The Four Species and the Heart of Sukkot: Faith, Unity, and True Freedom

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Yehuda Bachana.

Today, we will talk about Sukkot. One of the main holidays in the Bible and in the Jewish culture, one of the three pilgrimages, a holiday in which people make their way up to Jerusalem to the house of the Lord.

The holiday focuses on the memory of the Exodus from Egypt. And we will talk about the mitzvah of the Sukkot, the importance of learning and educating our children, and the values of the four species.

What is a Sukkot and what is its significance? “You are to live in Sukkot for seven days. Every citizen of Israel is to live in a Sukkot, so that generation after generation of you will know that I made the people of Israel live in Sukkot when I brought them out of the land of Egypt; I am Adonai, your God.”

When the Israelites left Egypt and traveled in the desert, they lived in a Sukkot, which is a kind of hut or tent. Our dwelling in Sukkot symbolizes the Sukkot of that time and reminds us of the Exodus from Egypt.

The Exodus from Egypt is a fundamental point in the Bible and in the lives of the Jewish people, as God takes a group of slaves and drives them through the Red Sea, bringing them out through the other side as a newly born free people. At this point in history, God created the nation of Israel.

So most of the holidays, including the Shabbat, are also reminders of the Exodus from Egypt. Likewise, our Sukkot is also a reminder of leaving the land of bondage to freedom.

In Deuteronomy 16:3, God commands us to remember the Exodus from Egypt all the days of our lives. Each of us must remember from what cruel slavery God freed us.

There are two important points here:

1. God is the God of Israel who brought the people out of slavery to freedom. This nation, the nation of Israel, belongs to Him, and He identifies as the God of Israel.

2. All of us are commanded to remember for the rest of our lives that God brought us out of bondage to freedom.

God redeemed us. Could it be an actual aliyah, immigration to the Promised Land, or redemption from past sins or trauma from the past?Yeshua redeemed us, and we must remember this all the days of our lives.

The main reason for building the Sukkot is learned from the passage:“So that generation after generation of you will know that I made the people of Israel live in Sukkot.”To teach future generations, to maintain continuity, to preserve the future.

Every holiday we share with our children. In fact, most holidays are designed to teach the children our history, to teach and to pass on the culture and the Torah between generations.

The children enjoy building the Sukkot with their parents. It is fun to leave the house and indulge in a family picnic outside. The children also take care of decorating and make it the prettiest of them all.

But more importantly, we enter the Sukkot and feel that for one week we have no home. We experience the Exodus from Egypt, and this helps families bond with the Bible and with each other.

Another mitzvah for the holiday is the four species. Every day we lift them together and shake in each direction:a lulav (date palm branch), three branches of myrtle, two branches of willow, and an etrog (a citrus fruit).All this is learned from Leviticus 23.

In the Jewish world, it is customary to divide everything into four. We don’t have only black and white, not only righteous and wicked, we have two shades of gray in the middle.

Each of the four species is categorized by qualities of taste or smell, and together they symbolize the people. Etrog, it has good taste and good smell. Lulav, it has taste (the date fruit) but has no smell.Myrtle—it has smell but no taste.Willow, it has neither taste nor smell.

This division symbolizes the different types of people:

• Taste and smell: people who have both faith and good deeds.

• Taste without smell: people with faith but without good deeds.

• Smell without taste: people with good deeds, good people, but without Torah, without faith.

• Neither taste nor smell: people without faith and without good deeds.

Now we hold them all together to teach our children: do not say, “I only want those who have both Torah and good deeds, like the etrog. I do not want, or God does not want, those who do not have Torah or good deeds.”

We tell the children: with the etrog alone, you cannot fulfill the mitzvah, not even with the addition of the lulav and the myrtle. You must include the willow, the one that has neither taste nor smell, neither faith nor deeds, and attach it to the lulav, the myrtle, and the etrog.

Only when all these species are together, embraced and united, will you be able to fulfill the mitzvah. Together we make up society and complement each other.

This is why we keep the four species very close, both as a prayer and a call for unity, and to remind us to accept each other with love and understanding. This lesson is not only for children but also for adults.

I will explain.The same idea also appears at Pesach. The Torah speaks of four sons: a wise one, a wicked one, a fool, and one who doesn’t know how to ask questions, four characters: a good character, a bad character, and two in the middle.

The Western world teaches us that there are two sides, good and bad. The biblical world teaches us that there is good and bad and shades of gray, which are neither absolute bad nor absolute good.

I believe that this is also the case in Yeshua’s parable of the sower in Matthew chapter 13, the parable of the four types of soil.

One of the most fascinating parts in the Gospels are the parables. The parables give depth, interest, and activate our imagination. Personally, I really enjoy thinking about a certain parable and imagining it, imagining the characters taking part in the parable.

In this parable of Yeshua, there is the same idea: that there are four types of people, four types of soil. We got used to the idea of good or bad, black or white, and with this way of thinking we got used to the idea that there are three bad types of soil that are not good, and only one good soil, the one that produced a lot of fruit.

But at the end, both the four boys at Pesach and the four species in Sukkot, and the parable of Yeshua, speak of a middle majority. Most of the people are somewhere in the middle.

Yes, there is one type of soil that is good, that produces a lot of fruit. It is great.And so are we, when we come to the congregation service, when we come to the house of God, we pray, we sing, we praise on Shabbat or Sunday. We are all good soil.

But what about the rest of the week? What about each day? At the end, we are all in the gray, like in Yeshua’s parable. We are all suffocated by worrying about the rent, bills, work, children’s education, and family problems.

Who among us can testify that he is the good soil that produces hundreds of good and effective fruits?Who can testify that they are not suffocated by the problems of life, that they don’t fight within their family, that they don’t think about their financial problems?

This pretense, that everything is fine and we are the good and perfect soil, is not healthy.

Many of us are so-called Shabbat believers. We’re Sunday Christians. On Shabbat, we are super spiritual, super close to God. We pray with all our hearts, dance, and sing.But during the week, we are ordinary and quite secular people.

And this dualistic life hurts the children first, who see exactly who we are in our everyday life, and not only in the Shabbat performance. And in the end, they don’t want to play in the charade, and they - the children, leave their faith.

We must understand that we are part of a community. We are part of a congregation.And one of the expressions of this unity is to help each other, to pray for each other, to strengthen each other.

And if we don’t know about each other’s problems, how can we pray?We all fall. The role of the community is to help us get back on our feet.

In the congregation, when we look to the left and look to the right, we see the four species.We see the people we love more and the ones we love a little bit less, but together we are one community.

Together, we fulfill and complete each other. And together we have taste and smell. Together we have faith and deeds.We need each other, and this lesson is important to teach our children.

May all of us and our families have a blessed and enjoyable holiday, a period of getting closer to each other and getting closer to our Heavenly Father.