In America, the period that followed World War II was a time
of great economic growth. Salaried workers took home more pay
than they had ever dreamed of earning. They spent their newly
acquired riches on houses, cars and various consumer goods --
things which had previously been available only to the upper
classes.
By the early 1960's, intelligent well-educated young
Americans began to feel dissatisfied with the materialism
that surrounded them, and with the lifestyle which was given
the name "conspicuous consumption."
These idealists -- many of them Jewish -- joined communes in
places like the Rocky Mountains, where they grew their own
organic vegetables, wove fabrics and sewed their own
clothing, baked their own bread and in general, returned to
nature and the basics that had been the norm a century or
more before.
Materialism and rampant consumerism took a while to get from
the shores of the Western Hemisphere to Eretz Yisroel, but by
the late 1980's, Israelis not only had caught on but were
busy playing catch- up. Here we are, a decade and a half
later, at the same point that America had reached in the
sixties!
This summer, I overheard a financially successful young
secular Israeli woman telling her friend that their neighbors
were taking the children and going off to spend the summer in
rural India. "It's so quiet and peaceful there," she said,
"you can just sit there in the country and enjoy the air."
Shades of the Rocky Mountain commune generation!
For us in the Torah observant world, we have a beautiful
opportunity once a year to get in touch with the simplicity
that most thinking people really crave. [As for the quiet --
we have that every Shabbos: no phones!] We can sit in our
wooden booths with nothing but a few branches or some bamboo
poles between us and the stars, and fulfill what we are
commanded to do at this wonderful time of year: to
rejoice!
I don't know about your succa, but mine does not have a
breakfront, a leather sofa, a chandelier, a ceramic tile
floor or any of the other `must-haves' that the furniture ads
keep telling us to go out and buy for our homes (of course,
my apartment doesn't have them either, but that's another
story). What my succa does contain is the happiness that
somehow eludes the people who do run out all year and
buy more and more fancy `things' -- read: creature
comforts.
For all the money in the world, you can't buy the pride my
young grandsons feel when they help put the succa together,
or the smile on my granddaughter's face when she hangs up the
decorations she made in gan.
By comparison, give a child one of today's super fancy toys
and watch what they will do with it. Yes, it is fun to take
off the wrapping paper and rip open the package, but that is
where the involvement of the child ends. The toy `works' by
dint of the batteries that you insert and the little on/off
button somewhere on the side [of whose operation they are
more expert than we are]. The child puts the thing down,
turns it on -- more sophisticated toys are equipped with
remote control -- watches it for a very brief time, becomes
bored and runs off. [Another scenario is that he will run it
down to the end of the batteries and no one will bother to
replace them for he has already lost interest.]
The people who design these things must think that children
expect to be amused non-stop, with very little effort on
their part. Even the storybooks for young children have pages
that pop up, holes and windows to highlight pictures printed
on later pages, and places one presses to activate a squeaker
or even tiny recorded noise. It can tire out the average
parent just trying to figure out what the `reader' is
supposed to do next to entertain the `listener.'
The basics that filled the toy boxes of yesteryear -- wooden
building blocks, cars, rag dolls, board games [did one ever
finish a Monopoly game?] -- taught children
creativity, problem solving and logic, and playing with these
toys increased, rather than diminished, one's attention
span.
Children enjoyed every moment of their creative playtime. It
was genuine simcha. They put together roads, bridges,
towns full of buildings and everything else that they
imagined the blocks to be. A doll that just sat there and
didn't talk, cry, wet or come with a miniature beauty parlor
was the `baby' and the favorite game was `playing house.'
Time flew by and two hours later, when they had to put the
toys away and get ready for bed, the children did so
reluctantly.
When we put together our succas and dwell in them for a full
week, we are children again. We get back to the basics. We
relish the creativity of the construction and the simplicity
of the structure.
However, we have not retained the innocence of childhood.
We are adults, and realists, and we know full well that what
we have constructed with our framed panels and simple
hardware is barely more substantial or permanent than the
wooden block houses we played with in childhood.
All year, we may realize intellectually that we are
dependent on the One Above, Who is our only protection, but
emotionally, we still somehow delude ourselves into thinking
that the metal door with its multi-cylinder lock, the iron
bars over the windows and the alarm system are what stand
between us and the world outside.
The fact that for one week we sit, eat and even sleep in the
succa shows our willingness to put our complete trust in
Hashem. But we don't only dwell in it: we rejoice in the
succa. We pray our joy, sing it and live it.
True joy cannot be bought. It isn't found in a fifty foot
yacht, a luxury motorcar, a vacation at a five-star hotel or
a chest of jewelry.
Joy comes from knowing that what you are doing is right. And
our Divine Guidebook tells us to live in booths for a week's
duration. What could be more basic or simple than that?
