Succot: Rejoicing in the Midst of Instability

Sukkot and Living in the Age of Insecurity

Throughout the ages Jews experienced risk and uncertainty, yet they still rejoiced while sitting under the shadow of faith.


What exactly is a sukkah? What is it supposed to represent?

The question is essential to the mitzvah itself. The Torah says: “Live in sukkot for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in sukkot so that your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in sukkot when I brought them out of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 23: 42-43). In other words, knowing – reflecting, understanding, being aware – is an integral part of the mitzvah. For that reason, says Rabbah in the Talmud (Sukkah 2a), a sukkah that is taller than twenty cubits (about thirty feet or nine meters high) is invalid because when the sechach, the “roof,” is that far above your head, you are unaware of it. So what is a sukkah?

On this, two Mishnaic sages disagreed. Rabbi Eliezer held that the sukkah represents the clouds of glory that surrounded the Israelites during the wilderness years, protecting them from heat during the day, cold during the night, and bathing them with the radiance of the Divine presence. Rashi in his commentary takes it as the “plain sense” of the verse.

Rabbi Akiva, on the other hand, says sukkot mammash, meaning a sukkah is a sukkah, no more and no less: a hut, a booth, a temporary dwelling. It has no symbolism. It is what it is (Sukkah 11b).

If we follow Rabbi Eliezer then it is obvious why we celebrate by making a sukkah. It is there to remind us of a miracle. All three pilgrimage festivals are about miracles. Pesach is about the miracle of the exodus when God brought us out of Egypt with signs and wonders. Shavuot is, according to the Oral Torah, about the miracle of the revelation at Mount Sinai when, for the only time in history, God appeared to an entire nation. Sukkot is about God’s tender care of his people, mitigating the hardships of the journey across the desert by surrounding them with His protective cloud as a parent wraps a young child in a blanket. Long afterward, the sight of the blanket evokes memories of the warmth of parental love.

Rabbi Akiva’s view, though, is deeply problematic. If a sukkah is merely a hut, what was the miracle? There is nothing unusual about living in a hut if you are living a nomadic existence in the desert. It’s what the Bedouin did until recently. Some still do. Why should there be a festival dedicated to something ordinary, commonplace and non-miraculous?

Rashbam (Rashi’s grandson) says the sukkah was there to remind the Israelites of their past so that, at the very moment they were feeling the greatest satisfaction at living in Israel – at the time of the ingathering of the produce of the land – they should remember their lowly origins. They were once a group of refugees without a home, living in a favela or a shanty town, never knowing when they would have to move on. Sukkot, says Rashbam, is integrally connected to the warning Moses gave the Israelites at the end of his life about the danger of security and affluence:

Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God … Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery … You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” (Deut. 8: 11-17)

Sukkot, according to Rashbam, exists to remind us of our humble origins so that we never fall into the complacency of taking freedom, the land of Israel and the blessings it yields, for granted, thinking that it happened in the normal course of history.

However there is another way of understanding Rabbi Akiva, and it lies in one of the most important lines in the prophetic literature. Jeremiah says, in words we recited on Rosh Hashanah, “‘I remember the loving-kindness of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown” (Jer. 2:2). This is one of the very rare lines in Tanakh that speaks in praise not of God but of the people Israel.

“How odd of God / To choose the Jews,” goes the famous rhyme, to which the answer is: “Not quite so odd: the Jews chose God.” They may have been, at times, fractious, rebellious, ungrateful and wayward. But they had the courage to travel, to move, to leave security behind, and follow God’s call, as did Abraham and Sarah at the dawn of our history.

If the sukkah represents God’s clouds of glory, where was “the loving-kindness of your youth”? There is no sacrifice involved if God is visibly protecting you in every way and at all times. But if we follow Rabbi Akiva and see the sukkah as what it is, the temporary home of a temporarily homeless people, then it makes sense to say that Israel showed the courage of a bride willing to follow her husband on a risk-laden journey to a place she has never seen before – a love that shows itself in the fact that she is willing to live in a hut trusting her husband’s promise that one day they will have a permanent home.

