Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] One mitzvah item for all of the people.
[00:00:05] In other words, if I want to put on filling, I can do it and you can do it and everybody can do it. But we have to take turns. We cannot do it with the same filling at the same time.
[00:00:14] If a woman wants to light Shabbat candles, another woman has to use another candlestick. She cannot have the same candle and same thing with every single mitzvah.
[00:00:24] Just think about it. Whether you put a mezuzah, you put a mezuzah on the door, this mezuzah is there. You cannot take this mezuzah and put it somewhere else now. Well, you can, but this door will be without mezuzah.
[00:00:34] So every single mitzvah requires a designated mitzvah object for it.
[00:00:41] Sukkah is the only mitzvah that many people can do at the same time. As a matter of fact, every single Jew can do at the same time. If we would be able to build a sukkah which will be large enough to host every single Jew around the world, the 18 million of us, then this sukkah would be perfectly fine. As a matter of fact, in the court of Jewish law it is discussed what are the minimum and the maximum sizes allowed for a sukkah? Just like Baltimore county zoning code has minimum and maximum requirements for everything in the Jewish law, there are also minimum, maximum. There is a minimum requirement for size of a sukkah.
[00:01:22] My son was trying to build a sukkah in his dormitory on the fire escape because his room is on the third floor and going down is complex and burdensome. So he wanted to see if he could make a sukkah right out of his window. In New York there are fire escapes on the buildings. So he measured and he was very upset because this fire escape landing was too small for a suka. Even though he was on top floor, there was no roof over him. So it was perfect. It would be perfect for a suka, but it was too couldn't build it. So there are minimum requirements for a sukkah.
[00:01:58] They are in terms of space, in width and length. There are also minimum requirements in terms of height. There are also maximum requirements in terms of height, because what if I will be making a structure which is hundred feet tall and then I'm going to put a branches over it will be kosher. No, Talmud says that when you are in a sukkah, the roof made out of these branches supposed to be low enough for you to feel like you have a roof over your head as opposed to Just the skyscraper, which is 100ft tall.
[00:02:32] So there are minimum and maximum requirements for every measurement, besides four, how big it can be.
[00:02:40] And Talmud specifically says if all of the Jews want to build one sukkah for every single one of them, it's going to be perfectly kosher.
[00:02:50] So Sukkah is speaking in this way. Sukkah is speaking about unity. It's the only mitzvah that can be unifying every single Jew.
[00:03:00] Now, if we'll turn to lulav and atrop and myrtle and willow, then we see four different species which grow in different parts of the world.
[00:03:13] Lulav is a palm branch.
[00:03:16] The ones we get here, they're usually from Egypt. Etrog is from Italy.
[00:03:21] Willow grows here in our backyard.
[00:03:24] Myrtle doesn't grow here, but it grows in more southern climates, like, for example, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
[00:03:31] And they grow in different places. They have completely different nature, biologically, they're different and they have totally different properties. And in Kabbalah and Hashiduti, it's explained at length how their properties vary. So they're very different. Yet we come, bring them together and we make a blessing over them. And this shows that even though we are different, we can still come together. So there are two types of unity.
[00:03:59] Sometimes people unite without recognizing, without paying attention to their differences.
[00:04:07] And usually that happens, let's say, at a time of crisis.
[00:04:11] If there's a national crisis or natural disaster, people unite, everybody comes together.
[00:04:17] And this guy, I couldn't stand his guts. Just yesterday, I couldn't stand his guts, and I would never speak to him yesterday. But today we are working hand in hand because something happened and we need each other's support.
[00:04:30] Somebody else. I was in a big fight with this guy. But now is a moment of crisis and we are together.
[00:04:37] So, you know, the best thing that unites people is a common enemy.
[00:04:41] And this is very often how people unite.
[00:04:44] What is the problem with that?
[00:04:46] The problem with that? That such a unity usually doesn't last.
[00:04:50] At a time of crisis, we unite. As soon as this peak of crisis dissipates, we are at odds with each other again.
[00:04:59] And this was a prime issue with many ideologies that wanted to erase differences between people.
[00:05:09] In the Soviet Union, for example, the idea was that everybody is the same.
[00:05:16] Famous statement made by Stalin. No one is irreplaceable. Why? Because no one has his own uniqueness.
[00:05:23] Everybody's the same. We could mold a person into whatever we want.
[00:05:28] And this was one of the reasons for USSR's push to erase different national identities in the USSR in the times of our parents, when they were young, the official government policy was pushing for interracial marriages, inter ethnic marriages.
[00:05:48] My mother was telling me that when she was in school, she had a friend, a student from Lithuania, and she was from these like very proper, we can even say aristocratic families from Lithuania.
[00:06:06] And somehow she became a girlfriend and boyfriend with this guy from some village in Kazakhstan.
