The Ascendent Journey of The High Holidays - with Rachel Goldberg-Polin

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0:17You are listening to an ARK Media podcast. We start this whole period with Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur, with the dynamic of God as a parent. And when we get to Sukkot, the relationship shifts, and God is really more like a partner or spouse. And so what's happening on the eighth day is that God is sort of detaining us, stopping us, not wanting the date to end. I think of it as you know like back in the days when you would go on a date and you didn't want the date to end you'd kind of drag your feet at the end and you're walking slower and slower to where you know the date is going to end and then someone will say you want to come up for coffee and I think of Shmini Atzeret as God saying you want to come up for coffee.

1:09Shmini Atzeret is you're at the top stop enjoy the view.

1:27It's 11 a.m. on Monday, August 31st here in New York City. It's 6 p.m. on Monday, August 31st in Israel. Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Stryker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dalia Scheinlin, and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets have gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description.

2:03Now on to today's episode. Last year, around this time, Rachel Goldberg-Polin joined us right before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to help us understand the days of A 'ah, what tshuva really means, what we are doing when we hear the shofar, why Yom Kippur is not simply about saying, I'm sorry, and why the real test of these holidays is how we live during the rest of the year. But the Jewish holiday season does not end with Yom Kippur. Almost immediately we move into Sukkot, and then, at the end of Sukkot, into Shemini Yetzaret, in Simchat Torah. Tishrei is the most holiday-dense month in the Hebrew calendar, And yet, for some reason, many Jews in the diaspora experience a kind of holiday drop-off after Yom Kippur.

2:51Why do Sukkot and Shemini Yatzeret and Simchat Torah get such short shrift? What are we missing? Because the transition from Yom Kippur to Sukkot and Simchat Torah is fascinating. We go from judgment and repentance to building a fragile hut outside our homes, eating and sometimes sleeping in it, celebrating, carrying the four spices, and finally dancing with the Torah. For Israelis and Jews around the world, Simchat Torah now carries another layer of meaning. October 7th, 2023 was Simchat Torah in Israel. So a holiday whose very name means the joy of Torah is now inseparable from one of the darkest days in modern Jewish history.

3:34So I wanna talk with Rachel about the whole arc of this season, but especially those latter holidays. Why do we move from judgment and repentance to fragility, joy, and ultimately dancing? And what do Sukkot and Simchat Torah ask of us now? Perhaps the holidays we tend to overlook contain the culmination of what the Days of A 'ah are trying to teach us. My conversation with Rachel right after this short break.

4:05I'd like to tell you about Hadass, a lone soldier who grew up outside Washington, D.C., but served in an IDF infantry unit. On October 7th, as a 22-year-old reservist, she was called up to the Gaza envelope. For days, she cleared houses of terrorists and witnessed the atrocities of Hamas's attack. Hadass was supposed to begin university in mid-October of that year. Instead, she found herself in reserve duty until sleeplessness and anxiety made it impossible to continue. A friend connected her with BuddyLine, a program of American Friends of Israel Navy SEALs. BuddyLine pairs Israeli Navy SEALs with IDF combat veterans struggling with PTSD.

4:48Over the course of a year, they rebuild trust, confidence, and connection through warrior to Warrior Care. For 750 veterans to date, it's working. Hadass just completed her first year of university, and Buddyline, she says, quote, gave me a reason to get up in the morning, no matter how the night was. During this period of holidays, please consider supporting this work through the link in our show notes. A gift of any size can help someone find their way back.

5:22Rachel, good to see you. Daniel, thank you for having me. Daniel. Does anyone call you Daniel? My mother calls me that when she's... When she's mad? Yes, it's Daniel. Everything's good when it's Dan. Maybe this is a fun fact that you don't know, but if I was a boy, I was going to be Daniel. Wow. Yeah. That's interesting. That's interesting that your parents shared that with you. But I'm not Daniel or Dan to you. I'm grandpa. That's true. Rachel, just for our listeners to understand, the context has been calling me grandpa recently because I do something, I have a habit of doing something that she claims only grandparents do, which is I don't message her via text or WhatsApp.

6:00I just call her. And that is apparently in Israel considered like a massive imposition when you just call someone, when people just hear the phone ring and they have to answer it as opposed to being warned with a message saying, hey, I'd like to talk, are you free? or leaving a voice memo, but just the cold call with no warning is considered some kind of like real inconvenience. Not real inconvenience, just very grandparental. But why? I don't know. By the way, I told my sister Wendy this. I said, you know, Rachel gets an order when I just call. She goes, oh, you do that? She goes, you only do that like for her, like immediate family.

6:37Emergencies, or if you're a grandpa. You don't just spring a phone call on someone. But I'm still gonna do it with you. as I did this morning, I'm just going to call you and that'll be, and when the phone rings, you know it's me. Okay. I do always know it's you. When the phone rings, John says, it's Dan. Without even seeing my name. Yep. All right. So let's, let's jump into this. Before we start, as we always do, we study in the merit of some person or persons or something happening. I leave it to you to set us up here. So who or what are we studying in the merit of today? Well, today, since especially we are going to be learning about Simchat Torah, Simchas Torah, I think that it is critical that we study in the merit of the thousands of people that we lost on Simchat Torah of 2023 and in the time since then from when that darkest day in Israel's modern history occurred.