Pesach represents the love of God for His people. Sukkot represents the love of the people for God.

If so, then a wonderful symmetry discloses itself in the three pilgrimage festivals. Pesach represents the love of God for His people. Sukkot represents the love of the people for God. Shavuot represents the mutuality of love expressed in the covenant at Sinai in which God pledged Himself to the people, and the people to God.

Sukkot, on this reading, becomes a metaphor for the Jewish condition not only during the forty years in the desert but also the almost 2,000 years spent in exile and dispersion. For centuries Jews lived, not knowing whether the place in which they lived would prove to be a mere temporary dwelling. To take just one period as an example: Jews were expelled from England in 1290, and during the next two centuries from almost every country in Europe, culminating in the Spanish Expulsion in 1492, and the Portuguese in 1497. They lived in a state of permanent insecurity. Sukkot is the festival of insecurity.

What is truly remarkable is that it is called, by tradition, zeman simchatenu, “our time of joy.” That to me is the wonder at the heart of the Jewish experience: that Jews throughout the ages were able to experience risk and uncertainty at every level of their existence and yet – while they sat betzila de-mehemnuta, “under the shadow of faith” (this is the Zohar’s description of the sukkah: Zohar, Emor, 103a) – they were able to rejoice. That is spiritual courage of a high order. I have often argued that faith is not certainty: faith is the courage to live with uncertainty. That is what Sukkot represents if what we celebrate is sukkot mammash, not the clouds of glory but the vulnerability of actual huts, open to the wind, the rain and the cold.

I find that faith today in the people and the State of Israel. It is astonishing to me how Israelis have been able to live with an almost constant threat of war and terror since the State was born, and not give way to fear. I sense even in the most secular Israelis a profound faith, not perhaps “religious” in the conventional sense, but faith nonetheless: in life, and the future, and hope. Israelis seem to me perfectly to exemplify what tradition says was God’s reply to Moses when he doubted the people’s capacity to believe: “They are believers, the children of believers” (Shabbat 97a). Today’s Israel is a living embodiment of what it is to exist in a state of insecurity and still rejoice.

And that is Sukkot’s message to the world. Sukkot is the only festival about which Tanakh says that it will one day be celebrated by the whole world (Zechariah 14: 16-19). The twenty-first century is teaching us what this might mean. For most of history, most people have experienced a universe that did not change fundamentally in their lifetimes. But there have been rare great ages of transition: the birth of agriculture, the first cities, the dawn of civilization, the invention of printing, and the industrial revolution. These were destabilizing times and they brought disruption in their wake. The age of transition we have experienced in our lifetime, born primarily out of the invention of the computer and instantaneous global communication, will one day be seen as the greatest and most rapid era of change since Homo sapiens first set foot on earth.

Sukkot, the festival of joy, is the ultimate antidote to fear.

Since 9/11 2001, we have experienced the convulsions. As I write these words, some nations are tearing themselves apart, and no nation is free of the threat of terror. There are parts of the Middle East and beyond that recall Hobbes’ famous description of the “state of nature,” a “war of every man against every man” in which there is “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Hobbes, The Leviathan, chapter X111). Insecurity begets fear, fear begets hate, hate begets violence, and violence eventually turns against its perpetrators.

The twenty-first century will one day be seen by historians as the Age of Insecurity. We, as Jews, are the world’s experts in insecurity, having lived with it for millennia. And the supreme response to insecurity is Sukkot, when we leave behind the safety of our houses and sit in sukkot mammash, in huts exposed to the elements. To be able to do so and still say, this is zeman simchatenu, our festival of joy, is the supreme achievement of faith, the ultimate antidote to fear.

Faith is the ability to rejoice in the midst of instability and change, travelling through the wilderness of time toward an unknown destination. Faith is not fear. Faith is not hate. Faith is not violence. These are vital truths, never more needed than now.

From Aish.com, here.

HINT, HINT: Jew-Hatred Soars, but American Jews Still Living in Denial

Jews Fight Back!

