Who do you imagine you could do without?
It is an uncomfortable question to bring into a festival.
But consider how easily we begin sorting people.
The ones who understand. The ones who disappoint us. The ones whose knowledge we respect. The ones we have quietly stopped listening to.
Then Sukkot places four very different species in our hands.
In Vayikra Rabbah 30:12, the sages read them as an image of the Jewish people.
The etrog, with both taste and fragrance, represents those with Torah learning and good deeds. The date palm, whose fruit has taste, represents learning without deeds. The fragrant myrtle represents deeds without learning. The willow, with neither taste nor fragrance, represents those lacking both.
The midrash then brings them all together, so that they may atone for one another.
Even the etrog belongs within that gathering.
That detail stays with me.
It is easy to recognize our need for community when we feel inadequate. It takes another kind of humility to recognize it when we feel accomplished, knowledgeable, or right.
I read this teaching as an invitation to examine the distance we create when we decide that someone has nothing to offer us.
A person may struggle to follow a page of Talmud and still notice that you have gone quiet.
Someone whose questions test your patience may ask the question you have spent years avoiding.
And someone you admire may need help they are ashamed to request.
We rarely know the whole of another person. Sometimes we barely know the part of ourselves that a difficult encounter reveals.
These days of Sukkot, I want to be more careful about whom I dismiss.
I want to remember that learning brings responsibility, that good deeds give learning a place to live, and that we still have work to do together.
The four species remain different when we bring them close.
May HaShem help us carry our differences with humility, our learning with kindness, and our belonging with responsibility.
There is room in our hands for what we have yet to understand.
Chag Sameach.
חג שמח ✡️💙