7:34And since that time, so many thousands of families have been affected by loss. And so we'll study in the merit, first of all, of those holy souls, that they should have an elevation in the world to come, and in the hope and aspiration that the people who are suffering in their absence can find comfort and adaptability. As I mentioned to you, I wanted to focus this conversation on the Ark of Tishrei, which is the month in the Hebrew calendar that we are in right now, as I mentioned in the introduction, is the most holiday-dense month in the Hebrew calendar. Last year, around this time, we spent a lot of time talking about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

8:13And this year, I want to zoom out a little bit. But before we zoom out, I just want to provide a little bit of a refresher for our listeners. What are the basics on Rosh Hashanah? What is its significance? Why is it so significant? This may be remedial for some, but it will set us up for this conversation. Okay. Well, so first of all, it's important to point out that right now we're actually not yet in Tishrei. We're not yet in the month where all these holidays that you're referring to happen. We're in the month preceding Tishrei, which is Elul. And it's in the month of Elul that people get ready emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, religiously.

8:52It's like the pregame. Yeah. Well, it's very much. We talked about this before that one of the nicknames of Rosh Hashanah. And we asked this question, you know, what actually is Rosh Hashanah? and the short incorrect answer is it's the Jewish New Year. We say that, but we know from studying together about Passover that the very first mitzvah that was given when Moses and Aaron are spoken to by God in the book of Exodus, in the book of Shemot, before the children of Israel leave Egypt, the very first mitzvah they're given is God says, okay, this is going to be the head of the months for you. Meaning for the Jewish people from now on, we're going to count as a people this time of year when Passover starts, which is in the month of Nisan.

9:40And then we are told in the Torah about different holidays with that as the starting point. And therefore, we are told that in the seventh month of the year, on the first of that month, you're going to have this holiday, which happens to be Rosh Hashanah. But obviously, it's not New Year's because the formula for it is it's the seventh month. And we've said before, it's like saying, OK, New Year, we're going to celebrate it on July 1st. It would be like a very strange recipe. Right. So this seventh month is very, as you mentioned in your introduction, saturated with a lot of holidays. And the first one happens on the first and second day of the month of Tishrei, which is falling out this year on the evening of September 11th and the evening of September 12th.

10:32It's a two-day holiday. One of the things that, according to our tradition, happened on the first of Tishrei is that that is when Adam and Eve were created. It's the launch of humanity. Correct, which means a couple of things. First of all, it makes sense that, therefore, it would be once a year when we do a check-in and say, how am I doing in this enterprise of being part of humanity? Like when you join a company and you have your annual review, you usually have it on the date on which you joined the company. And the other thing that is, I think, appealing about that idea is that then the holiday is not exclusively a Jewish holiday.

11:14It's a human holiday because Adam and Eve were created on the first of Tishrei, on the first of the seventh month that we are acknowledging. and Adam and Eve were the first people. They were not the first Jews. So there's something more broad about the day that I think is meaningful. It's also called the day of judgment because it is a day that not only are we ourselves, ideally, we're doing some inner judgment and inner reflection, but we also have this, in our tradition, this approach of this is when we are being looked at by this idea of God and having an assessment of what we have done with our time here in this past year.

11:58And I think people get reminiscent anytime there's, you know, you'll say like, oh, on my last birthday, where was I? Who was I with? What did I do? And when we have holidays, we often say, you know, where was I last Passover? Who was I with? What did I do? And certainly, I think at this time of year, there are many people who are saying, where was I last year? Where was I two years ago? Where was I three years ago? Because in many ways, the world seems to have really a before and after change since October 7th, 2023. But it is odd, though, that we say Happy New Year, that we say Shana Tova. I remember years ago, there was a rabbi who said, you know, there's that song, Don't Worry, Be Happy.

12:39And he said, worry, but be happy, which I thought was a nice take on Rosh Hashanah. Look, there's also a lot of potential. I think that as we prepare for this review, whether it's for the review in our company that we're pretending that we plow away at, or if it's in this lifetime that we are working and trying to do what we're meant to do in this lifetime, we do have to stop and acknowledge that there are a lot of things happening at the same time. And so we can also have apples and honey and we can also have festive dinners and be together and be happy and say we are still here. People have heard me talk about every morning there are millions of Jewish people around the world who wake up and say this famous line, which is saying, wow, I'm back.

13:33Well, Danny. Yeah. You have tremendous faith in me, universe, because here I am. and there are millions of people today who did not wake up because they were done with whatever it was that they were supposed to do in this lifetime. And we woke up this morning. Everyone who's listening to this woke up this morning. And so I think there's also this idea at this time of year of not just reflection of looking back, but there's preflection of looking ahead. What am I going to do with my time? You said that to me when we spoke this morning, this term preflection, which is interesting because after we talked about it, I thought to myself, there probably is nothing like it in Judaism.

14:10And I thought there's probably nothing like it anywhere. And this idea of just this dedicated time of anticipating reflection almost. Right. You know it's coming. Right. It's also called Yom Truah, the day of shofar blasts. The shofar is the horn of usually either a ram or a sheep or a goat. It has to be from a kosher animal and hollow, but we don't use a bull or a cow. I'll leave you in suspense of why. And the shofar has three specific sounds, four if we're being sticklers, because one of the sounds is elongated at the end. And so it becomes, you could technically say there are four sounds. And each one helps create the theme of what we're supposed to be feeling.

