TGI (almost) Cheshvan

We dance, we kiss, we schmooze, we carry on, we go home happy.  What do you say?  Come on.

The holiday of Sukkot is sometimes referred to as the Festival of In-gathering.  In the agricultural world, this time period marks the completion of the harvest and the beginning of the planting/rainy season.  Sukkot is also referred to as the season of our rejoicing.  The end of the harvest cycle is a time for celebration but this holiday also starts a mere 4 days after Yom Kippur.  We spent 25 hours afflicting our souls and made it out alive.  What better time than this to celebrate?  

The following line appears in the Torah reading of the 8th day of Sukkot:

שבעת ימים תחג ליהוה אלהיך במקום אשר יבחר יהוה כי יברכך יהוה אלהיך בכל תבואתך ובכל מעשה ידיך והיית אך שמח

Seven days you will celebrate to Hashem, your God, in the place that He will choose, because Hashem, your God, will bless you in all of your produce and in all of the work of your hands and you will only be happy.

The Torah commands that you only experience joy during this festival.  There have been lengthy discussions held by everyone as to how this is possible.  Human emotions are a complicated thing that we generally don't have much control over.  How can we maintain this level of happiness for a whole week?

I've been thinking about this for awhile.  This commandment reminds me of the big red button that says, in all caps, "do not push."  The second you see this button, the only thing you want to do is push it and see what happens.  It's human nature- when you're told to do one thing, you're inclined to do the opposite.  So why would God command us to feel a certain way?

Sukkot is a time for us to get back in touch with the basics.  We live in temporary booths for the week where we do all of our sleeping, eating, and "hanging out."  It's so easy for us to connect with the natural world and feel God's presence.  The Torah was quite brilliant to declare such a holiday happen right after Yom Kippur and the Days of Awe.  We've been given a clean slate and can now start over.  Like infants, we begin from nothing.  The commandment to be happy (in my personal, non-rabbinic opinion) has a deeper meaning.  Sadness/anger may start to develop as it's generally impossible to escape.  Instead of wallowing in these emotions (like we normally do) we should take this time to let the negative feelings pass and actively concentrate on the happier times.  By sitting in the Sukkah, we realize just how tiny our lives can be and how huge Hashem's presence is.  Like the infant that relies on its parents for everything, so too do we rely on God's kindness and giving nature.

This became quite apparent during Simchat Torah.  It's no secret that this is one of my favorite holidays.  My calves are still fairly mad at me and like to send constant reminders of their anger every time I go up and down the stairs.  In any case, things felt different this year.  I've dedicated 10 months to studying Torah- the same Torah I was holding during the Hakafot.  There was a moment when I blocked out the singing and dancing around me and thought about what it was that I was holding.  Hashem gave this to me to learn from and to develop into an "adult" from the "infant" that I am.  It connects the Jewish people, not just to each other, but to the world around us.  I could feel my heart glowing.  Or maybe that was just my locked up neshama trying to get out.  Ha...


It was great to finally get things back to "normal"- full of Kabbalat Shabbat and the whole shebang.  I was invited to Shabbos dinner by one of the families from Yedidya.  The night was incredible.  There was another couple there (math and science geeks!) with their newborn daughter.  Dinner conversation was full of exhilirating topics and deep questions.  After everyone else left, we ended up standing in the kitchen until midnight talking the night away.  I felt such a sense of being home.  They're truly an incredible family.

I'm happy to see the month of Tishrei come to an end.  The chaggim were beyond amazing, but I'm incredibly excited to jump into the meat and potatoes of my classes.  This month was such a whirlwind of emotions but now it's time to settle down and jump into Torah all day erryday.

Playing a game of nighttime daytime...

This is no ordinary lamp.  It once changed the course of a young man's life.  A young man, who, like this lamp, was more than what he seemed.  A diamond in the rough.


Yom Kippur did not bring about the fast that I had expected.  During my Friday afternoon prep, I made sure to pack a bag of tissues to prevent the snot-tastrophe of Rosh Hashanna.  As it turns out, I didn't need any of them.  Davening proved to be extremely frustrating until we hit Mincha.  But let's back track first.  My story (in a super small nutshell) goes as follows:

During my various experiences at school, I made the decision to be Shomer Shabbat.  I started asking a million questions and took on every learning experience that I could get my hands on.  At some point, I was informed that I wasn't Halachically Jewish.  Now this came as a huge slap in the face.  I was raised Jewish.  I believed in this stuff.  How could anyone look at me and tell me that it was all an illusion?  In the months following that conversation, I felt completely disconnected from the Jewish world.  The anxiety would build up just walking past Chabad on the way to campus.  Being the Director of Shabbat Experience became a nearly impossible task.  Praying was absolutely out of the question.  There's no way that the God I believed in could possibly allow someone to take my identity away from me.  I was hurt and angry and felt nothing but betrayal.  My faith was shot for awhile.  It took some time to get things back on track but my relationship with God hadn't fully repaired itself.  There was still a lot of anger and confusion present but I tried to look at it as any relationship.  You get angry at your lover and then kiss and make up.  It's all part of the game.  All I could do was continue praying in hopes that things would smooth out.  Then I hopped on a plane to dedicate a year to understanding the ways of the community that I so deeply wanted to be a part of.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm in Jerusalem.  Maybe it's a result of the few classes we've had at Pardes.  Maybe it's a matter of the people I've been meeting or the conversations I've been able to engage in.  Whatever it was, I had such a sense of clarity by the time Yom Kippur was over.  It seemed (at first) that my prayers were completely empty.  All I could feel was a grumbly stomach and the beginnings of a massive headache.  My heart seemed to be hiding.  For someone who almost always connected to prayer on a deeper level, this was beyond frustrating.  Why wasn't I connecting?  It finally hit me at Mincha- I didn't feel the usual turmoil because, for once, I was completely at peace.  The time period during the Days of Awe was such an intense journey.  I was forced to examine my life from so many different perspectives that I finally had a complete picture.  It became so clear that God had never betrayed me.  The anger and frustration had left.  I was completely at ease for the first time in months.

