Inviting God Home -- Sukkot Day 2 5787

On Yom Kippur, we say something out loud that we ordinarily whisper. After the first verse of the Shema, we proclaim aloud the phrase Barukh shem kevod malkhuto le’olam va’ed — blessed is the name of God’s glorious sovereignty forever.

According to the medieval sage Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher, when Moses ascended to heaven, he heard the ministering angels praising God with those words. When he descended Mt. Sinai and returned to the Israelite community, he told the people what he heard. Ordinarily, we whisper the angels’ words so they won’t know that we actually know their closely guarded secret. However, on Yom Kippur, we refrain from eating and drinking, we dress in white, and we devote ourselves to prayer. In other words, we spend a day as angels, our sanctuaries transformed into small pockets of heaven, in which we enjoy immediacy and intimacy with the Divine., And since we resemble the angels on Yom Kippur, we proclaim their praise aloud (Tur, Orah Hayyim 619).

Of course, even on Yom Kippur, we don’t actually become angels. Our stomachs, if nothing else, remind us of that. We are participating in a kind of sacred make-believe, enacting a world in which the needs and limitations of being human no longer stand between us and God.

That does not mean the connection is make-believe. The intimacy we seek is real, even if the angelic existence through which we seek it is necessarily temporary. Eventually, we have to eat. There are children to care for, livelihoods to earn, meals to prepare. At the end of Yom Kippur, we leave the sanctuary and return to the real, imperfect, mortal world.

That raises a troubling thought: that intimacy with God depends upon our ability to escape the conditions of being human. If we come close to God on Yom Kippur by pretending to be angels, what happens when we stop pretending? Must returning to our human lives mean leaving that closeness behind?

Our tradition responds with a rather curious -- and, candidly, kind of annoying -- instruction. The Rema, Rabbi Moses Isserles, teaches that, ideally, one will begin building their sukkah immediately after Yom Kippur (Orah Hayyim 624:5). After spending a day as angels in the sanctuary, the tradition has each of us go back to our respective homes and build little huts in our backyards.

It feels like a strange pivot -- and certainly not the thing I'm itching to do right after Yom Kippur ends -- until you remember that the sukkah is meant to resemble the Mishkan or Tabernacle, the sanctuary our ancestors carried with them during their sojourn in the wilderness. 

Another name for the Tabernacle in the Torah is Ohel Moed, the Tent of Meeting – because our ancestors understood it as a place where they could meet, or encounter, the Divine – building and nurturing connection and relationship with God.

As Rabbanit Dena Freundlich observes, a defining characteristic of the Mishkan was its temporary nature – it was dismantled every time the Israelites broke camp, carried in pieces as they journeyed, and put back together when they remade camp.In other words, our ancestors built a dwelling for God in the wilderness, amid the uncertainty of their travels, in a structure they knew they would have to take down. The Tabernacle’s impermanence did not make it any less a place of encounter. Rather, its temporary nature was the point: we might, periodically and temporarily, be able to enter the divine realm of angels. But as mere mortals, we can’t stay there forever. At some point, we have to go home – back to the real, corporeal, temporal, temporary, material world. The beauty of the Tabernacle is that it reminds us that our connection with the Divine is not limited to the realm of angels – that we can encounter God wherever we dwell. 

Even, it turns out, in our own backyards. According to Freundlich, like the Mishkan, the sukkah is a temporary dwelling designed for encountering the Divine. Seen from this perspective, the connection between Yom Kippur and Sukkot begins to make more sense. On Yom Kippur, we spend a day trying to be part of God’s world.

Immediately after the day ends, we go back to our respective homes and build a little tabernacle where we can let God in; a space where we can continue to connect and commune with the sacred, intimate presence of the Divine. We cannot remain in that imagined angelic world. But we can invite God into ours.