14:55The first one is the tikia sound, which is that one long shofar blast, which is reminiscent of the trumpet blasts that used to be used when a king was coronated. And on the most basic level, this is sort of jarring us with the awareness that there's something larger at the core here, that there's something larger that's in charge. It makes us moderns very uncomfortable to think that, but that is at the essence is when we're doing this tikiya coronation sound, that we're really crying out, there's something bigger than us, even us important people that we think we are so in control, there's something bigger.

15:36The second sound is the trua sound, which is nine short blasts. The tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu, which Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the Rambam says, is really like this primal alarm clock for the soul. You know, he says that at this particular time of year, we have disproportionate personal growth potential, and we should be seizing that opportunity. But most of the time, what our soul is desiring and what we're doing on the surface day to day are not in alignment. Those things aren't in alignment, and the shofar can actually elicit emotions we didn't know were dormant or asleep. And so the true ah is wake up, wake up.

16:19and the shvarim are the three broken sobbing sounds and it sounds like someone like sobbing and heaving and it's reminiscent of the idea that the soul is crying out to be more deeply connected and in line with our purpose i'll tell you that somebody actually wrote to me just last week someone i don't know and she said this is really intense she listens to me shouting to her shande day 328, she said it reminds her of the shofar, of me screaming to him. That was when you were right there at the border of Gaza. Yeah, that was really interesting. But I thought, like, it's not about me. It's that she understands that there's a sobbing quality and a wake-up quality that sounds very primal.

17:11And what I think is nice about the shofar is that it's really this link to our roots. Unlike so many elements in our lives that are different, right? Like the clothes we're wearing now are different than the clothes they were wearing thousands of years ago. The shoes, the dishes, our houses are so different. But here we have this exact same tool, this very genuine, authentic, primal tool in our ever-evolving and changing modernity that is thrusting us back and binding us with our roots. So from the first day of Rosh Hashanah, from that first night through the end of Yom Kippur, it's about a 10-day period.

17:50Should we think about that 10-day period from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur as like a package deal? Definitely. I think that's based on what our sages tell us, is that the period from the 1st of Tishrei until the 10th of Tishrei is called Aseret Yamei Tshuva, the 10 days of Tshuva. We translated it as repentance, which I think for some people that's a loaded word, but the actual shoresh, the root of tshuva, means to turn. It's the time of turning, of really turning inward, turning back, maybe turning forward. But it's movement. It's action. And so it is supposed to be that here we're having Judgment Day, meaning Judgment Day is one of those nicknames of Rosh Hashanah.

18:38And then we have this opportunity period to prove it. And then we end up on the 10th day with this day of atonement, Yom Kippur. And so in theory, if we're really serious about trying to use this construct as it has been prescribed, we're showing up having done some introspection beforehand right now during the month of Elul. In theory, we should be doing this every day, right? If it's February, we should be every single day waking up and saying, what happened yesterday that I'm not so proud of? Should I make amends with that person who I said something not nice to yesterday? I mean, we should be doing these mini introspections every day, but it's not always attainable.

19:24It's not natural. That's not a natural way to live, to wake up every day. Maybe it should be, but it's not. It could be something we aspire to. I'm sure that there are people who do it. But this time of year, we're given this opportunity of, okay, try. And we are immediately trying in those 10 days to prove that we're serious in what we're saying in these prayers on Rosh Hashanah. And so we are going and making amends. If we have a relationship that's rocky, we have to go try to deal with it. And that's hard. It's really hard. And it's painful. And it's uncomfortable. And it's embarrassing. And also we have to do things like give tzedakah, like prove, prove.

20:05But what about this thing? Everyone does this. And my family does this. We say this to each other. And I always wonder, is it box checking exercises? I mean, it's not box checking. It's heartfelt. but there is a box checking feel to it. Yes. And this is going to be annoying maybe to my family who are listening to this, thinking that I'm not suggesting that they're superficial in the way we do this with one another. Everybody forgives each other. Yes, yes, we love you. It's fine. Right, it's a whole thing. You call someone, hey, if there's anything I did to hurt you or offend you over the last year, I just want to ask you for your forgiveness.

20:37And you kind of jam it in, like you're like rushing, like running before you hit the tape of Khol Nidre, of when Yom Kippur starts to get in those requests for forgiveness. Is that like a diasporic thing? Is that a Western thing? Like it does feel very, again, and I do it. If I'm shaming anyone here, I'm shaming myself. Like I do this too. And for our listeners who aren't as familiar with this quote unquote tradition, as we approach Yom Kippur, we ask loved ones, we ask people close to us for forgiveness for anything we may have done to them over the previous year, because the idea is Yom Kippur is like after Yom Kippur, you get like a clean slate to start again.

21:11Right. I think that a lot of us do it that way. I absolutely agree with you. And I think that I was actually just talking to someone about this and I said, the way you know if you have done real chuva, real repentance, real amends, real, the true work that we are supposed to be doing is you go by yourself and look into a mirror and say, did I really do it? And you know if you really did it. And did you really make amends? Like there are people we have really, truly hurt with our words, with our actions. And it usually, not always, but there are oftentimes that it's people that we really love, people who we're in contact with all the time.

