Sukkos: The Joy of Galus (Ep. 346)

Hi, this is Deon Alowski and welcome to the special sukus edition of the Davidski show. And whether you're watching with our friends and producers over at Torah anytime uh or wherever you watch or listen to your podcasts. Thank you for taking our time from your yontiff to spend it together with us. If it applies to your platform, do not forget to subscribe and like and share and comment. Oh my gosh, I got them all down. Some people just rattle this stuff off, but I don't know because it took I don't even know what the word algorithm means. All right, I'll be perfectly frank. I don't know. But my daughter Yaffa, who of course handles our merch store, you know, says, "Make sure and mention these things because we're going to do some special stuff just for subscribers." So, if you want to get your um Rabbi Alowski bumper sticker, if you want to get your Rabi Alowski mug, if you want to uh get your uh Rabber Alowski um CPAP machine, which we're going to start marketing soon, all of you people have trouble sleeping. Uh, I got a CPAT machine. It was uh um I I was I was tired all the time and uh my cardiologist said, "You probably have sleep apnea." And I said, "No, I don't have sleep apnea. I don't that problem." So, I went down and I did a test, a sleep test. They put this little vest on you and you have to sleep with it. And anyway, that takes a couple months to get an appointment with a pulmonologist. Um and uh and he says you only stop breathing seven times an hour. That's not a big deal. There's some people who like 40 times an hour they stop breathing, but you stop breathing for 30 seconds at a time and your oxygen saturation rate drops. Now, I don't know if anybody uh remembers this from CO here in Israel. As soon as you got COVID, they would send you a little kit. And one of the things was this little thing you put on your finger to um to measure your oxygen saturation. And they tell you that if it goes down to 90%, you have to go to the hospital. So he says about seven times an hour, your oxygen saturation rate drops to 60%. It's basically destroying your heart. So, uh, so they gave me a CPAP machine, which now you sleep with and, uh, um, it's weird. It's a weird thing, you know, you got to put this mask on and tie it around, keep the little machine next to you, and you have to take it with you wherever you go. If you're going to sleep, you know, so like when I go to a shear, I always bring along my CPAT machine. You have to put it on. Anyway, so every year you have to go and have I don't know the filter changed, whatever. So I bring it down and has a little um chip and she sticks in the computer, the doctor, and she looks at and says, "You haven't had one incident since you started this." That's it. It just completely goes away when you're on your CPAP machine. So galdic, that's all I can say. So uh yeah. So maybe we'll have to have our own CPAP machines for the Rabi Alowski, you know, crowd and have a little picture of me with the little mask on it. Okay. Uh yeah. So don't forget to check out the merch store. That's I guess what I'm trying to say over here. And uh we have a uh we still have buy me a coffee where people have an opportunity to help to support the show even if they're not in a position to sponsor an entire episode or a paran or a question and answer even on all the different levels. But it would be nice if we do because we um are almost out of sponsors. Uh so uh um this is I think eight years. I think we're starting the eighth year. Good grief. Eight. Seven years I've done this. And you know what this is? Every single time I sit down and think, what am I going to talk about? It's so easy for somebody like Ben Shapiro, he just talks about politics and just look look at look at the news stories and go, I think it's a terrible thing that these people what are they thinking terrible and that's it. you know, read an article. He can knock off half a show by just reading an article. Maybe I should start reading articles. Maybe start doing that. Do more dramatic readings. Yeah. Anyway, um yeah. So, if you're not in a position to sponsor any of these things, so buy me a coffee.com. And of course, we have our phone hotline where you can listen and leave a voicemail that I will listen to and have no possible way of contacting you. uh and we have a WhatsApp group uh tinyurl.comolowski and we had a bumper sticker contest and the winner of the bumper sticker contest is Shosana Beznazof I hope I pronounced that correctly and her son you can see the picture with their uh Rabowski bumper sticker. I just met somebody who said, "I don't know. I'm driving and people keep beeping at me and I don't know why." And then I realized I have the bumper sticker. So, there are a lot of us out there. Yeah. Okay. Um, I think that's everything. And our sponsor for this week is a sponsor who has sponsored 10 episodes because he believes in what we're doing. Yeah. That's our friend Jeffrey from California who is not Jewish. I don't know. Don't any Don't any Jews want to see this show go on? Can I get a Jew to sponsor an episode? Thank God. I thank God for the nations of the world joining together to make sure that the Rabbi Holowski show continues because my my fellow uh my fellow people my fellow my my my chosen people over here have chosen not to send in any money. We just keep plowing ahead, giving you