Pre-Shabbat Thought (Sukkot / Kohelet)
When I was in elementary school, my parents would send me with my school list to Welber’s bookstore in Meah Shearim. The lines were out the door in August and Mr. and Mrs. Welber stood behind the counter handing schoolbooks to hundreds of kids every day. The big purchase in fifth grade was the Atlas Braver. It never showed only one map. The same region appeared in layers: topography, borders, economy, population. Each was true, but each was partial. Together they suggested that reality is always more than a single view.
Last week, in Nof HaGalil, I arrived early for a lecture. The streets were quiet, children walked to school, and I found myself asking: how do we build here? Who are the partners, the builders, the women who will shape the Galil’s future? The atlas came back to me. Every place, every community, can be seen through many lenses. And while we typically use the prisms we can see and feel: traffic, budgets, daily life, there is also a prism of eternity. What mark does this place, or this moment, leave that will last forever?
Kohelet, which we read on Sukkot, asks a similar question. The great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks ztz”l pointed out that Kohelet treats much of the past and future as fleeting, even petty — “vanity of vanities.” Where then is meaning to be found? His answer is joy. Not escapist joy, but the kind that lives in the present: in the work of our hands, in the simple pleasures of life, in the relationships we invest in. And that joy of the present is precisely what leaves an eternal impression. It transforms impermanence into something that endures.
Sukkot, too, is about impermanence. We leave the solidity of our homes for fragile sukkot. Yet in that fragility, we gather family, guests, meals, conversations — things that endure in memory and in meaning. Perhaps the deepest map we can draw is not one of GDP or topography, but one of significance. In the midst of transience, the prism of eternity reminds us to ask: what joy, what acts of value, can we create now that will last?
