Where do you go for refuge from the storm?
Use this guided meditation, inspired by Rabbi Alan Lew’s evocative reflections (below), to prepare for Sukkot and find an inner refuge - an inner sukkah - that can be inhabited anywhere, anytime.
“So now we sit flush with the world, in a ‘house’ that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no shelter. It is not really a house. It is the interrupted idea of a house, a parody of a house […] And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed in this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it.
In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need. The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another”
(Rabbi Alan Lew, This Is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared, pp. 263-267).
Chag Sameach!
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