uh giving you a I I hope uh I I hope I can say with confidence a high quality product because uh you know, Yakob Schlommo, our intrepid uh videographer, and Ari, our intrepid producer, uh you know, edits all this and then then puts it up and you know, and uh one day I won't even be here. It'll all be AI. They'll record my voice in my picture and some AI will just be sitting here talking. But not yet, you know. Although I can say that uh every now and then um my wife, you know, will use AI to find out like, you know, what maybe I should talk about, you know, and uh and she'll she'll say, you know, do you have any jokes in Raviolski style? None of them are funny. I haven't seen one funny joke that AI comes up with. So, I don't think it's very funny. Anyway, so at least at least we have that much job security left. So, we'll see what happens. Anyway, um who who produces this level of of of content? I know I know you are, but what am I? How about that? And so it's sukusmano we are happy and uh there's a lot of reasons why sukus is maneno and I want to focus on one of them in this particular episode if you will indulge me and that is we build a suka and I've spoken about this that uh sukus This is one of the holidays that I have such tremendous memories. I have memories of Sukis. I have memories of Pesak. I have memories of Kipa, but those aren't good memories. I have no memories of I don't know if we had it in our house, but sukus. My father was a florist. He had a florist nursery. And he would build a suka. Now, I lived in a little stut called North Merrick, Long Island. Um, there was no shul in North Merrick, Long Island. There were schuls in Merik. Merrick was a a Jewish area. It was about three maybe three and a half miles away from me. Um, we went to a conserved synagogue in East Meadow called the East Meadow Jewish Center that was a mile away. North America there weren't there weren't many Jews in general and even in East Meadow and certainly in North America there weren't a lot of sukas. Yeah. Uh East Jewish Center they had suka in the synagogue and there were maybe a few congregants who put up a suka. Now you remember I'm going back to the 1960s and a suka was uh these metal poles with canvas and bamboo on the top. That was, you know, the standard suka and the wind would blow and the and the the canvas would go back and forth, you know, and it was the shaking in it. But that was that was what a suka was. That's that was a standard suk. My father worked shabas. He worked yontiff. He basically the the only times that he really took off that he mish didn't go to work. Um but uh but sukus the first day of sukus he usually would also um uh take off and he would build a suka. Um he would make a wooden frame and then he would nail on trelluses. If you don't know what a trellis is, if you ever see sometimes like in a garden they have those little um lattice work things. Sometimes they make a mita out of it. you know, it's a trellis and he would nail on trelluses and then he would get big bundles of cedar green which he would use in arrangements in the store and he and my brothers would wire it on to the trelluses inside and out and then he would put down uh strips of wood and the was um was fresh cedar. First of all, it smelled beautifully. But the whole suker was like something alive. And he would not allow any thing that was not real as decorations. We had no paper chains. We had no little plastic things. Whatever went in there had to be real. So there were dried flowers. They call them straw flowers. You know, they use them in arrangements sometimes. Autumn leaves, which uh again they would use it sometimes in arrangements in the in the fall. There were different colored autumn leaves that they would decorate with. Indian corn. Uh I've never seen it in this country. By which I mean Israel. Yeah. Indian corn is corn, multicolored corn. That's beautiful. They would hang the Indian corn. Um there would be gourds. Now in here in Israel when they have a gourd like they use it as one of the simanim on Russashana. It's basically this big large green type of a squash. These are decorative gourds which are small in all kinds of different shapes and colors and they'd hang them from the ceiling you know and uh it was just it was a living thing. He would make once a year. He didn't call it that. He called it a suka party. And it was a very very large event. A lot of people came and he would bring from the store uh uh uh plants, mum plants that he would set all the way around the outside of the suka as decoration. It was something spectacular. And in fact, the Hebrew school of the conservative synagogue would bring the kids to come and see the suka. It was something amazing. And the first night of sukus, I didn't care if it was below zero. He didn't care if it was raining. He was gonna eat in the suka. And every night when he would come home from work, it was freezing sometimes. You know, he'd put on his over coat. He'd go outside and he'd eat his supper in the suka. A very warm uh feeling towards suka. And I guess since he had chosen as a profession um you know the flower business, flowers and plants which is uh which is what he worked in I mean that's not what he started and he started in the fur business but um uh he switched over to the flower business. So since he chose the fur business and then switched the flower business, so he had