How the movie Ushpizin can Help us Understand Shemini Atzeret
Shemini Atzeret 5768
Shmuel Herzfeld
One of the most important ideas of the holiday of Sukkot is to have guests visit your Sukkah. In part, this is why Rhanni and I would like to invite the whole congregation to our family Sukkah at 5 PM today. In Aramaic the word for guest is Ushpizin.
Recently there was a movie called Ushpizin which portrays the life of an indigent Breslover couple living in Jerusalem. The couple is literally without any money for the holiday of Sukkot. The movie shows the chasid, Moshe, walking into an Etrog store and longingly pine after the most beautiful Etrog in the store. When miraculously some money arrives just before Sukkot, Mosheimmediately takes a large portion of the money and runs to buy an Etrog for Sukkot. He doesn’t buy an ordinary Etrog; he buys the “yahalom,” the diamond—the most expensive Etrog in the entire land for 1000 shekel.
Why would anyone who is poor spend so much money on an Etrog? He could have found one for 20 shekel! Did he do the right thing in spending so much on an Etrog?
According to Halakhah one is required to spend up to %20 of their assets in order to fulfill a positive commandment of the Torah, but in this case he could have bought the Etrog for 20 shekel and still fulfilled the commandment.
There is another concept that partially motivated him here. This is the idea of hiddur mitzvah. When we do a mitzvah for Hashem, we don’t just do the mitzvah, we try to do it as beautifully as we can. We give everything of ourselves over to Hashem.
This is a reflection of our recognition that God gave us everything in creating us and in creating the world. The Torah tells us in Bereishit, “Vayar Elokim ki tov, and God saw that the world was good.” It doesn’t say, maspik tov, God saw that the world was good enough! God made a great world! We too in service of Hashem should not strive for “good enough” but for excellence.
The idea of Hiddur Mitzvah is especially relevant on Sukkot. On Sukkot we go out of our way to make our Sukkot extra beautiful. And for the Arbah Minim that we wave every day of Sukkot, we go to great lengths to get the most beautiful set possible.
Why the emphasis on a beautiful set of Arbah Minim? It relates to the origins of the commandment to take an Etrog. The Torah never says the word Etrog. It states that we should take a “peri etz hadar, a beautiful fruit.”
The rabbis understand that this “beautiful fruit” is the Etrog. Rabbi Eliezer explains in the Talmud that the Etrog is selected because “ein peri yoter hadar mimenu, because there is no fruit as beautiful as it.” The medieval commentator, Nahmanides, explains the meaning of the word Etrog is chemdah, desire or treasure.
So if we always try to beautify our performance of a mitzvah—hiddur mitzvah-- this idea is magnified when it comes to the Etrog. The Etrog is source of the very idea of performing a mitzvah beautifully. This is why you will see people spending hours over the selection of a beautiful Etrog.
Did Moshe the Breslover Chasid act correctly in fulfilling this idea of hiddur mitzvah to such an extreme? Perhaps he should have used the money for food for his wife or to pay back his rent. Is his purchase of the Etrog a perversion of the idea of hiddur mitzvah?
There is another scene from the movie. Moshe returns to his home one day to see that his two Sukkot guests had mistaken his prize Etrog for a lemon and sliced it into their salad. Moshe is so angry at the loss of his yahalomthat he runs into a forest and cries to Hashem: “What do you want from me Hashem? I don’t understand. I am trying to serve you and it is not working.”
In response to that let me share with you another teaching from Nachmanides that revolves around today’s holiday, Shemini Atzeret.
Shemini Atzeret is a strange holiday. It comes after 7 days of Sukkot, perhaps the holiday with the most number of rituals. Yet, Shemini Atzeret seems to be a holiday without an identity at all. It has no rituals. It seems to have nothing unique about it other than the fact that it has no identity. (In fact, when I lived in New York, I think the only thing most Jews knew about it was that alternate side of the street parking was suspended on this holiday.)
In general, how many people even know about Shemini Atzeret? Everyone knows about Matzah on Pesach or the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah. People know about a Sukkah. But the sad reality is that most Jews have never even heard of Shemini Atzeret. That is probably because there is no ritual associated with it.
As Jews we have descended to the point that without a ritual a holiday loses its prominence. But the fact that there is no ritual should not take away from the greatness of the holiday. On the contrary, it should add to it!
There is no ritual because by the end of the seven days of Sukkot we should be able to fly to God even without a ritual. So writes Nachmanides: On the first seven days of the holiday we need the Etrog to help us beautify the holiday, Aval be-shemini eino tzarikh ki hu atzmo hadar, but on the eighth day we don’t need the Etrog anymore because the day itself is beautiful (Hadar).
Rituals remind us to channel all of physical our actions to Hashem. That’s why we have them (at least according to Maimonides). But there is also a great danger to rituals. They can distract us into thinking that the ritual is the end in and of itself. We can get ourselves wrapped around the ritual so much and forget that the ultimate purpose of the ritual is to come close to Hashem.
In retrospect, Moshe the Chasid was buying the Etrog to serve Hashem but he was also buying to have that feeling of pride in walking into a store, putting down a $1000 and demanding the nicest Etrog. And once you are doing that the ritual itself –or the object of desire--can become idolatry.
Nachmanides explains that the ritual is but a vehicle to an even higher spiritual relationship with God.
On Shemini Atzeret we rejoice because we have been heavily immersed in rituals for the past seven days. They have guided every moment of our lives—how we ate, slept, prayed, and entertained. We have been able to recognize that we performed the mitzvoth with extra precision and beauty not for our own ego but in order to bring us closer to Hashem.
We finally arrive at Shemini Atzeret and we rejoice even more because now we realize that we can also have that same feeling of closeness with Hashem even without the rituals. The holidays have catapulted us.
But they have also taught us something else. When I was standing on K street with a Lulav and Etrog this week, someone who stopped by last year came by again. She picked up the Lulav and Etrog and said, “I haven’t done this now for two years.” She felt the absence of the ritual.
The overwhelming presence of rituals followed by their complete disappearance should remind us of something. It should remind us of how we can have someone with us in life and then be totally bereft when they are gone. The comfort and warmth of a ritual that we do every year can be comforting and embracing – the familiarity with a ritual can guide us with its presence just like a loved one can guide us.
On Shemini Atzeret we recite Yizkor in memory of our loved ones. The presence of Yizkor on this day suggests that we draw a parallel between our loved ones and the physical presence of a ritual.
When the ritual is there it offers us comfort, but when its not there, a great danger exists that we can let the relationship drift away. But that shouldn’t be the case. The absence of the ritual should be seen as an even higher relationship with Hashem. Only after a seven day holiday full of rituals can we finally achieve the level of celebrating a holiday without a ritual!
When we mourn for the people we have lost it can be overwhelming. Shemini Atzeret helps us with this by reminding us that a physical reality is but the first step in a relationship.
The deepest connection comes when we no longer need the physical reality in order to feel the closeness. The deepest connection is a spiritual connection that transcends the physical reality. Even though our loved ones are not here our relationship with them can grow stronger and stronger every year.
This is counterintuitive but it is the truth. The spiritual connection is so much stronger than the physical one. So even though our loved ones are not physically here, the truth is that we can be closer with them than we ever were before.
Close your eyes and imagine them pulling you close. Think about how we can be with them even without their physical presence. Then we can rise and recite Yizkor.