I've always wondered why Sukkot falls just a few days after Yom Kippur. After all, the rabbis ask, we started living in booths in the desert after the exodus from Egypt.  

Perhaps it is because Yom Kippur is a day when we find God by withdrawing from all forms of physicality—eating, drinking, cohabitation. Everything concerning life energy is prohibited. This is the one day when through abstaining, we try to reach great spiritual heights.  

Sukkot falls on the heels of the Day of Atonement to teach that the real way to find spirituality is not by withdrawing from the world but rather by finding holiness in the physical world.  

Thus during the Sukkot festival we live in the sukkah. In nature which God created. We lift the lulav and etrog and recite a blessing to God to declare that He can be found in every  form of life.  

In many other religious faiths one enters the world of the spirit by leaving the body. In Judaism one enters the world of the spirit by sanctifying the body.  

A fitting story comes to mind. Berel was on his way from Pelz to Kelz . He had heard that in Kelz he could attain great spiritual heights. As he rested for the night, he left his shoes pointed in the direction he was walking only to have a trickster turn them around as he slept.  

The next morning, Berel arose and started walking according to the way his shoes were pointed, in the same direction he had come from the day before. A deep sense of satisfaction came over him as he approached the "new" city, stream, house and family. Berel had found his spirituality not in the Heavens but in the very same physical place he had left.  

Sukkot follows just days after Yom Kippur as a counterbalance to that solemn day. It reflects the sentiments of Rav Kook who once said, "There is nothing unholy, only the holy and the not yet holy."                                                                                                                                    


Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Avi Weiss