Chag Same'ach - thoughts on Sukkot

We're now well into the Festival of Sukkot. I'd like to write a bit about what I'm doing this Sukkot, then a little about some of he interesting learning I've been doing.

First of, I (not my family) have never built a Sukkah (I would like to build one next year). However one of our family friends build one every year and invite us over. This year was no different. My wife and I, y parents, my brother and his fiance, and my sister-in-law and her husband all went over to join our friends in the Sukkah on the first night (Shabbas no less). After a week of cold and wet weather, the days leading up to Sukkot were warm and sunny. Our night in the Sukkah, we were blessed with weather just about as perfect as you could ask for in October.

Earlier that day, I received in the mail my MP3 player from Aish Audio, a service of Aish Ha'Torah where they offer many of their seminar series as downloadable MP3 files. The "listen Online" service is free, which gives you access to streamed audio. Or for $10 per month you get to download 10 MP3 seminars for listening offline. They also had a bundle where you pay about $175 and get a year's membership, 2 CD's full of MP3's and an MP3 player. I did that one.

So after spending far too much time that day playing with the MP3 payer and filling it with some learning material, my wife and I listened to some seminars about Sukkot on the way to our friends Sukkah. Here's one of the highlights I found interesting (more to follow).

The symbolism of the walls of the Sukkah were explained as follows. For the month of Elul, we sound the shofar. We know that the shofar has the power to bring down walls (i.e. in Jericho). Throughout the year, we build a wall between us and G-d through all the mistakes we make. The shofar we hear at the end of Yom Kippur brings these walls crashing down, leaving no barrier between us and G-d. Then, before we have a chance to build the separating wall back up we build a Sukkah, which are walls around us and G-d, to keep G-d in our lives. We pray that seven days of living with God (in the Sukkah) will prevent us from building the dividing walls back up in the coming year.