a sense uh you know of what what flowers meant and what growing things meant. So he felt sukis which is supposed to be the harvest holiday and you know the is that you're supposed to make it you know the from leftover things etc. That's why he felt suka should be only fresh and real things etc. And uh my suka is outside and you know basically I've got stone walls all around and uh we put on we put on those bamboo mats. Um I don't think my father would approve but uh I don't have the gift I don't have the gift that my father had but uh so sukus I have I have tremendous memories of it you know and uh and like everything right I make associations on any holiday based of course on um on food that's how we Jews uh go you know we look at everything in the context of food I was talking to a group once and I You know there's a food associated with every holiday you know I said Russia shana everyone said apple and honey pes matzabal soup you know not if you not if you uh don't eat your bra but then if you don't eat you don't even know what a matzabal is you say canal but you talk to a regular matzable cheesecake you know and uh I would say tishb of they'd say, you know, the egg with the ashes. I said, even on a fast day, we have to have a food associated with it. So, sukus um to to each their own, but when I was growing up, sukus was cabbage soup. My mother would make cabbage soup, which was exceptional. I think I've given the recipe, my mother's cabbage soup. It's one of the easiest things that that she ever made. And uh it just comes out very very good. You chop up cabbage and how much cabbage you chop up depends on the size of the pot and then you put in flankin and then you put in tomato sauce and then you put in water and sugar. Now again the amounts of all this depends like for example my mother used uh Hunts tomato sauce uh here in Israel we use tomato paste so it's the proportion is different and uh you boil it up and it's delicious serve with a little piece of flankin and and so we make that on on uh on sukus I don't know why we can't make everything else uh on other days but that's that's the has to be one of the easiest things my mother ever and uh to make it over. But you know, cabbage soup, everyone knows sukus, you know, now in America, you understand when it's like cold and you're outside, you have a nice hot bowl of cabbage soup, you know. Um here sometimes it's pretty hot. Doesn't have quite the same quite the same appeal, especially in a year like this when when sukus is so early. it. But cabbage soup, that's one of the that's one of the things we used to associate um with uh with sukusminatas. Uh we would we would make stuffed cabbage. We called it stuffed cabbage. That's all I ever knew. I remember when uh when I got married, my wife said, "Oh, my grandmother made kalipes." I was like, "What's that?" She goes, "You know," I said, "Oh, a stuffed cabbage. Why didn't you say so? That's how I grew up, you know, stuffed cabbage, you know." So, uh, but, um, so she would make that. The only thing is, I don't know why she could not hold them together, you know. You'd get a piece of stuffed cabbage, it had like five gigantic toothpicks in it holding the thing together, you know. So, uh, it's taken me years to master this, but I now am able to make my stuffed cabbage that they stay together, you know, and, uh, roll it in a particular way. Yeah. Uh, you have to you obviously have to first soften the cabbage. So, um, there's different ways. My mother used to boil it. Um, I, uh, I put it in the freezer for, you know, like four days. Then you take it out and it takes a whole day to defrost and then it's nice and soft. So when you take it, you have to put the filling. Filling is very simple. Yeah. You cook rice and mix in chop meat. How much chopped meat to rice depends how much money you have anyway. And then you take a scoop of that and you put it in the little well towards the stem. And then you bend it over and you turn over the sides and roll it up. and then give it a little pat and they stay together. It's It's been absolutely amazing. I don't know. I never managed to get it down before. So now it's uh my my family is so impressed. They're able to pull out usually would pull out deconstructed stuff and put into a little bowl and just pretend it was a stuffed cabbage. But now we're going to hold it together. You know that that's uh that's uh my mother would make that once. The truth is the mic is really they have it on hash raba along with the crepll and people do it on purim too also with krebl because it's it's something that's hidden just like on purum the n was hidden so you have the stuffed cabbage where the filling is hidden and you have the where it's hidden and then on the yadin before yum kipra that's when you have the crepll it's hidden and you also have that on hosen where it's hidden in the and the and the uh stuffed cabbage but my but my mother did onatis we didn't really celebrate hosana rabba that I remember anyway but um uh you know see you have you have memories that the the I know my kids that the the foods that you make um also help to uh to to create those memories etc but is there's something very happy about it I don't know I find cabbage soup to be a very happy dish I don't know why we don't make it more often is there's this attitude. For example, my mother would make this flesha um carrot simus which