Today, I want you to think out of the box. Why out of the box? Well, I guess it’s because we deal with so many boxes. For instance, who among us [Jews] doesn’t have memories of the blue and white pushkas, the Tzedakah Boxes? And everyone knows that giving charity is a holy mitzvah. How about the boxes that fulfill the Mitzvah of Donning the Tefillin? One box is to be inscribed between your eyes and one box is to be bound upon your arm … and, inside both of these boxes are holy words…

Even at the end of our days on Earth, we still have one last box to deal with … our casket, which will hold the holy vessel, the cask that held our spirit, our neshama, inside during our lifetime.

Oh, and there is another box that we have in our faith. In fact, it is the box, the hut, that we build for Sukkoth.

On Sukkoth many eat in a box, many sleep in a box, and, barring severe weather, will make the Kiddush and the Hamotzi in a box, a hut, a Sukkah. Rabbi Edythe Held Menscher recently wrote about a documentary film called, “G-d In The Box,” where a film crew took a portable studio, a box if you will, all over the country and asked people to step inside the box.

Now, if you are claustrophobic, being inside a box might not be such a good thing, so you might need to concentrate on a subject that would really occupy your mind … and, sure enough, the filmmaker asked just such a question. He asked, “What does G-d mean to you?” and “What does G-d look like?”

The studio, the box they went into, contained paper and pencil and a huge mirror; so each person had to take a good hard look at themselves.

Really looking at ourselves is not such an easy thing to do. Just ask those who spent Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in honest self-reflection.

The funny thing is, as Rabbi Mencher points out, at the end of “G-d in The Box,” there are a series of photos of synagogues

of churches and of mosques because our Houses of Worship can be likened to a box, a box where we explore what G-d means to us and what G-d wants from us.

I was trying to figure out how to end this article. I went to the cupboard and took out a box of cereal and I noticed a very simple, yet very true thing. If I didn’t open up the box, I would never be nourished by the cereal inside. So, too, the Synagogue, my friends, so, too, the Sukkah … being in the box is a great way to quiet yourself down and focus on holy and G-dly things, but just thinking about things, just praying for things, is not enough. Let us have the saichel, the good common sense, to think out of the box and may it nourish us, our family, our friends and our community and let us say, Amen.

Shalom My Friends,

Rabbi Craig H. Ezring