Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour throughout the entire Talmud, and this week we are exploring Tractate Sukkah. And I want to share a deeper meaning and a deeper look at this tractate that for me on a very personal level is a Torah, an idea, that probably stays with me more than any other that I have ever learned or ever read.
And I want to open up this question on this tractate where there’s something very strange about Tractate Sukkah that we discussed yesterday. We touched upon it. But what’s very strange in Tractate Sukkah is that if you look in the fifth chapter of Tractate Sukkah, it starts talking about Messiah and redemption. And in fact, it shouldn’t even be so strange because the Torah itself in Amos in the ninth chapter actually refers to the entire messianic state of the Jewish people as a fallen sukkah. This appears in our liturgy as well, where God says bayom hahu—this is in the ninth chapter of Amos, the 11th verse, but it’s language that appears throughout our liturgy—one day the day will come, okim es sukkas Dovid hanofeles. Okim, I will uplift.I will rebuild the sukkah of David, the King David. Not me, the actual King David.Hanofeles, that has fallen down.
God’s promise to reinstitute, to recreate the state of the Jewish people is described as rebuilding a sukkah. And the question is like, why? Like why don’t we call it the Sinai of David? Why don’t we call it the matzah of David. The, I don’t know, the exit of Egypt of David? No, it’s the sukkah of King David. Why of all things when we’re talking about that ultimate messianic realization, when the world is at peace and the Jewish people finally arrive at their station, we call it rebuilding the sukkah? What does this have to do with anything?
So I want to take a step back and I want to read a passage of Talmud that would seem to have no connection to a deeper meaning. It’s not even clear. Like you could read this and not even notice that it’s part of aggadata, the narrative part. It’s like more like a story that’s coming to support a halachic idea. But it’s a strange story, and we’re going to find that a close reading of it is so eye-opening and so illuminating.
The story appears on page 31a in Tractate Sukkah, that’s the 31st page, but on the first side. And this is what the story says. Now, the only bit of background you have to know is that the rabbis made a rule where if, God forbid, somebody steals some of their sukkah materials, let’s say I steal, I don’t know, a wooden beam from somebody, and I build it into my sukkah. So people are going to get really upset because, you know, in order to return the item that you stole, you kind of have to destroy your sukkah. The rabbis, because they wanted to encourage people to do teshuva, they actually said, “You know what, you don’t have to return it.” Instead of returning the actual item, which is normally what you would be responsible to do, you can just return the value of it in money.
So the Talmud is talking about that and shares a story about somebody who had something taken from her, and she’s now very upset and wants it back. This is the story: Hahi savsa, there was an older woman, d’asya lekamei de-Rav Nachman, that came before Rav Nachman. I’m going to read the Talmud in its original Aramaic. I think it’s good, especially for our listeners: we’re going to introduce more and more that you can hear the rhythm of Talmudic language, but of course I’m going to translate.
So hahi savsa, there’s an older woman, d’asya lekamei de-Rav Nachman, who comes before Rav Nachman. Amrah lei, she says to Rav Nachman: Reish Galusa, the head, the exilarch, that was like the leader of the Jewish community in the Diaspora at the time, vechulhu rabbanan de-vei Reish Galusa, and all the rabbis affiliated with him, besukkah gezulah havah yasvei, they’re sitting in a stolen sukkah. Oh my gosh, that’s a big deal. Tzavcha velo ashgach bah Rav Nachman. She’s screaming, she’s crying, Rav Nachman doesn’t pay attention. And then she continues, amrah lei, she says: Issesa, a woman, referring to herself, dehavalei la’avuha, that her father, tlas me’os usmanei asar avdei, had a staff, had like slaves, a household staff of 318 people, tzavcha kamei velo ashgechich bah? I’m crying in front of you, and you’re not listening to me? And my father had 300. He had a big house. I’m an important person, 318 people in his staff. I’m coming and you don’t listen to me? Amar lehu Rav Nachman, Rav Nachman responded: Pe’isah hi da ve’ein lah ela dmei eitzim bilvad. Because you’re screaming, I see you’re worked up, but still, you only get the monetary value.