basically you take a bunch of fresh carrots. Presumably you could do it with frozen carrots, but she would do fresh carrots and she'd cut them up into into small chunks and put in um a flank um little garlic powder and she'd bake it. And at some point, take it out and pour out uh the juice and then pour honey all over it and put it back in and bake it some more. And then take it out, pour out some more juice, pour on some more honey, wrap it up, and let it just sit there till everything got nice and soft and caramelized. Ah, there's a reason I have diabetes. I worked hard to get there. Some people are born with diabetes. What's the big deal? Those of us worked at it, you know. Anyway, so I remember there was at the kuf my kid said, "Can't we make that for a shabas?" I was like, "But it's a rashana dish." He goes, "Yeah, but if we make it on a weekday, then it'll be a a shabas dish and it wouldn't be a sha dish." I I guess I don't know. We could try. But you associate it. You associate it. when um we're going to be doing Pesak. I hope to have some more information uh later on. My family came down to make videos for uh for Pesak here. And we got a box of matzas and since I had the matzas anyway, so I made a matzah bry and everyone's like, "Wow, this is delicious. How come we never have it?" I said, "Because it's for pesak and it's not for during the year." That's why anyway this is this is what comes from having square thinking you know but anyway it's a very happy time I have a lot of happy memories wonderful things about it yeah when my father would make this simple showa he he had this uh thing that he always wanted to do when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s there used to be what was called a uh a candy store or a soda shop you can see it in these like 50 movies, people would hang out at the candy store, you know, and it had this big fountain and it had a seltza machine where, you know, you had a tap that made salt and it had syrups that you would make um uh soda. So, you would squeeze in some Coca-Cola syrup and the salsa and mix it up and you'd make the make it right on the spot. And uh they had molteds, they had a place for ice cream and all kinds of different things. So there was this candy store went out of business. You don't find them today anymore obviously, you know. Would you ever go any place and they make you a soda, you know, with some syrup in it? My father bought it and set it up in the basement as like a a little soda parlor, you know, with ice cream and stuff. My brother Jason used to run the used to run the uh soda fountain. So it was it was a lot of fun, you know. I used to remember that those kind of things. the the uh the memories you'd have. So, we don't have a soda fountain here, but we do have bottles of soda that we put outside in the suka, you know, and not quite the same, but uh um uh remember he had a whole compressor he put in to to make the salts, you know, little salsa tap. H the good old days. Anyway, uh so a happy time. A lot of different reasons for it. So I want to focus on one and that is that on sukus we leave our house and we live in the suka as much as is possible right when I lived in uh long island like I told you it was freezing cold it wasn't really possible to sleep in the suka yeah um when I became at the age 12. So I don't remember if it was that first sukus, the second sukus. I said to my father, "I'm sleeping in the suka." He says, "You crazy. You'll get pneumonia." I didn't care because I was uh baluva and I was willing to die for my religious beliefs. And I slept my bed outside into the suka. And of course, my father was wrong. I didn't get pneumonia. I only got bronchitis. But it was so cold. On the other hand, in uh Miami Beach, people told me they can't, you know, they they have to put air conditioning into their suka because you can't sit out there mituka and it's so hot. I know what it's like because I was once speaking in Miami Beach in September and I was in the house, nice air conditioned house, and I um I had taken a shower. I got all dressed for Shabas and I walked from the front door to the street where the guy was picking me up and I was dripping sweat. It was so humid and so hot that you just hope for a hurricane to like, you know, cool things off. I don't get me wrong, Miami Beach is or Miami in general gorgeous. Florida, beautiful in the winter. But uh I remember when I spoke in Boca Raton in between hurricane Ivan and Janine one year. I don't remember what year it was. You can look it up. Ivan and Janine. I remember that because they go by the letters. And they had just gotten the electricity back on. There were trees down everywhere. And I I get up to speak and I said, "Why would you people live here?" And they said, "Are you kidding? The weather." the irony was completely lost on this audience. But anyway, so uh so here in Yushaim for the most part, every now and then on sukus we have a particularly cold snap or it's particularly hot, but in general the the the temperature is such you can sleep in your suka. Um uh you can uh you can definitely eat in your suka. You can spend a lot of time in your suka. There are people here in whom mish move their furniture out into the suka. They they they live in the suka. That's most of their life that they spend during this week living in a suka. You can't do this long term. I mean, I live now in