Something very strange happens to the Torah just before Rosh Hashanah. It falls into a void and disappears. The Torah is read in a cycle of weekly readings which is both completed and begun again on Simchat Torah, the last day of the festival of Sukkot, some ten days after Yom Kippur. Towards the end of this cycle, Moses dies a noble and tragic death, poised on the border of the Promised Land he will never enter himself. Then the Torah falls into a void. The round of weekly readings grinds to a halt and remains suspended for several weeks until the long round of holidays – Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah – is completed. Then suddenly, the Torah begins again in a great rush with the beginning of Genesis and its account of creation. Life bursts into being out of nothing, out of the void the Torah had fallen into after the death of Moses.

There is something of this feeling about Rosh Hashanah as well. Rosh Hashanah is, among other things, Yom Harat Ha-Olam — the day of the birth of the world. Rosh Hashanah is also the day that the world burst into being out of nothing, and it stands for both that event and its renewal every year, every day, and every moment of our lives. Every moment of our lives the world bursts into being out of nothing, falls away and then rises up again. Every moment we are renewed by a plunge into the void. This void is called heaven.

There is a void at the beginning of creation and a void afterwards. Life is the narrow bridge between these two emptinesses. Usually, all our focus is on the narrow bridge, but in its accounts of both the death of Moses and the creation of the universe, the Torah focuses our attention on the void instead.

RELATED: You are at the beginning of the metaphorical journey from Rosh Hashanah through Sukkot:

On Rosh Hashannah we stand before God in his unity. He is present, and we are not. As we crown him as King, we realize that our lives, and indeed the entire world, are not necessary, are forfeit. Yet somehow we are allowed to be present to witness the majesty of the King of Kings as it exists prior to creation, and somehow he allows us to exist.

This vision to which we are witness is very real, but it is not yet part of the world that we live in, not part of the world of our daily experience.

Yom Kippur is the experience of our first turning from this vision of divine perfection to again look upon our lives. We are immediately struck by the realization that nothing we have done lives up to this vision. Everything is found lacking.

We turn to our maker and ask him to repair what we have broken, repair our bodies, minds, and souls, so that we can be vehicles for the vision of perfection that he has revealed to us. To our amazement, he accedes.

We come in to Sukkot with new eyes, a fresh soul. God tells us - take this opportunity, while you are still so wide-eyed and childlike, to look at my world. Look at everything I created. Isn't it wonderful?

We spend a week appreciating every expression of life.

In the Sukkah we appreciate space itself. In the intrinsic flimsiness of the Sukkah and the limited time that we spend in it, we appreciate each moment of time, unique and unrecoverable. With the 4 species, we appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of each piece of fruit, each branch of each tree. In the Hashannah prayers we appreciate every expression of Godliness we perceive, every aspect of Jerusalem, every way we understand ourselves, every created thing, its beauty, and its weakness.

During Sukkot, we are given the opportunity to fall in love with every little piece of the entire world. I think this is the joy of Sukkot - the joy of knowing that every place, every moment, and every thing is an incomparable gift from the incomparable One.