What is this back and forth? What does this have to do with Tractate Sukkah? And like what is this complaint that my father had a staff of 318 people? What’s the number 318? Was that to do with anything, and what’s that have to do with this conversation?
So, there is a thinker that I’ve spoken about before. It’s a Chasidic thinker named Rav Tzadok HaKohen miLublin. I’ve written extensively about Rav Tzadok in all of my books, and if you want to learn more about his life, you can either buy—have no shame—but I do have a fairly good introduction to Rav Tzadok in my book Sin-a-gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought. There is a great scholar named Alan Brill, Professor Alan Brill, who wrote a book called Thinking God about Rav Tzadok. That’s very advanced. It’s in English, but it’s advanced. Rav Tzadok was a thinker. Had a very difficult life. Never had children. Has a special place in my heart. And I think of all of the writings of Rav Tzadok, this is the one that for me really hit me in a very personal, very, very powerful way.
So Rav Tzadok says something really, really powerful, and this is in his work called Divrei Sofrim, The Words of the Scribes, that’s the name of his work, and it’s in the 16th chapter. And Rav Tzadok says something amazing. Rav Tzadok says that the Jewish people, as a whole, what are we about? We are about never giving up. In the words of Rav Tzadok, he says, “Ein le-Yehudi lehisya’eish mi-shum davar.” A Jew never despairs. Yi’ush is a Hebrew word, it actually appears very much in the Talmud. Yi’ush means to lose hope. It’s also a halachic term. When somebody loses something, if they are meya’eish, they lose hope over it, and then somebody finds it, they can keep it, actually. Losing hope—”Stop looking. I’m not interested anymore. It is what it is”—you know, we lose hope sometimes, we despair. It’s a halachic principle also. Then somebody, if they find that object, they have no obligation to return it.
Rav Tzadok says that the Jews in our very DNA of our peoplehood…Think about how we were founded. Rav Tzadok notes that we were founded, the couple, the first couple that founded the Jewish people, Avraham and Sarah, when did they have their first child? They were both elderly. It was impossible! But the founding of the Jewish people is after anybody else would have lost hope, would have despaired, that’s when the Jewish people begin.
And Rav Tzadok notes something so beautiful and so amazing. He says that the word yi’ush, if you look at it: yud, alef, vav, shin. If you look at the numerical value in the system of gematria, where each letter corresponds to a different numerical value, starting with alef. Alef means one, has the numerical value of one. If you look at yi’ush, yud is the 10th letter, is 10, vav is six, alef is one, and shin is 300. You count up all of that, the numerical value of the word yi’ush is 317. That is the word yi’ush.
So Rav Tzadok says something really amazing: What does it mean to transcend despair? What does it mean to live your life and say no matter what, no matter how difficult things get, no matter how much I want to despair, there is a path forward? That is to transcend despair, that is the number 318. It’s one more than despair. It transcends that feeling. It never fully falls into that world of giving up and losing hope and despairing on life itself. 318 is one more than yi’ush. It’s always being able to float above the chaos and the fray and say no matter how difficult life gets, no matter how scary and frightening life can be, I have a path forward as long as there’s breath in my lungs.
And now, Rav Tzadok says something amazing. This is the dialogue between this woman and the rabbis, where this woman says, “My father.” You know who she’s referring to? She’s referring to Avraham, to the first of the forefathers. That Avraham had 318, which Rashi actually points out is the numerical value of Eliezer, that was his helper. But what it really means is Avraham was all about transcending despair. This is what the Jewish people are about. “I did not lose hope of getting back my piece of wood that was stolen by the exilarch. I didn’t lose hope. I still am hoping that it comes back because I am a Jew, and what are Jews?” This is the words of Rav Tzadok, “Ein le-Yehudi lehisya’eish mi-shum davar.” A Jew, to be a Jew, is never fully despairing. As bleak and as dark as things get, we always hold onto hope.