21:54It's the people closest to you. And so we almost are preying on their love, the preexistent love there to be able to say, I'm really sorry if I hurt you. And we might really mean it, but we haven't had the real talk. And they usually, I think, say, of course I forgive you and I hope you forgive me. And there's this like sweet moment. And then you go progressing into your holiday. But I do think that there are times when there's real work to be done and it takes a lot of courage and a lot of honesty and determination to say, not just to say that, but to say, can we talk about what happened in March?

22:37Because I really do feel bad about it. and hashing it out. That's rough. And it's much harder also if that love doesn't exist. What if it's something that happened in a different framework and it was really awful? My Rabbi David Ingber, who you've met, who's our family rabbi and is a close friend and teacher, he, a couple of years ago, I remember on Yom Kippur, he gave this sermon where he confronted this line that you hear so much these days, which is, I refuse to live with regrets, or I don't live with regrets. You know, to live with regrets is to constantly look back and you just always got to look forward.

23:14And he was like, he made this argument in his sermon, that's preposterous. What do you mean you don't live with regrets? Everybody lives with regrets. It's what you do with those regrets. It struck me as a very, obviously in the spirit of Yom Kippur, but also a very Jewish approach to life, which is you're constantly looking back. You're constantly evaluating and reevaluating and dealing with bad decisions or bad circumstances The idea of trying to be blind to them and that being a source of strength or somehow empowering to deny your regrets is not honest and it's not healthy. Well, it's really a way of not being accountable for your actions.

23:52If you are allowed to just do things and say, oh, well, YOLO and I, you know, that was yesterday. Now I'm in today. That's fine. It's just not part of the tradition that I'm familiar with. Right. And it's a tough tradition. That's something that I'm constantly thinking about. This is not easy, but it's not supposed to be. So it's fine. I can do not easy. Believe me, I can do not easy. Why do we fast, speaking of not easy? So we are told in the Torah when it talks about what we're going to be doing on the 10th of the 7th month, it actually uses the word inui. Inui is translated as afflict. The Mishnah, the oral law, explains that what we're really doing on Yom Kippur is we're trying to disregard our physical needs because we're trying to elevate ourselves.

24:49So it's not that we're trying to deprive ourselves, but Rambam suggests, Rabbi Moses Maimonides suggests that once a year we try to aspire to transcend normal human limitations. And we try to be almost like celestial beings, closer to this idea of God, and we elevate ourselves, but it is hard. And so we don't do these things that sort of like human beings need to eat and drink. and, oh, we want to shower and we want to, you know, put on oils or face cream or what have you. No, celestial sort of like high elevated spiritual beings don't worry about that stuff. But something that I think is interesting, by the way, is that in the Torah, when we have the story of Moses going back up onto Mount Sinai after the Jewish people have been caught praying to an idol that they've constructed of a golden calf.

25:45And that's a huge betrayal of God at the time. When Moses is up on Mount Sinai for 40 days begging forgiveness and trying to, you know, renegotiate things with God and the people in his absence, in Moses's absence, take it upon themselves to really do severe introspection and say, what is it that made us do this thing that was so egregious. And they really worked and repented and they fasted and they cried and they did all of this genuine, sincere, authentic remorse. And Moses comes back down and says, God has said the slate will be wiped clean and we can start over. And forever, because of the profound sincerity in your repentance, this date will forever be for your descendants a date upon which we wiped the slate clean, and it was the 10th of Tishrei.

26:40So what I like about this is that it's also a gift from our predecessors, according to our tradition, thousands of years ago, who taught us the power of being sorry, how transformative being apologetic can be. We'll be right back.

27:03Right now, tens of thousands of Israeli veterans are battling PTSD. But only some of these men and women are able to recover through conventional treatment. That's where BuddyLine comes in, a program of American Friends of Israel Navy SEALs. BuddyLine pairs Israeli Navy SEALs with IDF combat veterans struggling with severe PTSD. Over the course of a year, they rebuild trust, confidence, and connection through warrior-to-warrior care. For 750 veterans to date, Buddyline has been a lifeline back to society. To watch a brief video and support the program, visit aphins.us slash warriorcare or use the link in our show notes.

27:47Your gift, big or small, can help someone find their way back. AFINS wishes its supporters and all of Call Me Back's listeners a happy and healthy new year.

28:03And we're back with Rachel Goldberg-Poland. I want to now, we've got a little bit of a primer on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Obviously, we could double, triple, quadruple click on each of those and go deeper and deeper and deeper. But I really want to get to the holidays we've never really covered in conversation on the podcast. Sukkot and Simchat Torah. Before I do, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchat Torah, are they meant to be understood as one journey? And I guess if so, what journey is that? What journey are we on? I think very much, yes, it is one journey. Everything is absolutely connected.

