From the Festivals into the New Year - Tehila Gimpel: The Land of Israel Fellowship

as we begin this new year tehila recorded a video and she wanted to share it this is right now key time for children this is like bedtime but um she had a beautiful tour that she taught me over the holiday and i said tequila you have got to share that with the fellowship and so here's tehila bringing it all home what we're going to take away and how we're really going to go into our new year hey everyone so the holidays are finishing up um we've been on this amazing journey of study and growth around the festivals together and now it's winding down the question that's on my mind and i bet it's on a lot of your minds is what do we walk away with now that we're going into our new year what is the state of mind what's the eternal pot the internal posture that we want to enter into the new year with um so when we kind of reflect back on this you know this period of time that we've been through a lot of paraphernalia comes to mind we've had a lot of props like in the month of elul we hear the shofar every day then comes rosh hashanah and we hear a lot of the shofar and we eat apples dipped in honey and pomegranates and new fruits and all these symbolic foods to bless the new year and then we have yom kippur where we dress in white and we have a little more chauffeuring and then we have sukkot where we build this hut and we decorate it you know to be really beautiful and we buy the four species we make sure to have an echo and a lulav you know them which is like the palm uh branch and we have the myrtles and the in the willows right and then and we sure have a lot of liturgy right we have boatloads of prayers that we say we have a prayer book for rosh hashanah we have a prayer book for yom kippur we have a prayer book for sukkot which makes sense because there's a lot to do and a lot to say like we're summing up an entire year and facing a whole new year and we want to make it we want to make it count we want to make this holiday season really special um so now that like it's winding down to an end what would you expect the end of sukkot to be like right like if i was writing the book i'll tell you what sukkot would finish like how sukkot would finish it would be this cool grand finale i would have people bring their shofar and blow the chauffeur inside their sikka while they're shaking their lululemon etc and dipping apples and honey while dressed in white um and eating pomegranates that would be cool right it would like bring together all the different elements that we've been you know symbolically uh using throughout the holiday season um but instead what do we have what do we have in reality the last day of sukkot is called hoshanah rava now not everybody knows about this so if you missed it don't despair right just make a mental note for yourself on hoshanah rabbah we have a tradition going way back before the oral torah was even written down going all the way back to the times of the prophets what do you what props do you have on the last day of sukkot just your willow branch you're supposed to take your willow branch and swag it isn't that funny so you have your your willow branch like out of all of the four species the willow seems like the least impressive that's for sure right if you go to a jewish neighborhood before sukkot you'll see people seriously fretting over their etero like people will have um magnifying glasses and they'll be looking at it trying to make sure there's no blemishes and they'll be looking at their lula to make sure that the end isn't floppy and that it's really really perfect and then people buy their willow branches and they come in this creep package plastic thing nobody even cares like i've never even seen anybody open up their willow branches to check and see what they look like and at the end of the day at the end of sukkot we put aside our lulav we put aside our etch drug and you take your willow and if your willow wasn't much of a looker on the first day it sure isn't by the end of the you know by the end of the holiday it's all kind of dried up look at this it just like falls off in your hand it's really really the most humble of all of the uh four species um and that's the and that's the one we hang out with on the last day of sukkot um and if it wasn't tattered enough you make it a little more tattered uh to me that symbolizes that after everything what do we walk away with what do we walk away with at the end of all of this that it's just us standing in simplicity and with a humble heart before hashem after all of these experiences the highest level is to just be able to stand before hashem and know that we're in need of him and that we're not able you know we're not self-sufficient we're just like this willow here today gone tomorrow flesh and blood and just be able to stand in front of hashem and say look this is me with all of my pluses and minuses with my foibles and my shortcomings this is who i am and i'm standing before you and begging for mercy hashem yeah the uh the willow the sages teach us is unique in from the four species in that it has no smell and no taste it's truly the most humble of all and like the etrog has a smell and a taste um the myrtles and and the lula's either have a smell or a taste but but they always say that the willow has neither of those and that's saying that i'm really from you know heard that heard so many times really this year took on a new meaning because uh if you talk to any of your friends that have had corona one of the most annoying symptoms of corona seems to be that people lose their sense of smell and sense of taste it's as if hashem is showing us more than ever before our fragility and how much we're dependent on him you know my son told me something really interesting a crazy fact that if you took all of the corona cells in the world they're so small that they wouldn't even fit into they wouldn't even fill a teaspoon it's just like such a crazy thing with all of our technology and all of our advances in our sense that we have so much power right in the end of the day if hashem wants to unleash this teaspoon of virus on us he could put us we can make the entire world go into a tailspin um and so i think this year more than ever before we can really get into the state of mind of the willow branch and what do we say on this last day of sukkot it's hoshanah rabbah the word hoshanah means salvation hashem please save us it's a sort of a abbreviation of one of the shortest prayer in prayers and psalms of king david in psalm 118 there's a prayer ana hashem hoshiyana please hashem please save us now if you would cut that