Harnov. There are some people don't take down their suka and they rent it to young couples for like 5,000 shekels a month because there's no other place to go. It's amazing what you what people pay for the rents over here. But uh maybe one time we'll talk about that the rental uh crisis. But anyway, so um so spent a lot of time out in the suka just enjoying it. When my kids were little, um, apparently by law you have to take your kids away during so you have to spend like four hours going to whatever the place is. Four hours coming back because you're stuck in traffic and every from person in Israel is there, you know, and you come home at the end to find something to eat, you know. But um, uh, why? because everybody has to do tim and I always said when I get old my dream is I'm going to spend sukas in my suka. Now here I build the suka and I spend all sukas not in my suka running around just to sit in my suka. What is the sim of the suka? The sim of the suka is it doesn't have a roof. Yeah, it's a temporary drawing and it's called aus arai. That's how the mission refers to it. The suka has to be a dearest arai and not a dearest keva. It has to be a temporary dwelling. One that is not meant to be permanent. It has to be essentially and what makes something temporary is the roof. In the early years of the state, um the British of course opposed Jewish settlement when the British had the mandate here and um they would make you take down a building that you were building. But the law was once the roof was up then they didn't take it down. So people would sneak in in the middle of the night and they put up like poles and set up the roof. So they couldn't take it down and then they build the rest of the structure around it. Masha Enken, if it doesn't have a roof, it's not a permanent dwelling. And that's why the Mishkan did not have a roof. It had Yurios. It had curtains on top. So too in Shilo, even though they had stone walls, it was a curtain on top. It was temporary. And uh the bases was an actual building. Yeah. But uh if you don't have a roof, it's by definition a temporary uh dwelling because if it rains in and you're not protected from the elements, then you're defeating the purpose of what a uh uh house is supposed to be. A house is supposed to protect you from the elements. Yeah. In particular, burillium. Little element joke there. Anyway, but uh it's supposed to keep you from um uh protect you. We go outside for a week in a temporary dwelling. Now, where's the sim exactly? What's the sim of that? There's a famous story with where this fellow comes to visit the and he's heard so much about him and he imagines that of course he is living in a house based on his standards of who he is his position in Clawel. Um when he got remarried his wife wanted a wooden floor was most places at that time still had a dirt floor said no maestras no extras. What's wrong with a dirt floor? She goes then you're not washing negasa next to the bed. I'm not I'm not I'm not walking around in mud. But that was the the normal thing was that and you know that song in uh in Fiddle on the Roof, you know, a fine a fine big house with a real wooden floor below. That was considered a luxury item to have a wooden floor. Yeah. And uh people people lived in dirt. So he comes into this very simple house, the dirt floors, nothing there, very sparse. He says, "You're the Yeah." He goes, "How do you live like this?" He says, "What do you mean?" He says, "You don't have any furniture. You don't have any curtains. You don't have a rug. You have nothing." He says, "You have a couch." He says, "Yes, a beautiful over stuffed gorgeous couch." says, 'You have a rug? Says, a beautiful Turkish rug. He says, 'You have curtains? Beautiful velvet curtains. He says, 'Well, it sounds great. Can I see them? I don't take them with me. I'm just passing through. Said, I'm also just passing through. To be temporary in this world is the goal. It's a very important idea. This world is an illusion. I know it feels like it's real. Feels real, but it's not. Right? When we die, we go to the ols, the world of truth, which means this world is the it's an illusion. It's not real. Nothing that happens here is real. There's a book written by Richard Bach who wrote Jonathan Living Seagull back in the 60s and he wrote a little book called illusions and the theme of the book is that there's this fellow who apparently is some kind of miracle worker. He's doing all kinds of things and he's basically becoming a messiahike figure. He's doing all these miracles and there's a guy living in the Midwest who has a little plane. and he does crop dusting in fields and this guy travels and seeks him out. He can't believe it. What's this guy coming to me for? And he says, "You don't remember who you are, do you?" He says, "What does that mean?" He says, "You're a uh you're a powerful being like I am, but you decided you wanted to see what humans are like, and you came down here dressed as a human, and you forgot who you are." He says, "That's crazy." And the whole book is him trying to get him to remember who he is and what his powers are. So, at one point they're going through town. He says, "Uh, let's go watch a movie." And the movie they're doing is Butch Cass and the Sundance Kid. It' only recently come out obviously when he wrote the book in the 1960s. And uh and they uh he says, "I was happy to do it