[00:06:13] Needless to say, it's completely different cultures, it's completely different way of living.
[00:06:19] And the Communist department over there, Komsomol, the people who were in charge of pushing the communist agend in the university, came to them and said that if they get married while they're still in university, the university is paying for their marriage. They were pushing them to get married right now because in their books it was one of the signs of their success that they had people from total different cultures and total different backgrounds getting married.
[00:06:47] But in reality, there are people from very different backgrounds that get married and they live happily ever after and they adapt. They. One of them, you know, changes a little bit in this way, one of them changes a little bit in that way, and they make it work. I know many people who have marriages of people from very different backgrounds, but it required work.
[00:07:07] It doesn't happen by itself.
[00:07:10] In the Soviet Union, this was not recognized.
[00:07:14] The official dogma was that all cultures, all ethnicities, all backgrounds are all the same.
[00:07:21] And you don't even need to put any work, you just automatically marry each other and everything is perfect.
[00:07:26] And it's not only with marriages, it's with everything.
[00:07:30] So in other words, the unity that does not see differences.
[00:07:34] This idea has to be there, but it cannot work all the time.
[00:07:39] It could work only sometimes.
[00:07:42] And then there is another part of Sukkot, Lulava and the Chog.
[00:07:47] And here they say, you know what?
[00:07:50] These four species are very different.
[00:07:53] These four species have different nature, they come from different places. But even though they have these differences, they can unite.
[00:08:02] In other words, you don't need to erase your identity in order to unite with someone else.
[00:08:08] In the Soviet Union, they wanted to have multicultural society or even multicultural families by having each culture erasing its own identity.
[00:08:21] And the Torah says, no, no, no, you don't need to raise your own identity. You could remain yourself, but find how being yourself, you could unite with someone else who stays himself.
[00:08:32] And that's one of the most difficult ideas in today's Western world itself as well.
[00:08:37] We know that the US America is often called the melting pot, where all cultures come together and somehow they melt into one entity.
[00:08:47] Well, the original idea of this country was E pluribus unum. From many one. Well, if we are making from many one, we have to be many. If we are becoming already one, that's not a big deal to make one out of one. If you erase all of the cultures that people had, if you'll erase all ethnicities, then obviously you'll not have any conflicts whatsoever. As a friend of mine would always say, I don't understand why people argue. Why can't everybody just think like me?
[00:09:19] If everybody will think like me, we'll have no arguments in the world. But people have their own identity. People have their own thoughts, People have their own opinions. People have their own feelings.
[00:09:27] And this is what lulava nechog, the palm branch, citron, willow and myrtle. That's what they're telling us, that you can remain who you are and with this together make one union with everybody else.
[00:09:45] So this is for us Jews, specifically here in America, it's very important because we don't want to lose our identity.
[00:09:54] We want to stay Jews. We know that many people who don't like Jews so much, they come out with these claims. Well, you have double loyalty.
[00:10:06] You have. If you are Jewish, can you really be an American?
[00:10:11] If you love Israel, can you be loyal to the US?
[00:10:16] These are the questions that they're asking. Yes. And now prayers that we recite every single day, we say, God, bring us back to Israel. And by the way, the Reform movement in Germany started with exactly that principle. They wanted to be loyal Germans. You know, the original Reform movement in Germany was, by today's standards, fully Orthodox.
[00:10:38] They were fully observant. They kept Shabbos, they kept kosher, they kept everything that says in the code of Jewish law. They made only one change. They eliminated from their sidurim, from their prayer books any mention of the land of Israel.
[00:10:53] Why? Because they believe that they cannot be loyal German citizens if they are praying to return to some different country.
[00:11:02] So if I'm saying every single day, God, please bring us back to Israel, can I be a loyal American?
[00:11:08] That's the question that people ask.
[00:11:11] So what is the answer? The answer is America is built on the principle of E pluribus unum, that we are making one out of many, but it has to be many.
[00:11:20] So, yes, we are different than everyone else, but that's the whole idea of modern society, that we are making a union out of different people, and we are part of this different.
[00:11:33] And by the way, needless to say that the people that are asking this question, can a Jew be really loyal Jew to the US if he is praying about coming to a different country?
[00:11:43] They are ideologically also very close to the thinking that was in the Soviet Union that believes that everybody was supposed to be the same. In Russian, there was a saying, Everything has to look the same, even if it looks ugly.
[00:12:01] So everything has to be the same. That's how it was in the Soviet Union.
[00:12:05] They didn't recognize differences between people. So Sukkah tells us it could work for a little bit.
[00:12:11] We don't have Sukkot 365 days a year. We have Sukkot only eight days a year.
[00:12:16] So it works. But for the rest of the year, we need to understand that we have our differences, and in spite of being different, we can retain our different identity and unite with everybody else.
[00:12:30] And that's the message of Sukkot.