But there is something curious about the dwelling we prepare for this encounter. If we want to welcome the Divine into our world, why build such fragile and temporary structures? After all, we might imagine that a home fit for God would have to be perfect, enduring, somehow beyond the limitations of everything else we build. Yet the sukkot we construct are by design temporary and permeable shelters. Their coverings don’t seal us off from the world. Their walls offer limited protection from the elements. We inhabit sukkot knowing that, soon enough, we will take it down.

Moreover, we don’t just build Sukkot to facilitate a magical, mystical experience. We build them as spaces to gather with loved ones, to welcome guests; to eat and drink. It is material, corporeal, communal. In other words, the place where we welcome God bears the characteristics of the real lives and real world into which we are inviting God: it is imperfect and ephemeral, vulnerable and finite. And that is precisely the place where we most need to let God in, and where – according to our tradition – God longs to meet us.

On Yom Kippur, we draw close to God while abstaining from food. On Sukkot, we draw close to God by eating a meal. On Yom Kippur, we gather in a sanctuary. On Sukkot, we gather around a table. Though we observe Yom Kippur in community, it is in a sense a solitary experience – each of us stands alone before God. Sukkot is designed to be communal – we gather not only with God, but with one another. Where Yom Kippur asks us to imagine being angels, Sukkot asks us to inhabit the reality of being human. The hunger we satisfy is real. The people around our table are real. So are the limits of the structure that shelters us, and of the lives we live within it.

That, I think, is what the sequence of these holy days is aiming to teach us. On Yom Kippur, we spend a day trying to be part of God’s world. Immediately afterward, we bring God into ours. And when we do, we recognize that our world does not have to become heaven before it can be a place of divine intimacy.

The meals we prepare, the people we care for, the homes we tend — these belong to the world into which we are inviting God. We can approach them as part of a life shared with the Divine, rather than as the things that keep us from that life.

Moreover, moving from Yom Kippur immediately into Sukkot means that we need not wait until our lives feel settled and secure before nurturing our relationship with the Divine. If a temporary shelter can be a dwelling for God, then the uncertainty and ephemerality of our lives need not place us beyond God’s presence. 

Our tradition, in other words, is inviting us to take God with us out of the sanctuary — to let our homes become places of encounter, to recognize our real, imperfect lives as lives in which we can connect and commune with the Divine. The sukkah is, in a powerful sense, meant to be a home for God in the midst of our material and mortal world.

And remember: the people with whom we share our lives and our world also bear God’s image. When we welcome someone to our table, when we feed someone who is hungry, when we care for someone who needs us, we are encountering an image of the very God whose presence we sought in the sanctuary on Yom Kippur. Inviting God into our world asks something of us: to recognize and respond to the Divine in the people who inhabit that world with us. The sukkah gives us a place to practice — opening our homes and sharing what sustains us, allowing our longing for closeness with God to deepen our care for one another.

Our tradition imagines Shemini Atzeret, the concluding festival, as God asking the beloved guests to linger a little longer. Rashi offers the image of a king who has gathered his children for a feast. When it is time for them to leave, he asks them to stay another day; their departure is difficult for him (Rashi on Leviticus 23:36).

I wonder whether we might hear that same longing in the movement from Yom Kippur into Sukkot. We have spent a day as angels, enjoying immediacy and intimacy with the Divine. Now it is time to leave. We cannot remain in that imagined heavenly world, however much we might wish to prolong the encounter.

So we go home and build a little tabernacle. Having spent a day in God’s world, we invite God to linger with us in ours.

May we take that closeness with us — from the sanctuary to our homes, from the prayers we offer together to the lives we lead in all the places where we dwell.

May we welcome You into our world — into the homes we tend and the meals we share, recognizing Your image in those we welcome, those we feed, and those who need our care.

May we welcome You into our world — a world that is imperfect and ephemeral, where so much is uncertain and so little can be kept forever; a world in which, even so, we can know Your presence.

And may the little tabernacles we build teach us that we can dwell with You here, in the lives we have, as the people we are.

So that when our day as angels ends, our intimacy with You may continue.

So that when we leave the world in which we imagined being Your guests, we may welcome You into ours.

So that we may leave the Holy of Holies without leaving the Holy One.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.