The rash of physical attacks against Jews in Brooklyn and Manhattan began almost a year ago.  We have cellphone and street camera footage of many of the attacks, and they are coming from assailants bellowing “Allahu Akbar” and from younger black and Hispanic men often yelling “dirty Jew.” They sneak up on Jewish-garbed citizens using bricks and stones, breaking bones and smashing eyes. There was no mainstream media discussion about this until a few weeks ago, and the major Jewish establishment organizations were basically silent as well. Even now, none of these Jewish organizations are flexing their muscles or evincing anywhere near the type of outrage we should expect.

You can be sure that if the attackers were white or Jewish and the victims Black, Muslim, or Hispanic, the establishment alphabet Jewish organizations (ADL, AJC, NYF, JCRC, Conference of Presidents, and Federations) would be the very first organizing protests against racism and pontificating about something rotten within American society.

My grievance is not why general society is doing little, since most Americans have no clue about what is happening in Boro Park, Williamsburg, or Crown Heights. But the major secular Jewish organizations do know! Nor am I perplexed about why this is not at the top of the list of many officeholders and politicians. After all, the “machers” from the Jewish organizations are not knocking down their doors nor raising Cain — something Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, CAIR, and Ocasio-Cortez would certainly do if their people were being assaulted by outsiders. Beyond doubt, the establishment Jewish organizations would themselves be knocking down doors right alongside them. They, as they always do, would be proclaiming “how the most important Jewish value is the protection of minorities and fighting racism.” Actually, it is President Trump who has made more of an issue over anti-Jewish remarks coming from the mouths of high-profile members of minority communities than our own Jewish establishment “leadership.”

Many of those running Jewish organizations and non-Orthodox synagogue and temples have for decades made helping other minorities the centerpiece of their ideological life and, thus, will never spotlight the anti-Semitism coming from members of the minority community, since it would shatter all they believe in. It might get in the way of “dialogue,” which is their most precious template, though it usually is a dialogue of what we Jews can do for you and not what you can also do for us. Years after the 1992 Crown Heights pogroms, the ADL finally acknowledged that its unwillingness to defend the Lubavitch community was a fear of jeopardizing their loyalty to the Black civil rights movement.

Many American Jewish leaders, including rabbis, consider these issues more important than mere tribal Jewish concerns, while others have convinced themselves that it constitutes Judaism itself, universalism taking precedence over those matters of Jewishness that are labeled “parochial” and “tribal.” For them, more important than Jewish survival is the survival of progressivism and left-liberalism, their guiding light. They have redefined Judaism as leftwing progressivism. This is their “religion” and they are zealots for it. Even the few Jewish holidays observed have been stripped of the uniquely Jewish component and replaced by universalist themes that abhor the Jewish particular.

A people in constant need to display to others or affirm their own moral superiority will eventually not defend itself and puts its survival at risk. Virtue signaling is but another form of social climbing.                                                                                                                                    

II

This devaluing of things specifically Jewish explains how Jewish organizations have allowed Jewish children on college campuses to be bullied, spat upon, harassed, and forced to renounce support of Israel. The ADL and big-city federations have the funds to counteract the BDS movement on campuses, the know-how in doing so, and the clout and savvy to demonize the movement and the Muslim students behind it as full-fledged racists not acceptable on campus. But they haven’t. In fact, the ADL has assertively come out against those states proposing legislation against BDS.

Continue reading…

From American Thinker, here.

‘Cherut’ – Negative Liberty Leads to Positive Liberty

On the Etymology of חרות

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

The appearance of the root /חור/ with the meaning of nobleman, aristocrat, or elder appears mostly in the later books of Tanakh. Melachim I 21:8, 11 and Kohelet 10:17 juxtapose חורים with elders or contrast them with youth. Nechemiah (2:16; 4:8, 13; 5:7; 7:5; 13:17) consistently juxtaposes חורים with nobleman or priests (see also 6:17). Yeshayahu 34:12 and Yirmiyahu 27:20, 39:6 similarly place חורים in the context of royalty and is commonly translated as “nobleman.” In Rabbinic literature חור came to mean freedom (e.g. Gitten 4:4; Targum on Shemot 21:2; Bereishit Rabbah 92). Daat Mikra, however, understands חורים as aristocrats who were free from paying taxes throughout Tanakh (e.g. Melachim I 21:8; Nechemiah 2:16).

