If It Truly Matters to You, Where Can It Be Seen in Your Life?
If It Truly Matters to You, Where Can It Be Seen in Your Life?
If It Truly Matters to You, Where Can It Be Seen in Your Life?
Almost every person has a list of things that matter deeply. Family matters to me. Health matters to me. Torah study matters to me. Marriage matters to me. Friends matter to me. I want to be more patient, give more charity, read more, pray with greater concentration, stay in touch with my parents, and give my children real time. These are not lies. In most cases we truly mean them. But then a simple and not always pleasant question arrives: if this matters so much to me, where exactly could someone see it in my last week?
Not in what I said.
In the calendar.
In the bank account.
In the hours I devoted.
In the people I called.
In the places I went.
On Sukkot it is especially difficult to leave values in the world of thought. The Torah does not merely tell us to remember the sukkah. It commands: “You shall dwell in sukkot for seven days” (Leviticus 23:42). The sages explain: “Dwell as you ordinarily live” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 28b). A person transfers life into the mitzvah: eating there, drinking there, studying there, and spending time there.
The four species are not an abstract idea either. The Torah says: “You shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of a beautiful tree, branches of date palms, a bough of a leafy tree, and willows of the brook” (Leviticus 23:40).
They must be taken.
In the hands.
This is a festival in which faith becomes intensely physical. Walls are built. Schach is placed. A table is dragged. Chairs are brought in. The four species are purchased. They are taken in the hand and waved. Food is eaten inside the sukkah.
The entire body enters the mitzvah.
The sages even say: “Throughout all seven days a person makes the sukkah the permanent dwelling and the house temporary” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 28b). It is not enough to say the sukkah is important. You are required to change, in practice, the place where you live.
This raises a much broader question: what is the distance between the values we declare and the practical architecture of our lives?
The prophet Isaiah describes a situation in which that gap becomes extreme: “With its mouth and lips this people honors Me, but its heart is far from Me” (Isaiah 29:13). The words are correct, but life is not located in the same place as the words.
The prophet Ezekiel likewise describes people who come to hear prophecy, enjoy listening, but change nothing: “They sit before you as My people and hear your words, but they do not do them... and behold, you are to them like a lovely song of one who has a beautiful voice and plays well, for they hear your words but do not perform them” (Ezekiel 33:31-32). A person can greatly enjoy a lesson about changing life, leave inspired, tell others it was a wonderful lesson, and continue the next morning with exactly the same life.
The sages formulated this sharply: “Study is not the main thing, but action” (Pirkei Avot 1:17). This does not mean study is unimportant. Without learning we will not know what to do. But Torah that never reaches life remains halfway along the road.
Psychology knows this gap well too. Researchers sometimes call it the intention-behavior gap. People can hold a completely sincere intention and still fail to carry it out. We intend to exercise, save, study, eat differently, call someone, or stop a habit, but intention alone does not guarantee action.
Peter Gollwitzer studied an interesting way to reduce part of this gap using what are called implementation intentions. Instead of merely saying, “I want to exercise more,” a person formulates a concrete plan: on Sunday at seven, when I return from work, I will put on athletic shoes and go for a thirty-minute walk. Instead of “I want to study more,” the person decides: after the evening prayer I will remain in the synagogue for twenty minutes and study.
The difference looks small, but it is profound.
A value says what matters to me. A plan says when it will happen.
This is precisely where many of the important things in our lives fall.
A person says, “My children are the most important thing in the world to me.” That may be completely true. But if for an entire month there is not even one protected hour for them on the calendar, something is missing. Not in the love, but in the translation of love into life.
A person says, “Health comes before everything,” but whenever work is busy, work receives the hours and the body receives what remains.
A person says, “My marriage comes first,” but when the phone rings in the middle of a conversation with his wife, the phone almost always wins.
A person says, “I must call Father,” and remembers every evening only when it is already too late to call.
Again, this is not necessarily hypocrisy. That is precisely the point. A person can be completely sincere and hold genuine values that nevertheless fail to become behavior.
