Caps For Sale

Reintegration

More often than I would like to admit, I think of the children’s book Caps for Sale. Not for any reason related to my own son and his love of books but for the image just above. That picture reminds of the ways in which we walk through the world with multiple roles and identities stacked on top of one another. Sometimes we can cycle through those identities seamlessly and other times it can become quite messy and challenging.

This notion is understood in Japanese culture as Seikatsusha, and it is key to creating a happy society. Seikatsusha is a Japanese word that refers to people who live their daily lives in a multifaceted manner. It helps people strike a balance between self-interest and altruism. If I can accept all my various identities as complementary and not warring, then I can contribute more strongly to a happier society and a happier personal life.

I’m a husband, a father, a rabbi, a teacher, a coach, and a whole slew of other things 

As a husband, I do my best to be a great partner to Lauren, as a father dote on Cal, as a rabbi to serve people as possible, as an educator to empower learners, and as a coach to push my clients safely to do things they convince themselves they can’t. 

I don’t take off my hats. I wear them like the guy in caps for sale. We need all of those parts of our identity that are so often divorced from one another. 

In a similar way we need Sukkot so dearly after Yom Kippur. This connection can help us understand why Sukkot is “the season of joy.”

There was a particular ritual that took place on Sukkot in ancient times. Every sacrifice brought in the Temple was accompanied by a flour offering and the pouring of a prescribed measure of wine on the altar. During the seven days of the Festival of Sukkot a libation of water was added to that of wine, together with each of the daily morning offerings.

The water libation was performed with intense joy. Accompanying the water libation were festivities entitled Simchat Beit HaShoeva, or Happiness of the House of the Water-drawing. The festivities were held in the Ezrat Nashim, which was the courtyard of the outer Temple. Though a relatively small area, miraculously, many thousands of happy people were able to crowd in. There was dancing and singing in celebration of the drawing of the water.

In the Mishnah¹ we are taught:

One who has not seen rejoicing at the Simchat Beit HaShoeva, has never seen rejoicing in their life.

In part, this was special because there was singing, and dancing, and parading, and all the people together but one wonders, don’t we have other moments like that throughout the year? Amid some of our less admirable qualities, we are a relatively joyous people. There has to be a deeper undercurrent. One powerful answer comes in the following parable from Reb Avraham, the Sabba Kadisha of Slonim:

There was a king who had a child who left the king for a far away place.

After a time away, the child returned but the king never lost the suspicion that his child only returned out of fear and not fullness of their heart, not through an internally driven desire to be happy but one externally driven.

Once the child returned and the king watched the child return to their normal way of life, living joyously, with a smile on their face, returning to their regular way of being, the king became convinced that their child had fully returned. 

This parable is meant by the Saba Kadisha as an allusion to Sukkot, which is a holiday that is love embodied. Once separated, these two entities come back together authentically.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have a particular role for us to play in our relationship with God. We intensely prepare. We spiritually scrub ourselves. Hopefully having done the work, we get purified. But it’s the High Holy Days after all. If there’s any time to understand and live in the space of awe of fear, it’s then.

But the celebration that existed at the Simchat Beit Hashoevah during Sukkot reflects a return of a different kind, a return to joy, happiness, and an ability to breathe out of the constriction. We can’t live in the high holiday space always. We need to inhabit it here and there for limited periods of time, but then we need to get out and get out quickly. Maybe that’s why we’re supposed to put the first peg in our sukkah immediately following Yom Kippur. 

Sukkot according to the Netivot Sholom, the recently deceased Slonimer Rebbe is built on this notion of water drawing. It is a symbol of the love we pour out to God through our celebration of the day and God pours out to us through the opportunity. 

The Talmud² in discussing this ceremony goes a step further:

Rabbi Elazar said: When the water libation was poured during the festival of Sukkot, these waters of the deep say to the other waters of the deep: Let your water flow, as I hear the voices of two of our friends, the wine libation and the water libation, which are both poured on the altar. As it is stated: “Deep calls to deep at the sound of your channels, all Your waves and Your billows are gone over me” (Psalms 42:8), i.e., the upper waters of the deep call to the lower waters of the deep when they hear the sound of the libations.

The image of waters speaking to each other using verses from Psalms is beautiful, penetrating…and kind of hard to understand. What exactly does it mean for water to speak to water?

Rashi, the preeminent commentator on all things Torah and Talmud cryptically answers that it’s referencing the upper waters and lower water, which doesn’t quite answer the question. One answer we then glean comes from the Tikkunei Hazohar, a major Kabbalistic text. It is a collection of seventy commentaries on the the first word of the Torah, "Bereishit-In the Beginning".”

They quote the teaching that when God created the waters, God separated them into lower waters (what we know here on earth) and upper waters, those in heavenly realms:

Those upper waters stand in as love of God while lower waters are a symbol of fallen love and less than desirable desires.The lower waters were sad and cried out, we too wanted to be with the King. At the Nisuch Hamayim, this ceremony of water drawing, when the Talmud says deep speaks to deep, those lower waters are brought back into integration with the upper waters and are made into pure love of God again. 

Sukkot then becomes a holiday of reintegration. To recognize that it’s not all awe, fear, admonition, and chest beating, but it’s a chance to just be in a loving relationship with the Divine. At its purest level, being a spirit seeker is trying to find that feeling of love. 

So for these days of Sukkot, we live in our fragility. We sit in a sukkah which can be missing walls, whose roof isn’t fully whole, and we connect to God with vegetation that can kind of fall apart, because that’s the honesty of love. 

Love need not be perfect, pure, or always whole but it has to come with earnestness, honesty, and a sort of realness that I think only Sukkot can bring. Love of the self is the same. The elements of our world are trying to find integration on this holiday. Bringing parts of ourselves together is what we’re meant to do. As Sekastusha reminds us, we are multifaceted and we need to optimize and integrate those parts of ourselves. Often they’re separate, but during these 7 days we can balance them all. For a few short days, we need the awe-driven fear of the high holidays, but then we need to quickly pivot to learning how to be back in love again. 

Sending wishes for a most joyous and love-filled Sukkot. 

1. Sukkah 5:1

2. Sukkah 50a