because it's one of my favorite movies." And we're getting towards the end of the movie, the dramatic scene at the ending, and he turns to me and says,"Wh are you here?" And I said, "Just wait till the movie's over." He says, "But why are you here?" He says, "Because I'm watching the movie. Please be quiet." "But why are you here?" He says, "Just let me watch." And the movie is over. You know, it's an ambiguous ending, but you hear a lot of gunfire. The implication is the two of them get killed down in Mexico. And uh when they get outside, he says, "Why was it so important for you to ask me that question then?" And he said, "You know, it's not real. None of that's happening. It's light flickering on a wall. Those two stars, they're not dead. They're living in Hollywood. They're doing very well for themselves. Paul Newman and Robert Redford, they're fine. It's it's an illusion, but you chose the illusion over reality. I'm a real person. I'm sitting here talking to you and you chose the illusion instead. And that's this world. People choose which illusion they're going to live in. So he says, "What about people who have sad lives or or horrible lives?" He says, "Why don't people go to horror movies? Why do people go to sad movies? They enjoy the illusion of watching a tragedy or a terrible thing take place. They cry. They're afraid. Whatever it is, they enjoy that experience. And down here, they choose those lies for themselves as well. It's an illusion. And people think this world is real. That's why we make all the mistakes that we make. told the story before the Geredic of VNA as he was being burnt to the stake for becoming a Jew. So the executioner says, "I'm burning you in this world, but I guess you'll burn me in the next world." He says, "You know, I grew up as a nobleman, fabulously wealthy, powerful. I didn't have any other noblemen to play with. I was playing with the peasant children. And one time they broke my toys. And I told my father, "Put those children to death. If they broke my toys, you have the power. You could do it." My father thought about it and he said, "You know what? At 18, you become an adult. If you want to put them to death, you will." Says, "You think when I became an adult, I wanted to kill these little children because they they broke my toys?" He says, "What are you doing? You're burning my body. It's nothing. It's it's it's a physical vessel for who I am. You can't burn me. I'm a soul. And because you're doing this to me, I'm going to go up into shmayim to the highest levels of spiritual fulfillment because of this. You think when I get up there, I will be troubled by petty feelings like revenge and anger and jealousy. You don't have any of those things there. It's a mistake. I do it too, you know. when I was dabbing for the omid during the year when my father died. So I remember one time somebody came in and he wanted to take the om from me and I was overworked. I didn't want to give it up. So someone runs over and says don't fight. Your father wouldn't want you to. I said you obviously didn't know my father. I'll get the shim and he'll say jerk. Why'd you let him take the from you for now? Of course, it's a joke because when you get the Shamay, you think that's that's what my father's going to be thinking. It's the you realize what's true and what's real and you're not you're not troubled by all these petty emotions and feelings that that drive people in this world. And so the problem is we become uh stuck in this illusion of this world and we think it's real. We accept it as reality. It's not. It's an illusion. But we buy into the illusion to the point that it becomes so real to us. 1986, I went to Disneyland, my wife. We went out to uh Los Angeles for program and uh went to Disneyland and uh we went to the haunted house. It had just opened. And as you're leaving, there's a sign that says, "Don't pick up any hitchhiking ghosts." Okay, I think it's good advice. And as the little cart goes by, we pass this mirror and there's me and my wife and sitting in between us is a ghost waving. And I look down. Of course, there's no ghost there. I look back up and he winks at me and I look again because the illusion is so real that we start to think it. This is what really matters. When you get up to Shmayam, nobody cares what name, brand, outfit you were wearing. Nobody cares what kind of car you're driving. None of these things are important. But here we attach so much importance to it. And people sit there and talk to you about, oh, I got this the all this kind of nonsense. There was apparently a video. I didn't see it but somebody told me about this before uh tishab where somebody went around to from communities where these people have built these massive homes adm very very fancy very you know with just over the top over the top and there whoever was doing the video went around and said um are you looking forward to Mashiach coming. So he said, "Of course says then why would you build this giant house in Gulus which you're going to have to leave if you're temporary?" So it goes had a suitcase packed with special clothes for when Mashiah came. There were people who lived in this world. Ara, I'm only passing through. This is not really where I belong. This is not real. And there are other people who get so caught up in the illusion of this world that they can't even imagine anything else. The sim of