And this is the conversation the woman is saying. She says, “I didn’t lose hope for getting back these wooden beams that they built into their sukkah.” And Rav Nachman in response says, “Even so, they still get to keep them. The whole idea is that they don’t have to disassemble their entire sukkah. They get to keep it, and they only give you the money.”
And this actually explains why this is being read specifically in Sukkah, because Sukkos is the final of the three of the holidays: Passover, Shavuos, Sukkos; creation, revelation, redemption. We finally feel that at-peaceness, that wholeness in our lives. That is what Sukkos is all about. After revelation falls apart, the golden calf, forgiveness on Yom Kippur, we finally say, “You know what? We want this relationship, and we want this relationship forever.” The Jewish people, and divinity and God.
And this explains, the Maharal [says], something so amazing. This is why the ultimate rebuilding of the temple, the ultimate messianic revelation is always called the re-establishment of the fallen sukkah. The Maharal says something so beautiful. And let me just explain. The Maharal lived in the late 1500s, died in 1607, was a world-famous figure both in the Jewish and the non-Jewish world. [He] lived in Prague. If you’ve ever been to Prague, there’s a famous statue that the non-Jewish community, I believe, commissioned to commemorate the presence and the legacy of the Maharal. The Maharal is an acronym, like many rabbis, of Moreinu HaRav Yehuda Loew ben Betzalel. That’s the Maharal, but he’s known as the Maharal.
The Maharal says something so beautiful. In the 35th chapter of his work Netzach Yisroel, which is the Maharal’s work on exile and redemption, the Maharal explains why the sukkah is the prototype for redemption itself. As opposed to a house, you know, when you build a house, if, God forbid, you take a big destruction, one of those big balls called, that knock down the entire house, and you start rebuilding it from scratch, when it knocks down the house, and somebody asks you, “Where’s your house?” you would not point to the rubble and say, “Oh, that’s my house. It’s sitting over there.” You would say, “We knocked down our house, and we’re building a new house.”
A sukkah is different. A sukkah is a deliberately temporary dwelling. It is deliberately meant to construct, take down, construct, and build again. Most of the year, my sukkah is in my garage, which is right off of my office. I could bring you in there, and you would see the planks and the boards. When my child, whenever we take down our sukkah, my children get very sad, and I always tell them, “The sukkah’s still here. We can visit it. It’s in the garage. We can go visit. You see the planks, you see the schach, you see the boards. It’s all right over there.” That only applies to a building that’s deliberately made to build, to erect, and then deconstruct. Then, when it sits, even when it’s not constructed, you could say, “Oh, there’s still a sukkah there.”
This the Maharal says explains why the ultimate redemption is literally the model of a sukkah. Sukkah boards lying in your garage are still called a sukkah. It’s made to take apart and rebuild. But a house that’s leveled and rebuilt is just a new house.
This is the lesson of the resilience, and the fact that what redemption is all about is that resilience, that sense of “I’m never losing hope, I’m never despairing. Even when I fall down, even when things seem dark, even when my sukkah is taken apart and sitting in my garage, I still feel like I have a connection to it. And this is the ultimate redemption that we still hope for. Yes, we don’t have a temple, but like the sukkah, just because it’s not built, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean redemption is not something that we can hold onto, glimmer, and actually see.
This is the beauty of the sukkah, and why sukkah, and more largely Tractate Sukkah, is the model for redemption itself. That even when it’s broken, even when we fall down, even when things are dark, sukkah is the reminder that we never lose hope, we never have yi’ush, we never despair, because like life itself, we can build and rebuild over and over again. And that’s the whole holiday of Sukkos. That it’s not about the first time we had the clouds of glory. It’s celebrating the return of the clouds of glory when they come back. Because real redemption is knowing that even when you’re down, even when you feel distance, that closeness is still there.
So thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily, and let’s together keep making Torah sweet.