28:38I like to think of the second that Yom Kippur is ending is that the judge, right, we've called it Judgment Day, the whole 10-day period, that suddenly the judge looks down, like I'm picturing Judge Judy looking over her podium and saying, honey, don't you recognize me? It's me, mom. You're free to go. And that feeling of elation, thinking back to LA law or the practice, that when someone was told, okay, you're free to go. Wow. I love your, Rachel, I'm sorry. I love your pop culture references. Keep going. And, you know, you would see the camera would shift from being in the courtroom to the stairs, the white steps outside with the pillars in the background.

29:24And cameras would be there with microphones and saying, like, how are you? How are you feeling? What are you going to do? And they'd say, oh, I'm just so relieved and so happy. And I'm going home to be with my family. I'm just filled with happiness. And that's how we should feel leaving synagogue after Yom Kippur, going home to now build our sukkah. And our sukkah, remember, we have three agricultural holidays that kind of tether our year, but each of those three holidays also has nicknames. And so Passover is called Zman Cheruteinu, our time of freedom, because we were freed from Egypt. And we have Shavuot, that's Zman Matan Torateinu, that's the time of the gift of the giving of the Torah.

30:06And now we have Sukkot. And Sukkot's nickname is very simple. It's called Zman Simchatinu, the time of our happiness. and that's when I have that feeling of the elation of the person walking out of a very intense judgment time and the verdict was out for 10 days the judge was deliberating and the judge comes back and says you're free to go and that that deep breath of joy is how we go in to this holiday this time of our happiness holiday and so the interesting thing is what exactly are we celebrating that's making us so happy at this Sukkot holiday? Okay, so I want to get to that in a moment. But before I do, I just, this is more just an observational point.

30:54As someone you have lived, obviously, in the U.S., in the diaspora, and now you live in Israel, why do you think Sukkot and Simchat Torah get such short shrift over here? Because they don't get short shrift in Israel. I mean, my gosh, one of the most beautiful experiences for anyone visiting Israel, especially Jerusalem, but not only Jerusalem, you see the Sukkot, you see the Sukkot all over the place. It's this beautiful expression of Jewish life and Jewish living in Israel that it's just, I mean, some parts of the United States and very observant communities, you'll see this, but it's not just something you see.

31:27So both Sukkot and Simchat Torah are, let's just say, big features of Jewish life. And here, it's like after Yom Kippur, there's kind of like a drop-off for many Jews. How did these two holidays, Sukkot and Simchat Torah, get neglected? Well, I think it's a mambo-combo of several things. I think, first of all, if people were not being Jewishly involved in a religious or spiritual way, and they wanted to retain just those days that, again, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are called Hayyamim no Ra 'im, like the days filled with awe. And if you were someone who 100 years ago came to Pittsburgh or Chicago or Los Angeles or New York or Boston, you had to work all the time.

32:14There was not the permissiveness there is now or understanding that there are different people who believe in different faiths and may need certain days off from work. Everybody was working all the time, but there were people who said, those days I am going to make sure I'll work 362 days a year. I'm not working those three days. And the second that Yom Kippur is over, I think it was very difficult in North American history to then go back to your non-Jewish boss and say, I'm sorry, I have to go build a hut and I have to go sleep in it. And I have to gather these interesting plant species and wave them around and go do special prayers.

32:57And oh, and then eight days after that, I have to also take off another day because I have to go dance around with the Torah. I think it is sociological and anthropological of what happened, just the reality of living in the diaspora as a faith that was not as understood and not just Judaism. I mean, all different faiths struggled with how do you observe your faith in a new land where everyone's trying to fit in? And it was very different than it is now where there or and I don't even know what it's like now. But 20 years ago, there was multiculturalism and everybody was so excited to celebrate everybody else's interesting holidays.

33:39I don't know that that's still the case. No, that's true for many. Just not the Jews don't get included in that deal. Okay. So I think that that has a lot to do with it. And also, I do think that if somebody is not really very Jewishly connected and they decide to carve out the time, and I can only use my family as a child as my example, my parents were not religiously observant, but my father would take off those days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and we would go to shul. And if the first day of Rosh Hashanah was too long and too intense, we didn't go the second day, but we did go to Yom Kippur 10 days later.

34:18But then we were done for the year. Because it really was like someone who has never worked out and then once a year running the Boston Marathon. The second you're done, I can guarantee you that five days later, you are not running the Chicago Marathon. Right. You're done. You're done. You're also very sore and in pain and thinking, why did I do that? And you're behind. You're behind at work. You got to get caught up. That's true. Right. Also, what happens on Yom Kippur that I think is very important is that we are saying we're going to change and do more. And there's an immediate chance to implement this infusion of meaning into when we're saying we're going to do more when you go home and start building your sukkah that night.

35:06You know, it's sort of like on January 1st when people say, I'm taking on that I'm going to lose weight and I'm going to live more healthy. Well, that means that on January 2nd, you better be eating better and joining a gym because otherwise it's just talk. And so here we have these opportunities. Sukkot has innumerous opportunities to do Jewish. And the first is that we build this little dwelling outside. Okay, let's talk about that dwelling. Five days after Yom Kippur ending, we are told to leave our permanent homes and even sometimes sleep in an intentionally flimsy structure. Why? What is this thing we have to build?