Because life does not run according to our list of values.
It runs according to systems.
Schedules. Habits. Reminders. Money. Priorities. Environment. Other people. Fatigue. The phone. Convenience.
If a value receives no place inside one of these systems, it may remain extremely important in theory and almost absent in reality.
Deuteronomy says: “For the matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14). There are three dimensions here: mouth, heart, and action. Faith is not only what a person says, and not even only what a person feels. It asks to arrive at “to do it.”
In the Shema we likewise say: “These words which I command you today shall be upon your heart,” and immediately afterward come actions: “You shall teach them diligently to your children... you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand... and you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 6:6-9). The Torah does not leave faith only in the heart. It places it in conversation with the children, on the hand, on the head, on the door, and in the house. The value receives an address.
Perhaps this is one of the differences between a wish and a commitment.
A wish says: I would like this to happen.
A commitment asks: what am I changing so that it will happen?
A person says he wants to learn a page of Gemara every day. The question is not only how much he wants it. Where is that page in the schedule?
A person wants to give charity. Does he wait for the heart to be moved each time, or has a fixed amount been established?
A parent wants to speak separately with each child. Does the parent hope an opportunity will appear, or create one?
A husband wants more time with his wife. Is that a beautiful idea, or is there an evening on which he refuses to schedule anything else?
There is a simple and even slightly cruel test: if a stranger received our schedule, our spending details, and our phone-use history without hearing a single word from us, what would that stranger conclude matters to us?
The answer might surprise us.
Perhaps we would discover that we say family matters, but work receives the best hours and family the leftovers.
Perhaps we say Torah matters, but everything else receives a fixed place and learning depends on whether time remains.
Perhaps we say health matters, but treat sleep as though it were wasted time.
And perhaps we would discover good things too. A person might see on the calendar that every week there is a trip to visit Mother, even though the person never formulated “honoring parents is a central value in my life.” Sometimes our actions also reveal beautiful values already rooted within us.
But there is a deeper level here.
We tend to think that actions are the result of identity: I am a generous person, therefore I give. I am a devoted father, therefore I give time to my children. I am a Torah person, therefore I study.
But the movement also works in the other direction.
The actions we repeat gradually build the person we become.
Sefer HaChinuch formulates a famous principle: “The hearts are drawn after the actions” (Sefer HaChinuch, Commandment 16). In context, it discusses the power of actions to shape a person. We do not always need to wait until the heart is in the perfect place before beginning to act. Sometimes the action itself educates the heart.
A person who repeatedly sets aside charity is not only proving generosity. The person is training to become someone who gives.
A father who turns off the phone for half an hour in order to sit with his child is not merely expressing priorities. He is building them.
A person who establishes fixed time for Torah is not merely reporting that Torah is important. The person is actually making it part of the structure of life.
Perhaps this is why Sukkot is such a physical festival.
The Torah could have commanded: for seven days think about the Exodus from Egypt and the Clouds of Glory.
Instead, it says: build.
Go out.
Sit.
Eat.
Take.
Values descend from the head into the hands.
This is a very difficult test because words allow us to maintain an attractive image of ourselves. Actions are less polite. They tell us what actually received space.
Therefore, on Sukkot one can perform a simple exercise. Choose one value we say matters to us and ask four questions: how much time did this value receive in the last month? How much money was I willing to devote to it? What discomfort am I willing to endure for it? And what regular action ensures that it will not remain dependent on my mood?
If there is no answer to any of the questions, there is no need immediately to accuse ourselves.
But it is worth being honest.
Perhaps this is a value we admire, but not yet a value we live.
That distance is an excellent place from which to begin.
The sukkah does not ask only what you believe. It asks you to move a table because of what you believe.
Perhaps this is one of the most important questions a person can ask during this festival: if for a moment I erased everything I say about myself and looked only at the way I live, what kind of person would my actions say I am?
In the end, the things that truly matter to us should not remain only in the heart.
They need a place in our hands, our calendar, our home, and our life.