Sukkos: Here’s what we do with the leftovers
Every year, the day after Yom Kippur, I go into the garage and pull out the boards for my sukkah, and every year I have the same small argument with myself. Some of the wood is still solid, while some is warped from last year’s rain, and I have to decide what is going back up and what finally belongs in the trash. It never occurred to me until I learned a remarkable Shem MiShmuel that Sukkos asks us to make that same decision. What do we do with the parts of the past year that did not turn out quite the way we wanted?
The Torah calls Sukkos Chag HaAsif, the Festival of Gathering, because it comes when a farmer gathers the year’s produce from the threshing floor and winepress. Yet the Gemara makes a striking observation. The s’chach above our heads is made specifically from pesoles goren v’yekev, the refuse of the threshing floor and winepress, not the wheat or the wine, but what remains after the harvest has already been gathered (Sukkah 12a). The material that seems least important is what we use to build our sukkah.
The Shem MiShmuel asks what this means for us. If Sukkos is the season when we gather everything we accomplished during the year, why is the house we build for Hashem made from the scraps rather than the harvest itself? He explains that our spiritual harvest also has produce and waste. Every year is filled with Torah, mitzvos, and good deeds, but very little of what we do is completely pure. There is the mitzvah itself, and then there is everything mixed into it, the distraction, the ulterior motive, the part of the act that never quite rose to the level we wanted it to reach.
Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are when that harvest is sorted. During these days, the good we have done is purified, and the precious part is gathered into what the Shem MiShmuel calls the otzar Shamayim, the heavenly storehouse. But not all leftovers are the same. There is motz, chaff, which has no use and is scattered by the wind, and there is teven, straw, which will never become bread but can still feed an animal or serve another purpose.
The same is true of our mitzvos.
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There are things that need to be discarded, but there are also mitzvos that were real even if they were imperfect. The Shem MiShmuel describes the physical act of a mitzvah as valuable even when it falls short of the higher level represented by the inner intention of the heart.
I think about all the mitzvos of a year that look like that, the Mincha I raced through because I had somewhere to be, the chesed I did without the warmth I wish I had brought to it, the bracha I said while my mind was somewhere else, or the mitzvah I performed on automatic pilot. Those are not necessarily mitzvos to throw away. They may be teven. And what does a Jew do with teven? We build a sukkah out of it.
There is another halacha about s’chach that gives this idea even greater meaning. The Mishnah in Sukkah teaches that a vine still attached to the ground cannot serve as kosher s’chach. Once it is cut, however, it can become valid s’chach (Sukkah 1:4).
The material has not changed. Only its relationship to the ground has. Perhaps Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur can do something similar to the imperfect mitzvos of a year. We davened, but we were distracted by everything waiting for us afterward. We gave, but our ego came along for the ride. We did the right things, but they remained tangled in the ordinary pressures and motivations of life, too attached to the ground to become part of something higher.
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Then comes Yom Kippur. For one day, we try to cut ourselves loose from the ground, stepping away from the physical world as much as humanly possible. By Neilah, we may find ourselves saying words we have said hundreds of times before, only now we are actually hearing them, discovering a sincerity that was buried underneath a year of distraction. Maybe that moment does more than prepare us for the year ahead. Maybe it changes the way we carry the year behind us.
The mitzvos were always there. They may not have been everything they could have been, but now we can look back at them differently, separate them from some of the earthiness that clung to them, and recognize that even our imperfect efforts belonged to something higher. Then, just a few days later, Hashem tells us what to do with what remains. We build with it.
That may be one of the most comforting messages of Sukkos. None of us brings a perfect harvest into the new year. There are things we regret and things we truly need to leave behind. But the distracted mitzvah, the tired mitzvah, the mitzvah we wish we had done better, may still have something precious inside it.
Every year, I stand in my garage deciding what is still worth building with. Maybe Sukkos asks us to do the same thing with ourselves. Some things need to be thrown away, but some of what looks like leftovers is still holy enough to become s’chach. We just have to lift it off the ground.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach. www.bachlongbeach.com.
