Succot Lecture Part Five: Under His Wings

So this idea of being able to take the Shechina and use it as a reality is halchically true and it’s someone who converts. Someone who’s made a life-changing decision, a choice, for someone who wants relationship with G-d, is choosing to give up the past and choose the future so that this person can have a relationship with G-d.

So I would think that the way we bring the Shechina to the succah is not only to imagine ourselves taking the Shechina that we experienced on Yom Kippur when we were obligated to bow down, because we were not just hearing, but we were standing in G-d’s presence and we had to bow as much as Moshe Rabbeinu had to bow when Hashem revealed Himself at the greatest revelation of Hashem to Moshe.

We are able to take that if we use the time between Yom Kippur and Succos to do what convert does – “lachasos tachas kanfei shechina,” that we want to sit and dwell under the wings of the Shechina.

So when we’re putting up the s’chach, and the s’chach, as the passuk in Yeshayahu says is it’s a symbol of G-d hovering over us, literally the Shechina hovering over us. As we are putting up the s’chach, its not just as if G-d’s presence is there, its not just that we believe, halacha tells us nothing is impossible, it is telling us that we can take the Shechina from Yom Kippur, the one in front of which we bowed down, and we can literally infuse the S’chach that is on top of our succah with that Shechina, and we can do it simply by making the same choice that Ruth makes, or that any convert makes. Which is “lachasos tachat kanfei hashechina.”

“Hashem, when I  sit in this succah, all I want is to feel that I am sitting under the presence of the shechina, the cloud of Glory that appeared in the sake of Moshe, to Moshe in which all the Jewish people were able to see the presence of Hashem.”

Seems difficult doesn’t it. To literally do it. So it may be ‘as if’ and it may be that halacha tells us the impossible is possible.