Compacted into a single space, compressed to a final goal of success and virtue, to receive all of life while attending to all its complex parts is the paradox of existence. We must dissipate certain passions to be alive with any passion at all. Capturing each moment with perspective and experience is what we may seek as there are less reminders in our current settings of the price tag of being and the passions forgotten. Which survives the final round, which continues beyond the slaughter of good ideas and true motives? Soon, we sacrifice for another sacrifice and goes the whirlwind of never getting that which we truly want.
Where do we put our tending and care if we aren’t to know which will become the shining star? So goes the story of the holiday, the many holidays and their quench for deliverance to a new profound soul-like experience and impression. We ought to work for its existence, we give energy and resources to it and we may want a return on the investment.
This leads to the holiday in question, that of Sukkot, the festival of gathering and the final stage of harvest. To gather is to receive and to receive is to take, the taking of everything; a holiday of taking. I know you may seem to question such a selfish mode of spirituality, the 'taking' of the palm branch, the taking of new structures outside our regular home abode. The irony is clear, when we collectively begin to take, to take all we can whether the happiness from another or the dance with another we find deep joy in its place. Instead of the anguish of the crowded arenas of all sorts of gatherings, we find a deeper resonance in the participation of each other in a single space and communion.
Taking away the boundaries from one home door and another, taking away division between one fellow and another, allowing old feuds to heal and new friendships to mature. This is the game of this holiday, it demands the removal of the safe space where we fester within, the compromises and acceptances we have made for the sake of comfort and peace. Without that break, the home becomes a place of lost opportunities as well as new insights which never grow because of that festering place, there is a rot element to the home and to our communications.
This holiday demands to relinquish control of the very safe and the mediocre environment which protects and represses passion and strong strides in our step. Take from nature, from your fellow man, take the happiness of some stranger with you and this will find a space unexplored till now.
Take the life which was lost in the dark corner of your ordinary dwellings, take from the trees you brush past without a single care and enter into the festival of gathering truly uncomfortable of status quo which may result to some minor bothersome experiences but, maybe just maybe we can place a sacrifice to rid ourselves of all the sacrifices which keep us stifled and boring, mediocre and repressed. We must not remain hidden within our simple frame of how we think the world works or worse how we assume the world ought to be.
Prepare to be amazed at the uptick in our step while we take a new path to a new albeit temporary home, being the irony that it remains temporary for we are not to find comfort there. When stripped of the homelike comfort, only then can we imagine what had been missed from our purview. Then get up and travel to the greatest gatherings in the finest of all cities, each with a little bit of nature and the missed opportunities that we promise to make up for once again.