35:44And what is that process? What is that experience of the sukkah trying to teach us? Well, the why is very easy. In the book of Leviticus, in the book of Vayikra, in chapter 23, we have a list of different holidays that we are told about. And at the end of chapter 23, we start to learn about this holiday that's called Sukkot. It's tied somehow to the Egypt experience, the leaving Egypt experience. And we're going to make these booths, these little clubhouses, and we're going to dwell in them for seven days. And the question does come up of, first of all, is this metaphorical? Is this reminiscent of the structures that when the children of Israel left Egypt, did they actually dwell in Sukkot?

36:33And there is this question and Rabbi Eliezer says this is metaphorical and Rabbi Akiva says absolutely not. This is what it looked like. This is what they were building out in the desert when the children of Israel were living out there. And it's a little weird because, as we were saying before, we already have an Egypt holiday. We already have a leaving Egypt holiday, and that is Passover, which we studied together back in April. What we grow to see is that we're mentioning Egypt again because they're two very different angles of events related to Egypt. Passover is celebrating this one-time event of God taking us out of the slavery of Egypt.

37:15And what Sukkot is really celebrating is the taking care of us for 40 years in the desert after we left Egypt, the rearing and the nurturing and the providing, not the birthing. We became a nation and we were freed. That's the one time. But I think of it in terms of, you know, sometimes there's someone who births a baby and then there's someone who raise and nurtures and provides and sustains for that baby. It's not always the same person. And maybe it is the same person or family, but it's different. Those are different experiences. Those are different things. And I think about how, you know, when we left Egypt, we left with sandals and matzah.

37:59OK, and for anyone who's ever traveled with just even a baby overnight, you have to take diapers and wipes and pacifiers and blankets and pajamas and a change of clothes and everything. And that's for one night for one kid. Or if you've ever I don't know if your kids have gone to sleepaway camp, but. Oh, yes. When my kids would go to sleepaway camp, it looked like I was packing them up for a transatlantic voyage. And we think about, we're told that at least 600 ,000 males above the age of 20 left Egypt. So they kind of like play with those numbers and say that there were somewhere between two and a half and three million people who left Egypt.

38:37We left without dental floss or bug spray or sunscreen or... EpiPens. Bupkis. Like we left with nothing and yet we were provided for for 40 years. and that is what we are celebrating on Sukkot. So Pesach is really the exodus and sort of being set free but Sukkot is this long journey to freedom. It's a deeper exodus in many ways. And what is a Sukkot? Just describe it very briefly because I want people to understand. I mean, you can Google it but a Sukkot is a small temporary structure that we make that has to have at least two and a half sides to it. I mean, there's a lot of halakhic specifics about how high it can be, how short it can be, how big, how small, how many walls.

39:30The top should not be like a solid ceiling. You should be able to see through the top because it's very much supposed to be that we're leaving our stuff behind because as much as we all love our stuff and our stuff is great, our stuff is not the core of who we are. Like that's sort of like the underlying message of Sukkot is that life is fragile. Yeah, it's like we spend so much of our lives trying to create security, right? Our homes, our careers, our savings, our countries. And then we're told with this holiday to go sit under a roof through which we can see the sky for a number of days and eat your meals there.

40:05And as you said, dwell there. I mean, I think what you're saying is Sukkot is asking us to confront, and the Sukkah itself is asking us to confront the limits of how much security and control we can really have. I think ultimately it's saying we do know that we live in the illusion that we have any control. It is all an illusion. But something that I remember thinking was super cool was when I was in eighth grade, and that was the first time that I went to someone's house, and my friend Sharon, they had a Sukkah, and they turned the TV around in the window of their den that was facing the sukkah, and it was during the World Series.

40:44And we watched the World Series in the sukkah, and Mr. Schwartz said to us, see, it's a mitzvah to watch the World Series. And it was infusing Yiddishkeit and mitzvot into places where we don't normally have that opportunity. And as you mentioned, a lot of people love to sleep in the sukkah. Here's an opportunity where you're having a mitzvah while you're not even conscious. You're sleeping in the sukkah. It's a mitzvah because you're dwelling in the sukkah. There are a lot of opportunities for children. You decorate the sukkah. You make it a really, you know, you're beautifying the mitzvah. And that's what you see.

41:22The scene I was trying to conjure, like in Jerusalem, is you see you pass by homes in every home. It's almost like every home you see a sukkah there in front of it. and each one has its own kind of family tradition or imprint or creativity that is obvious in how the sukkah is built or decorated. Right. A very practical question, for those who don't live in Israel or places in, you know, I guess in suburbs or parts of, you know, in geographic areas where they're actually in homes, but are in cities, a big part of our audience here is in New York City, but not just New York City. They're in New York City, they're in Chicago, they're in Washington, D.C., they're in San Francisco, they're in London, Australia.

41:59I can't ever forget to mention Australia where we have a big audience. Those who are in cities, many of them are in apartment buildings. What do they do about a sukkah in that situation? You'd probably dealt with this growing up in Chicago. Yeah, I mean, we didn't have one in our building, and I didn't live in a particularly specific Jewish neighborhood. I used to go and stay with friends in Skokie and in West Rogers Park, these very, and Peterson Park, these communities that you would see on every block. You would see Sukkot. It was really amazing. Right. Or many synagogues build Sukkot, so you can go have a meal there.