down in hebrew into like a really short sentence it would be hoshina just like hashem please save us and if you cut down that into something really really tiny you could squish it into one hebrew word called hoshanah so it's like after all this praying and all these books and all this liturgy and all this stuff we just stand there before hashem with our willow branch and say the shortest possible prayer hashem please save us we just realized hashem that we're totally dependent on you um there's an exercise that i did that was really meaningful to me on the last day of code maybe maybe it'll resonate with some of you guys you could feel free to borrow it i sat on the floor with my hoshanah and with my uh start with my willow and i just meditated on the word hoshanah just thought about that and first i just thought about it for myself i said hashem please save me i thought about the places you know close my eyes and thought about the places in my life where i need hashem to save me and to help me and i said hashem hoshanah just this one word prayer like hashem i finished all of the words and all of these books but now i can just stand before you and say the simplest prayer as this simple person hashana and then little by little in my mind i spread out into ever widening circles first i envisioned jeremy and i thought about the places where he really needs hashem to save him the places where he's struggling and then i thought about each one of my kids and i just said hoshanah for each one of my kids like places where they need hashem in their lives and then i thought about my parents and i thought about jeremy's parents and my grandmother and my siblings and my and my brothers and sisters in law my nieces and nephews and just going out and out and i thought about all of you guys and beautiful community of of truth seekers that has formed in this fellowship and so many of you have shared um with jeremy and with me your struggles and things you know prayer requests that you have and just praying for him hoshanah for each and every one of you and then you know for all of israel in the world and for me that was a really a really meaningful way to finish this holiday season um so feel free to borrow and then after all of that i was sort of debating to myself should i share this idea with a fellowship or not because it's kind of uh i don't want to kind of get you guys down like the will is sort of depressing like here today and gone tomorrow right it's just facing our our how humble we are and the grand picture of creation can be a little bit depressing do i want to bring everyone down i don't want to be like we're flesh and blood we're really we're really simple that's not much of a happy spirit to go into the new year with is it um but then i was struck by this passage in maimonides maimonides in his book summarizing all the torah laws has eight chapters on all of the laws of on all of the laws of sukkot how to build your sukkah and all the details of the four species and he has a lot a lot of you know mitzvahs that you need to do and then at the end he sums it all up and says you just need to be happy and he says being happy is really hard work which is funny because he just gave us eight chapters of really hard work to do building our sukkah um but he said that's not the real hard work the real hard work is to be happy it's to be happy on sukkot and to be happy in all of our service of hashem because that's the hard work and he says if you don't do that if you're not able to do that then you really missed the point and so then he says well how do you be happy how do you serve hashem with joy so if i were to ask you what's the opposite of happiness what is the thing that is the stumbling block to happiness if you would ask me i would intuitively just say it's the annoying stuff it's the annoying stuff that happens that's what makes me upset that's what bothers me that's what makes me not be able to be happy maimonides says no he says that what gets in the way of being happy is worrying about honor he says having taking yourself seriously is the opposite of happiness it's the thing that stops you from being happy because let's say you know you feel like you deserve something you don't get it then you're going to be upset if you think i deserve a spouse that dotes on me and i deserve children that behave properly and listen all the time and i deserve that promotion at work that's for sure and i sure deserve for you know so and so to have treated me more night you know more respectfully if you walk around with that state of mind and you take yourself so seriously then you're always going to be disappointed and upset um and he contrasts that type of person with somebody who doesn't take that themselves too seriously and he he brings as an example king david king david when he's bringing the ark of the covenant he's so happy he's so happy he's dancing and he's shaking around and he's just you know not caring what anybody thinks and his wife michal is just like oh my god david could you please like reign in some of that enthusiasm let's have a little bit of decorum you're the king you're supposed to be a respectable person not just cutting loose and dent you know tearing up the dance floor that's not that's not suitable for a king and he's like me i would lower myself even more than that i just i'm just trying to serve hashem with joy i don't care what i look like um and so maimonides brings david ironically the david who has like that we know like the most glory and honor in the eyes of hashem he brings david as the example of a person who just didn't take himself so seriously he wasn't heavy about you know about needing honor and needing respect and a person like him is able to really somebody who's able to do that is able to really serve hashem um to serve hashem with joy uh and and so you know that really connects back to this willow state of mind when we realize that we're just not that important in the grand scheme of things and our importance comes from how hashem sees us not from how other people see us because you know we're just flesh and blood we're here today gone tomorrow we're so fleeting um our our our significance really comes from our service of hashem and when we realize that we're able to have a deep sense of joy a true sense of joy um and so i think that it's a you know it's a something to meditate on as we start the new year um and so i bless i bless you guys and i bless you know us that we're able to continue this journey together of trying to find pathways to the true service of hashem and we're able to have a year filled with joy and blessings so have a wonderful year guys