Why is Sukkot called the Festival of Ingathering just when the Torah sends us outside?
The Torah calls Sukkot “the Festival of Ingathering, at the end of the year, when you gather in the results of your work from the field” (Exodus 23:16). This is the moment when the harvest comes inside. Precisely then the person goes outside.
The contrast is striking. The storehouse is full, and the Torah says: now leave the house. Perhaps there is no more dangerous moment than the moment when a person looks at everything he has gathered and says, “Now I am secure.”
We spend our lives gathering: money, degrees, property, connections and achievements. But the great question is not only what we managed to collect. It is what all that collecting did to us. Did it make us more generous, calmer and more available to the people we love? Or did we become servants of the things we gathered?
The Festival of Ingathering comes when the storehouse is full to remind us of an easy truth to forget: a person can hold many things in his hands and still fail to hold life itself.