42:37You can, there's Jewish community centers hold Sukkot. I'm just thinking practically for people who want to, the experience of having a meal or experiencing a Sukkot in some way, you can, there are community events that are held in Sukkot, especially for folks who are like in apartment buildings and don't have access to them. This is where the internet is so wonderful because you just do Dr. Google is a rabbi. Rabbi, Rabbi Google. But do you think there's something because Sukkot is not a holiday of anxiety. It's literally, you know, Zman Sikhan Tenu, the season of our rejoicing. And yet you're in this very fragile physical, you know, this thing you're constructing is where you're dwelling.

43:17And yet there's all this rejoicing. Is there a connection between this idea that we're not in control and then yet being able to be like be capable of joy, even when we have we're recognizing that we have very little control and we all live in a very fragile state. Look, I think what you're talking about is this poignant message of Sukkot that we demonstrate what is truly important to us. We all seem to have a lot of stuff. And somehow when we leave all that stuff, it ends up making us see our stuff in a different perspective. And even though we intellectually know that, one time a year we act it out.

43:52It's a live demonstration for our children, for ourselves, for our neighbors, for the people around us saying, what is tefel and what is pre? What is the peel and what is the fruit in my existence? And there is no more powerful way of saying my things do not define me than by leaving our things behind and heading out into this flimsy, self-constructed hut for the week. So through that lens, we experience actually a joy and a happiness that is more organic and genuine and authentic because we are almost forced to focus on our most precious commodities. And that is our rich heritage, our priceless traditions, and our most precious families.

44:42So I think that there's something about the stripping down of the stuff that gets in the way, the stuff that distracts us by going out and saying, wow, we're in these four walls. And you know what? We can actually play whatever game together or just listen to music or just have a conversation and have a cup of tea. And we are spending time together and doing something very plain. and in the plainness is the real stuff. So then we go from Sukkot to we arrive at Shemini Atzeret in Simchat Torah. What exactly are we celebrating on this holiday? So the final day of Sukkot ends and flows immediately into what is called Shemini Atzeret.

45:31Atzeret means stop. And with the exception of a very short prayer for rain that is added to the prayer service, there are no rituals on Shemini Apsarad. And I think of this as everything that's been experienced now in the 50 plus days since Elul, the first of Elul, as sort of like there are these families that get together for these huge family reunions and there's so much going on and there's big meals and a petting zoo and a moon bounce and a disco and everybody's hanging out. And then finally, it gets to be Sunday night. People are already heading out some and people change into sweatpants and it's just quiet quality time.

46:12And we have Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki, who was the famous French medieval commentator, scholar, who says we start this whole period with Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur with the dynamic of God as a parent. And when we get to Sukkot, the relationship shifts and God is really more like a partner or spouse. And so what's happening on the eighth day is that God is sort of detaining us, is atzerring us, stopping us, not wanting the date to end. I think of it as, you know, like when back in the days, many, many moons ago in January, I'll be married 30 years, about when you would go on a date and you didn't want the date to end, you'd kind of drag your feet at the end and you're walking slower and slower to where, you know, the date is going to end.

47:07And then someone will say, you want to come up for coffee? And I think of Shemini Atzeret as God saying, you want to come up for coffee. And it is usually our holidays have these unique rituals, as we're mentioning before, that, you know, we have Matzah on Passover, we have Megillah on Purim or the Manovah or Hanukkah and Hanukkah. But after much fanfare and celebration, we now have an absence of ritual with the exception of the rain prayer. We have started this whole long process and now we are ideally at the top of the experience and we're pausing to digest the view. When I was using that analogy before and saying, you know, we're now at the top of Mount Everest, it would be such a shame If you get to the top and you say, we made it, bye, and you turn and start heading down.

47:54No, Shmini Atzeret is you're at the top. Stop. Enjoy the view. Enjoy all the hard work of building this relationship and being sincere in this dynamic that you've been working on. And what's really interesting, by the way, is that at the end of the harvest, and we have to remember that Sukkot is a harvest holiday. And if we think about that's very distant from who we are today, right? We don't think of ourselves as farmers, but we were farmers. But what sometimes happens, whether we're farmers or doctors or bankers or lawyers or podcast makers or teachers, is sometimes we get lost in the harvest that we've reaped and we think, wow, look what we did.

48:39Look how cool we are. Any hardworking farmer, lawyer, doctor, business person can study and commit themselves and hopefully succeed. And they forget that there's something larger that contributed to their success. It's easy to get lost in our own success. and there is this fusion at this time of year with the historical remembrance holiday of Sukkot and God providing us with what we needed. There's this idea that there's always someone bigger behind us. There is a warning that Moses gives the children of Israel at the end of the Torah, at the end of Deuteronomy, and I love this sentence, this verse.

49:20It says, do not imagine in your heart, through my own strength and power, I have brought all this wealth to me. That we have to remember that there's something else that actually did that. Like I think of the valedictorian or the first in their class in medical school who thinks like, wow, I really worked hard. Well, remember your parents actually really helped you and enabled you to be able to work hard. And I think that that's a theme that we go into Shmini Atzeret with. And what happens is Shemini Yatzeret also coincides with when we finish the cycle of reading the Torah. We have a tradition that we read a portion of Torah of the five books of Moses every Shabbat, and different Torah readings are also on all of the different holidays.

