After Tishrei, What Are We Carrying with Us for the Year Ahead?

Now that the month of Tishrei is over, we should feel fairly prepared for the long stretch until Passover. Tishrei begins with us trying to figure out what matters and ends with gathering what we need to live accordingly. During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we take stock of our lives and repent our misdeeds. During Sukkot, also known as Chag HaAsif, the Festival of Ingathering, because it comes at the end of the summer harvest, we celebrate with the hope that our new year’s resolutions will be successful, and we gather the resolve to carry them out.

The fact that Kohelet became a traditional reading for Ashkenazi communities during Sukkot therefore raises a question that goes beyond whether we have gathered enough for the year ahead. It makes us consider what all these resources are for.

The difference between having wealth – whether material, social, or spiritual – and using it in ways that are meaningful and worthwhile is an especially hard lesson to learn. For this, I can give you an example from my own life.

I used to love my books. I also loved reading, but I loved the actual books. I loved buying them, writing in their margins, arranging them on my shelves, remembering where I bought them, and seeing how one book led me to another. Looking at a book would remind me of a class I took, an argument I had with its author in the margins, or an idea that bothered me for years before finally making sense. I would look at a book on my shelves and remember not simply what I had read but who I had been while reading it.

As my library grew, how I related to my bookshelves changed. Books I had read started to feel like trophies of my achievements, of degrees earned, subjects mastered, courses taught. Unread books became trophies on layaway until I achieved what they represented.

My collection made me feel rich in what I had – both in terms of actual books and in the achievements they represented. Yet, it also made me feel that something was lacking in terms of the richness those books now gave to my life. I had gone from loving what books said to me to loving what my books might communicate about me to myself and to others. The moment I finally realized this came during a conversation with an interior decorator. We were discussing how to arrange my books according to the colors of their covers. I heard myself agreeing to the color scheme, judging those books solely by their covers, and I realized that my library had become simply a function of home décor.

While my love affair with my books may seem a bit out there, it is no different than how people might collect friends or “likes” on social media rather than IRL. Rather than friendships being opportunities for relationship, they become markers for one’s social capital or “influence.” Similarly, we may start to collect money to attain all the things we want in life only to end up focusing on the money we have (or don’t) rather than the life we wanted money to buy. Even religious practice can become a marker of identity rather than a means of deepening our relationship with Judaism.

Just like with my library, when we focus primarily on what we have rather than on what we want to do or how we want to live, we start to carry a lot of weight instead of letting what we carry push us forward.

This is not to dismiss the desire to gather and be proud of what we have. Achievement merits recognition, and possessions oftentimes carry memories and meaning. The difference between demonstrating appreciation and engaging in futile display is in whether we would still value what we have if we didn’t let it define who we are.

Kohelet disparages wealth, knowledge, or accomplishment when we mistake having them as the purpose of life. Someone else may always have more than you, and chasing the satisfaction you get from achievements is like chasing the wind. The celebration of what we gather and display on Sukkot is, therefore, not simply in how much we have. It is in appreciation that we are ready to live according to what, during the first days of Tishrei, we decided matters most.

Ira Bedzow is an associate professor in the practice of organization and management at Goizueta Business School, an associate professor in the department of medicine at Emory School of Medicine, and a core faculty member at Emory University’s Center for Ethics. He is also the co-director of the Atlanta Rabbinic Leadership Lab.