However, the original meaning of the root /חור/ appears too have been “white.”[1] In Bereishit 40:16, R. Saadia Gaon interprets חרי as “white bread,” a symbol of royalty (see Ramban).

Yeshayahu 29:22 uses יחורו as pale, and is understood by multiple commentators as being the Aramaic equivalent of “white” (Radak, Metzudot Tzion and Ramban on Bereishit 40:16; see Daniel 7:9). Being pale-faced may be a symbol of royalty since it implies that one is at leisure to stay in-doors protected from the sun.

Esther 1:7, 8:15, and Yeshayahu 19:9 (according to Ibn Ezra and Radal; see especially R”I Karo) use חור as “white linen,” especially in the context of royalty (Esther Rabbah on 1:6; see Jastrow on חור). It is possible that חור/white linen is related to, and possibly derived from, חור/hole (Rashi on Bereishit 40:16 and Yeshayahu 19:9 relates חור to wicker and nets).

Thus, three etymologies may be suggested: 1) the white bread-royalty connection; 2) the pale-royalty connection; and, 3) the white linen-royalty connection. Either way, it is not surprising that חור is a common name among the royalty (e.g. Shemot 31:2; Divrei ha’Yamim I 4:1; Yehoshua 13:21)

Hirsch (Shemot 32:16) threads the disparate meanings of /חור/ into one conceptual whole, and relates it to the well-known rabbinic dictum (Avot 6:2):  “Do not read engraved [חרות] but free [חרות], for there is no person who exemplifies freedom as one who engages in Torah study.”

“Now חור means white, free and open, from which we get the meaning of opening and hole. The basic meaning seems to be “unhindered.” Hence: free, open, and the unhindered i.e. unbroken, rays of light: white. So that חרות   could also mean “opening” in the sense of the stone being bored clean through, or actually “freedom,” and in this sense חרות על הלחות would mean “in free mastery over the Tablets” and thereby express that ם” וס” שבלוחות בנס היו עומדים. The Tablets did not bear the writing but the writing bore and held the Tablets. Then the sentence in Avot 6:2 אין לך בן חורין אלא מי שעוסק בתורה , that the Torah makes “free,” would be a literal fact, brought home to one’s mind by a glance at the writing of the Tablets. Just as the writing of the Divine Evidence was not only independent of the material but raises the material serving it to its own level of freedom above the ordinary laws of Nature which govern matter, in the same way human beings, who take upon themselves the spirit of this writing and make themselves the representatives of this spirit, are raised, borne and held by the very spirit itself, above the blind force of ‘you must,’ the lack of free will which clings to all matter, i.e. they become “free.” (See Maharal, Derech Chaim, for a similar interpretation).


[1] As is common in all languages, the concrete becomes a metaphor for more abstract concepts. Thus, “white” becomes “clear” and “logical” as in מחוור

From BM’EI HA’DAGA, here.

HYEHUDI CORNERSTONE: ‘Frum Is A Galach!’

WARNING! Religion May be Harmful to Your Health!

Jan 17, 2013

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Visit http://11213.org/ for audio & video of Rabbi Manis Friedman

This class with Rabbi Manis Friedman took place in Gush Etzion at Matnas Community Center

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From YouTube, here.

Some Overseas Americans May Soon Lose Access to Banking Services

Congress and the IRS Declare War on Overseas Americans

A fundamental injustice of US tax law is that it discriminates against the approximately nine million Americans who live in other countries.

These citizens must continue filing US tax and information reporting returns, even if they’re paying tax in their resident countries. Any local businesses they’re associated with become ensnared into the spiderweb of US tax laws. (The only other country that imposes similar rules is the totalitarian dictatorship of Eritrea.)

With the enactment of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in 2010, things got even worse for overseas Americans. The law requires foreign banks and other financial institutions with US customers to act as unpaid informants for the IRS. If they fail to do so, US-source income they have in the form of interest, dividends, rents, and similar payments becomes subject to a 30% withholding tax.

