Yom Kippur and Sukkot

Q: What is the connection between Yom Kippur and Sukkot?

A: Yom Kippur is akin to death.

We dress in white, like the dead. Like them, we do not eat. Like the dead, we abstain from sexual relations. As we sit in the synagogue for the better part of the day, no sales are rung up on the register. Economically, the day is total waste.  Withdrawing from the world to pray and seek redemption and wholeness, it is as if we do not exist.

If Yom Kippur is death, Sukkot is the antithesis; it means life. Coming out of the Day of Atonement we drive the first nail into the Sukkah symbolizing our re-entry into the world.  The mitzvah is immediate.  Some communities do not consider Yom Kippur to be truly ended until the first piece if lumber has been placed for the construction of the Sukkah after the shofar has sounded.

What does the Jew explain when he does something for the first time? The shechechiyanu course. But we do not. Not this time.

Silently, the wood is hold up from the shed as we begin to construct a new universe.  The shechechiyanu is withheld until the first moment we enter the shaky little structure on the festival of Sukkot.

Like life itself, it takes time to emerge from the grip of death.