Lately I have been thinking about the number of things we do in Judaism. So many actions seem small or even unimportant, yet we cherish them anyway. People call them symbolic or say they have deeper meaning, but on the surface they do not seem to change much.
What they definitely do is - fill the calendar. We hide ten pieces of bread before Pesach. We bang for Haman. We eat latkes on Chanukah and cheesecake on Shavuos. We dip apples in honey on Rosh HaShana and wear a kittel on Yom Kippur. Even what we wear and how we act, from tzitzis to the kippah to how we cut our nails and wash our hands, carries meaning we rarely stop to think about.
With Sukkos approaching this year, I have been trying to understand why we do so many different strange things—from the mitzva of sukkah itself to the arba minim, from the hoshanos to the ushpizin, and everything in between. As I learned, I began to understand some ideas. Others were simply above my pay grade, and more just did not resonate or speak to…