50:08And when we get to the day of Shemini Yatzeret in Israel, in the diaspora, it's over two days. Shemini Yatzeret is one day, and Simchat Torah, the finishing of the Torah holiday, is the following day. And we immediately roll the entire Torah back to the very beginning. And it's considered a very festive day because... So you're right, you finish, and then you're like right back at it with Genesis. The second that it happens, we roll it back. Everyone watches it be rolled all the way from the end of Deuteronomy, the end of Devarim, to the very beginning of Brashid, of Genesis. And we read the first reading of In the Beginning.

50:47We start over immediately. And there's something about that that is so powerful. Alexander Strassfeld, Rabbi Alexander Strassfeld, called that the deathlessness of the Jewish people, that this wovenness that we have to this blueprint for life is the deathlessness of the Jewish people. And so there's something very layered and complicated and crushing and tragic that since October 7, 2023, which occurred on that very same day, on the day of Simchat Torah, that makes it very confusing and painful. Because now forever, in addition to this being the symbol of the deathlessness of the Jewish people, it is also now forever the yurt site, the anniversary of the date of death for thousands of families to commemorate their children, their partners, their parents, their siblings, their loved ones.

51:47And that is a challenge that I will certainly have for the rest of my life, because even though Hirsch was not killed on October 7th, that part of my life ended on that day. And there was very much a before and after. and of course I'm very close with at this point thousands of people for whom the date of Simchat Torah which jumps around it's not always going to be on October 7th it's on different days depending on the Gregorian calendar and the Jewish calendar don't always align and so that will always be a challenge for so many thousands of us and I think millions of us because I think the Jewish people around the world feel connected, even if it wasn't someone they knew or a blood relative.

52:33I think just as a people feel very connected to the complete, utter massacre and tragedy that befell our people in the land of Israel on Simchat Torah, on this day that is, in theory, supposed to be joyful at the end of Zman Simchatenu, of our holiday of happiness. The holiday, as you say, the exact translation of Simchat Torah is the joy of Torah. And as you're saying, it's a date that has become synonymous with one of the darkest days in modern Jewish history. There will be, Rachel, in Jerusalem, in Israel, and throughout the diaspora, Jews dancing on Simchat Torah, as they were doing, obviously, long before October 7th, 2023.

53:18What is your reaction to that? Should we think about it as an act of, I mean, calling it just purely an act of joy feels there's something cruel about that, but maybe it's also an act of memory or an act of defiance or all three. How do you think about that? Yeah, I think it is all three. I think how do you braid together reality, which is that at the same time, we're often challenged with feeling joy and sadness at the exact same moment. You know, we read Ecclesiastes on Sukkot, and that is when we're beseeched by King Solomon of this is a time, there are times of mourning and times of birth, there are times of happiness and times of sadness, times of planting and times of harvesting.

54:04And as we've talked about, and as the poet Yehuda Amichai has pointed out, sometimes it's simultaneous. And I talked about that last year, that sometimes we are commanded to do many things at the exact same time. And I do think that we have to still be sensitive. I do think that there should be dancing about the deathlessness of the Jewish people. And I do think that there should be sensitivity that there will be people in shul who are saying yizker, which is the memorial prayer for one of our seventh closest relatives, which is mother, father, brother, sister, spouse, daughter or son. Those are very challenging prayers to have to say in light of how those deaths occurred and when those deaths occurred.

54:52And so what I'm really blessing all of us with for this whole period of this new year is an infusion of introspection and growth, honesty and healing, curiosity and comfort. And I'm praying my heart out. I am really praying my heart out in these trying times that we keep trying. All right. What do we say? A meaningful? I wish you a meaningful new year. Definitely. What I was thinking about recently is that miracles are not always good, but they're miraculous. Meaning miracles, I think, are defined as things that seem to defy nature. So we often think, well, so the miracles are great. Oh, my gosh, this terrible thing could have happened.

55:37and we averted disaster, it was a miracle. But sometimes miracles are challenging. And I think that we have experienced these last three years, the Jewish people have experienced many challenging miracles. And what I'm really praying for are miracles that we can universally agree on are good, that so much of the hurt and pain can somehow be carried in a less clunky and more graceful and less painful way, somehow, some way. All right, we will leave it there. Thank you, Rachel. Oh, I want to make sure that everyone remembers that everyone's invited to Elon Benatar's Sukkah. If you're inside Call Me Back subscriber, then you also get a special piece of rhubarb pie that Elon's very famous for making.

56:24Okay. So we'll see you there. We'll see you there. Thanks, Dan.

57:04The Shalom Hartman Institute friend and ally. These questions have been gnawing at you these past few years. For some of you, like for us, these questions have been keeping you up at night. And for some, they've been simmering in the background, waiting for answers. But dilemmas don't always have clear answers. What they do deserve are honest and respectful debates. And as it happens, Yossi and I love to challenge each other to get to the bottom of things. We look at current events through a lens that speaks to us most deeply, a Jewish lens. So if today's Jewish dilemmas are on your mind, tune in to our conversation on For Heaven's Sake, a partnership between ARC Media and the Sholem Hartman Institute.

57:47You can find For Heaven's Sake on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you there.