This, hands down, was the most meaningful Yom Kippur I've yet to experience.  It wasn't just about my journey but about the day as a whole.  To sum it up, here's a video:

The entire 25-hour period was full of contrast.  We sat through Kol Nidrei Friday night and then left shul to see every single Israeli out in the streets.  It was like happy hour without the drinks.  And the bikes?  Kids everywhere on bikes!  You thought you were finally safe from crazy Israeli drivers but their 4-year-olds on bicycles are just as bad.  Then there's the actual content during the service.  We go from singing upbeat praises about Hashem to standing hunched over, humbly acknowledging all of our sins.  During the Temple Service, we find ourselves on the floor as an expression of total submission to God.  It ends in a celebration that the Cohen Gadol was able to atone for all of our sins and actually made it out alive.  People were singing and clapping and parading around shul.  Who knew such things could take place on Yom Kippur.

The final blast of the shofar opened the tear gates (signature move...it had to happen).  This piercing sound marked the end of the intense 10 day journey we had just traveled along.  The past 25 hours alone were a complete roller coaster.  I had done everything I possibly could to find favor in Hashem's eyes.  The reality of everything started to set in and I was left to feel nothing but awe.


I feel confident moving forward and can finally say that I'm excited to see what comes next.  Only time will tell what this year will bring.

Like sheep, we flock.

We all go a little mad sometimes.  Haven't you?



You remember Cobble's Knot from Maniac Magee?  The large ball of knotted string that Cobble would award a year's worth of pizza to anyone who could untie it?  That's what the inside of my mind feels like.  Something tells me this post won't do it justice, but here goes nothing...


I made the decision to daven at Yedidya for the Holidays.  It's a Modern Orthodox shul located about 2 minutes from Pardes.  They don't have a Rabbi but they sure do have a strong sense of community.  I went to check them out last Shabbos to make sure I'd be comfortable there.  Shacharit started at 8:30 and I got there around 8:25...only to find that they were in the middle of the repetition of the Musaf Amida.  Something wasn't right.  A woman came over and informed me that I had stumbled into the early morning minyan and that I really wanted to be upstairs.  We started talking and I asked about Rosh Hashanna seating.  The conversation resulted in an invite to 2nd day lunch (score!).

In my Self, Soul, and Text class, we analyzed sources that discussed that the best time to pray is when you're in a state of semi-consciousness.  When you're half asleep, you don't have the ability to logically think and therefore can put your complete heart into your prayers.  I didn't need these source sheets to understand the truth behind this idea.  Due to some miscommunications, I made the decision to go to 5:40 Shacharit every morning.  I soon discovered that 5AM is such a beautiful time to be awake.  In our Mishna class, we've been discussing what the latest time is to say the nighttime Shema.  According to Rabbi Gamliel, you can say it until the column of light starts to come up (aka: dawn).  It was comforting to know that if a bunch of rabbi's sons wandered into our apartment after a night in the "drinking house" and hadn't yet said their nighttime Shema, it wouldn't have been too late.  But I digress.  I made the short trip to shul in the crisp, chilly air and joined the other morning birds.

Davening this year was an experience and a half.  I was filled with such a wide range of emotions.  This was the first time that I was ever away from my home shul and my family for the Holidays.  I went from knowing everyone to being the visiting stranger in the back of the shul.  If I was going to be welcomed back, there was no opportunity to hide the shoes of the Cohanim.  This was the first time I've ever been homesick.  On the other hand, I was able to really focus on the service and the prayers coming out of my mouth.  I was able to reflect on the previous year- the ups and downs and all arounds.  I thought about my roller coaster relationship with Hashem.  I thought about my raging emotions towards Judaism ranging from complete anger and confusion to absolute awe and amazement.  Will God judge me harshly or was this all part of the plan?  They say that on Rosh Hashana, every human is like a sheep being inspected by God, one by one.  Imagining myself as a sheep being inspected to the fullest extent was such a nerve wracking experience.

I did, however, find a lot of comfort in the shul's technical problems.  There was an electrical fire in the middle of the second night.  Fortunately, there was no serious damage but the shul was without electricity until after chag.  This meant no lights or air conditioning.  We davened the beginning of Shacharit outside along with the birds waking up with the sunrise.  And, of course, with the obnoxious cats running around our feet.  One of the women made a sarcastic comment about the shul and all of its problems.  If only she had realized that everyone at home was sitting there with their snorkels and umbrellas praying to stay dry...

All in all, it was a pretty intense couple of days.  I still don't think I've fully recovered but there will be time for that on another day.

Things I've learned recently:
1.  Just because the "column of light" has appeared doesn't mean there will be enough light in the apartment to get ready.  We should have set the timer a little later so the lights would still be on at 5:40AM.
2.  Always know where the blech is and be sure to plug it in before chag.  Just because you don't mind eating cold dino nuggets and pizza doesn't mean you should be forced into doing so.
3.  Bring an ample supply of tissues to shul.  It's pretty terrible getting on the floor for Aleinu and discovering just how much snot can come out of the human body.
4.  Stumbling into wrong places will lead to delicious meals with strangers.
5.  Delicious meals with strangers will lead to familiar conversations about the pros and cons of shul and what changes can and should be made.

Something tells me it's going to be a beautiful year.

שנה טובה ומתוקה וגמר חתימה טובה