FATCA’s working assumption is that all Americans with investments outside the US are tax evaders, including those who live full-time overseas. But that’s simply nonsense. For instance, the most popular destination for Americans living abroad is Canada. As many as two million US citizens live there. The top combined federal and provincial income tax rate in Canada can approach 50%. In one province – Newfoundland and Labrador – the top combined rate is 51.3%.

Does Canada sound like a tax haven to you?

Despite FATCA’s flawed premise, the IRS has ratcheted up the pressure on foreign financial institutions (FFIs) to enforce it. Unsurprisingly, most FFIs don’t want anything to do with the law. They’ve closed hundreds of thousands of accounts held by US citizens instead.

With their local accounts closed, many overseas Americans increased their reliance on US accounts. But US banks and brokerages have started to close accounts owned by non-resident citizens as well. These include Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch and Wells Fargo. In the US financial institutions that still accept business from non-resident citizens, the minimum account values have increased astronomically. Millions of overseas Americans are now effectively locked out of banking relationships anywhere in the world.

What’s more, because the SEC forbids solicitations by US mutual funds to individuals living outside the US, it’s become nearly impossible for non-resident citizens to own them.  In addition, US citizens generally can’t purchase non-US mutual funds without disastrous tax consequences. As a result, Americans living abroad are effectively locked out of all mutual funds, US or non-US.

Another way Congress and the IRS have made life miserable for overseas Americans is to make it practically impossible for them to retire in their adopted countries. For instance, contributions to a foreign pension plan are usually tax-deductible in the country offering it. And growth in the plan is generally tax deferred. But in most cases, the US Tax Code doesn’t offer a deduction for the contribution and taxes the growth in the plan. Overseas Americans often wind up paying two sets of income tax on their pensions: one to the US and a second to their adopted countries. Similarly, US citizens generally can’t own foreign life insurance policies that have a cash value without disastrous tax consequences.

The situation for many Americans living abroad got even worse after Congress enacted President Trump’s tax reform bill in 2017. The law lowers tax rates for both individuals and domestic corporations. But anyone with deferred profits in what the Tax Code refers to as a CFC or controlled foreign corporation (a foreign corporation with more than 50% US ownership), is subject to a mandatory one-time repatriation tax of 15.5%. For less liquid assets like real estate, the tax rate is 8%.

The problem is especially acute for overseas Americans who use foreign corporations as a savings vehicle and have no intention of repatriating the profits to the US. For instance, many Canadians use corporations to operate small businesses and set up pension plans. Net profits in these corporations are taxable in Canada only when they’re distributed. The repatriation tax confiscates a portion of deferred profits of these corporations owned by US citizens, with no provision in Canadian law to offset the tax. Up to 15.5% of the profits are subject to double taxation.

As bad as conditions are now for US citizens living abroad, they’re about to get even worse. In just one country – France – the Banking Federation has warned its members they must close as many as 40,000 additional accounts held by US citizens living there by the end of the year. Many of them are held by “accidental Americans;” individuals born in the US who left the country as children or born to US parents in France. By law, they’re US citizens, although according to the Banking Federation, they “lack any concrete link with the United States, where they no longer reside.”

Indeed, the European Banking Federation, which represents around 3,500 European banks, told the US Treasury that up to 300,000 more US citizens living in Europe could lose access to banking services by the end of the year.

The law forcing their hand is FATCA, which requires FFIs to provide the IRS with the Social Security Numbers of their US citizen customers. Until now the IRS has waived this requirement in certain cases. The waiver ends December 31, 2019. But accidental Americans often don’t have SSNs and often find it difficult to come up with the required documentation to get one.

Since Congress and the IRS have declared war on overseas Americans, it’s no wonder why the number of US citizens expatriating – giving up their citizenship and passport – has skyrocketed in recent years. Unless Congress ends or substantially modifies citizenship-based taxation, that’s the only alternative overseas Americans have to live normal lives in their adopted countries.

Reprinted with permission from Nestmann.com.

From LRC, here.