sukus is we leave our house and we go into a it's temporary. It's not real. You can't live in a suka. But for a week, just like on pes we eat all year, but at least for a week, which represents the ga, take it out of your system for a week. Clean yourself out. And then and then we can uh we can move forward. But uh but it's a it's a therapy for a week. We move out of our house to remind ourselves we're not really in this world. It's an illusion. This world is make believe. As long as you're traveling, you're not where you belong. And once you settle down, that's it. And that's where the sworno says an amazing thing at the beginning of paras. It says um and he takes his entourage with him. Well, what did you need that for? says because at the end of paras Noah it says takes basically the same entourage and he leaves ordan says he wanted to be and he comes to and he stops in he didn't die then but for all intents and purposes his journey was over and so But when a comes to says you complete that journey, he finished the journey. He got there. Until that point, you're not where you belong. I'm not telling people what they should do in their lives, but at least we have to think of ourselves that we are passing through. We're temporary in this world. This world is not permanent. We're just sjouring. Great word, sjourn. Yeah. It's it's uh um passing through. This is not how I am. If you've ever gone to a hotel, a lot of people like me live out of their suitcase. Some people, they go to the hotel, they get there in the afternoon, they're going to be leaving in the morning. They're on a tour. They unpack their entire suitcase into all the drawers, hang up everything, and the next morning they pack everything back up. They don't want to live out of a suitcase. We're leaving living out of the suitcase. We're living a temporary existence. We came to We're not living here. It's just temporary. It's not enough that you're going to live in Haba. You want to live in this world. In this world, you're temporary. And the only time we really get to experience that is for a weaker sukus. If we do it right and we change our mindset, we understand that we are arai in this world. It's temporary. This is not where I belong. I'm going someplace. I'm going on a journey. Don't get too comfortable. I don't know if you've ever been on one of these tours or something where they stop someplace. It's like a bathroom stop and they say, "Okay, you know, don't you know, only if you need it, get off the bus because, you know, we're only going to be here for 15 minutes. Then we're pulling out. Make sure you're on the bus. Don't miss your opportunity. We're not really staying here. We're just stopping." And on sukus, we have an opportunity to live that experience. My friends, if we live our lives in this world and in the world to come and whether the world to come means uh you know and I don't have to get into that. All I know is that we look at this world and we remember it's an illusion and we have to move outside of those illusions to move to a new existence. That's one of the aspects of the sim of sukus and we will be this sukus to enjoy the uh understanding that we're just passing through to a greater existence. We should be z to enjoy it. Now a couple of appreciation comments. Hi, Rabowski. This must be my 10th time commenting. I love your shirum and can't stop laughing. Recently, I was in a campground. Talk about a dear Sarai. And I had 10 of your shirum on my MP3 and for two nights that I was there, I had it on all night. Thank you for the inspiration. Well, at least that way you don't get eaten by a bear. So, I think that's a good thing to do. Thank you for all your wonderful shirm exclamation mark. I enjoy them very much. I just wanted to let you know that I may be the mother of your youngest fan. My not yet one-year-old daughter. Okay, so less than a year, sits in her high chair and watches your classes as she eats and I cook dinner. Whenever she hears you laughing, she gives a big grin and laughs heartily along. I can definitely attest to the fact that the Rabowski Show appeals to all ages and stages. Thank you again. Thank you. And that's it for this episode. If you want to find out more about this program and all of the activities of the Rabolowski community, feel free to go to my website railowski.com. You can sign up for an online share. We still have the MLS for women. We have dafomi for men and we have the tila for everybody. Uh we uh you can download other material. Download that very exciting theme song that uh Lenny Solomon wrote for us. Thank you Lenny. We love you. Uh you can other articles and shurum that you can access over there. You can sponsor an episode sponsor paran five sponsor a question and answer. You can uh go to the merch store. All kinds of wonderful things to do. Check it out. And that's it for this special sukus edition. Until next time, I am Dowski and this has been the Rabowski Show. >> It's the Rabbi Orlovski Show. Torah and Sima, ready to go. The Rabbi Orloski Show. Knowledge and wisdom will help you grow. Lots of fun in every episode. And we don't have to rhyme, no we. It's the Rabbi Orlavski show on rabbi.com to any YouTube and more. It's Rabbi Olowski show. Torah and ready to go. It's the Rabbi orski show. Till next time till we meet again. It's the Rabbi Show. It's the Rabbi Olowski show. It's the Rabbi Olowski show.