By Shlomo Riskin

The climax of Yom Kippur is its closing Ne’ilah prayer when the sun is beginning to set and when we are nearing our last chance for the opportunity to receive God’s loving forgiveness for the year. With the setting sun, the very heavens, the pathway to the Divine Throne, and the gateway to God seems to be closing.  “Don’t lock me out,” says the Jew during Ne’ilah.

But there is another way of looking at this – the opposite way.  “Don’t lock me in!” cries the Jew during Ne’ilah. “I’ve truly felt God’s divine and gracious acceptance and His total forgiveness. I’ve spent an entire 25 hours in His house, in which I’ve seen the sweetness of the Lord and visited in His tent. But now, as the doors to His house are closing, I don’t want to be locked in. The prayers on Rosh HaShanah taught me that God did not choose Israel to live with Him in splendid and glorious isolation; He chose Israel to be a ‘kingdom of priest-teachers and a holy nation’ to bring the message of compassionate righteousness and moral justice as a blessing for all the families of the earth. We are meant to be a light unto the nations, a banner for all peoples.”

It goes without saying that we need our moments of quiet contemplation, of anguished repentance and of personal outpouring to the God who gave us life and Torah. But the ultimate purpose of this day of divine fellowship is for us to be recharged to bring God’s message to a world crying out for God’s word of love, morality and peace. We must leave the ivory tower of Yom Kippur and descend into the maddening crowd in the world all around us.

And so, just four days after Yom Kippur we go out into the sukkah. The sukkah is the next best thing to living within the bosom of nature, feeling at one with the world around you. The walls are usually flimsy and even see-through, and the vegetation-roof must enable you to see through the greens up above to the sky. We pray together with the four species – the citron, the palm branch, the myrtle and the willow, which all grow near

the refreshing waters of the earth – and we pray during this week not only for ourselves or for Israel, but for all 70 nations of the world. Indeed, we are biblically mandated in Temple times to bring 70 bullocks during the week of Sukkot on behalf of all the nations of the world.

The sukkah teaches us one more lesson, perhaps the most important of all.  The major place for us to feel God and His divine presence – after the heavy dose of Yom Kippur – is not in a Temple or a synagogue, but is rather in our familial homes. In order to go out into the world, we must first go out into our family.

The homes we build need not be that large, that spacious, or that fancy. It can be an exceedingly simple dwelling place, but it must have two critical ingredients. First, it must be suffused with love – love of God, love of family and love of Torah. The meals must be permeated with gratitude and thanksgiving to the God who gave us food, with words of Torah and with the realization that it is ultimately not the walls of the home that provide our protection, but it is rather the grace of the God who gives us life. And we should invite into our home the special Ushpizin guests:  Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, Rachel, Miriam, Devorah and Ruth (as you can see, in my Sukkah we add Ushpizot!).

Remember, the biblical reading for Rosh Hashanah is not the story of the Creation; it is rather the story of the first Hebrew family, the family of Abraham. Yes, we have a mandate to teach and perfect the world. But at the same time, we must remember that the first and most real world for each of us is our own individual family. We must begin the new year of reaching out to the world with a renewed reaching out to our life’s partners, our children and grandchildren – then to our neighbors and larger community, and then to include the other and the stranger as well.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is chancellor of Ohr Torah Stone and chief rabbi of Efrat, Israel.