Created especially for your succah, we invite you to download and print the new collection of 4 posters featuring inspiring quotes from Rabbi Sacks about the festival of Succot, or scroll down for last year's set of 8 posters.
“The universe is the space God makes for us. The sukkah, with its incomplete roof and its door open to strangers, is the space we make for God.”“No other nation took as a symbol not a castle, a fortress or a triumphal arch, but a fragile tabernacle. No other nation was born, not in its land, but in the desert. Far from being universal, Sukkot seems intensely particularistic, the festival of a people like no other, whose only protection was its faith in the sheltering wings of the Divine Presence.”“For ten days, beginning on Rosh Hashanah and reaching a climax on Yom Kippur, we have prayed, ‘Remember us for life, O King who desires life, and write us in the book of life – for Your sake, O God of life.’Now, having survived the trial, we are faced with the deepest question of all. What is life? What is this gift we have been granted? What gives life meaning, purpose, substance? What will redeem us from the shadow of death? Kohelet’s answer, in a word, is joy.”“You can live in a hut with only leaves for a roof, exposed to the wind, the cold and the rain, and still rejoice... Joy is something we share with others. Joy is gratitude for the gift of life that we feel in the presence of the Giver of life. We become eternal not by constructing buildings, but by opening ourselves up, making ourselves vulnerable, to the Eternal, to God Himself.”
“Sitting in the sukkah under its canopy of leaves, I often think of my ancestors and their wanderings across Europe in search of safety, and I begin to understand how faith was their only home. It was fragile, chillingly exposed to the storms of prejudice and hate. But it proved stronger than superpowers and outlived them all.”“Sukkot is a testament to the Jewish people’s survival. Even if it loses its land and is cast again into the wilderness, it will lose neither heart nor hope. It will remember that it spent its early years as a nation living in a sukkah, a temporary dwelling exposed to the elements. It will know that in the wilderness, no encampment is permanent. It will keep travelling until once again it reaches the promised land: Israel, home.”“We need no castles for protection or palaces for glory. A humble sukkah will do, for when we sit within it, we sit beneath what the Zohar calls ‘the shade of faith.’”“Sukkot is the time we ask the most profound question of what makes a life worth living. What matters is not how long we live, but how intensely we feel that life is a gift we repay by giving to others. Joy, the overwhelming theme of the festival, is what we feel when we know that it is a privilege simply to be alive.”“Joy doesn’t come from great buildings of brick and stone. It doesn’t come from what we shut out, but from what we let in. Joy comes from a roof open to heaven, a door open to guests, and a heart open to thanksgiving.”“The universe is the space God makes for us. The sukkah, with its incomplete roof and its door open to strangers, is the space we make for God.”“I believe that the experience of leaving the protection of a house and entering the exposure of the sukkah is a way of taming our fear of the unknown. It says: We have been here before. We are all travellers on a journey. The Divine Presence is with us. We need not be afraid. That is a source of the resilience we need in our interconnected, hazardous, radically uncertain world.”“Ben Zoma was right when he said: Who is rich? Not one who has everything he wants, but one who celebrates everything he has. Sukkot is one of the world’s great seminars in happiness, because it shows us that you can sit in a shack with only leaves for a roof, exposed to all the hazards of the cold, the wind, and the rain, and yet still rejoice, when you are surrounded by God and the people you love. Have that, and you have everything.”
