others is the most beautiful thing in somebody’s home and somebody’s life should be their religious life, their religious commitments. It shouldn’t be kind of like dank and gross and just like ugh, like trudge in there. It sucks away the energy. You walk in, and it’s beautiful. The books that we publish, they should look beautiful. The most important thing is that the Torah, the ideas of Torah itself should be beautiful.
And I’ll leave you with an article that was written more than 20, probably 30 years ago, in the 1991 issue of Tradition journal. There was an article that was written by the editor at the time. His name was Rabbi Emanuel Feldman. And he actually has an article where he talks about how the ideas of Torah are transmitted. What’s the language that we use to transmit Torah? And the name of the article is called “Tefillin in a Brown Paper Bag.
And I want to share with you what he says over here. He’s talking about how sometimes, you know, when you open up a New Yorker, The Economist, or maybe some articles in The New York Times—probably ones that are not about Israel—you see the writing and the structure. It’s so beautiful and you love reading it. And he laments the fact that when he opens up a book about Torah and Jewish ideas, a lot of times the writing is very shoddy. It’s very like… He writes that it’s important that just as our Sefer Torah should be beautiful, just as where we store our tefillin should be beautiful, the very language with which we talk about Torah, that too should be beautiful.
“Poor language cannot do the job. It cannot inform or uplift in any lasting way. When language is inadequate, simplistic, and one-dimensional, then ideas that are potentially sophisticated, profound, and subtle will, in the reader’s mind, be reduced to simplistic and one-dimensional proportions… It’s hard to imagine that any thinking individual can be persuaded of the depths of Torah when, quite beyond grating misusages, such as “being that” instead of “since,” “comes to tell us”instead of “informs us,” “brings down” instead of “cites,” the ideas of Torah are presented in jejune and puerile language.” He is a brilliant writer. Jejune, I don’t know if I pronounce that correctly. “This is a pity, for Torah is precious enough to deserve elegance, grace, sophistication, and precision. After all, we don’t wrap our tefillin in brown paper bags or bind our sifrei Torah with coarse, ugly ropes. A worldview which is inadequately articulated not only fails to communicate, but repels those whom it would reach.”
This is such a beautiful application of the idea of hiddur mitzvah which emerges from our tractate, derived from the verse in Exodus, “Zeh Eili ve’anveihu,” this is my God and I, through my own life, through my own creativity, through my own work, I want it to be beautiful. I want my own Jewish life to be beautiful.
And not only our sifrei Torah, not only our Shabbos table. We can think of all the ways that we can make Jewish life more beautiful. The most important way is the way that we articulate and connect to Torah ideas themselves. To be able to find the sophistication, the complexity, the profundity of Torah itself is also a function of beautifying the entirety of Jewish life.
So thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily, and let’s keep making Torah sweet and beautiful.