Whenever I hear someone boast about how many books they read in a year I wonder, how many of those books did you integrate?How many of those ideas and concepts did you incorporate into your life?
I have seen many people repeatedly attend the same seminars and workshops without incorporating what they learned into their lives. It’s like they go for the fun of it but don’t actually take anything they learned and apply it.
They don’t embody the teachings.
Because they don’t embody it, without their notes, they forget what they learned.
Concepts remain concepts until we apply them to our lives. Until we integrate them. Live them.
And that’s when change happens.
Concepts and mental models are not meant to stay in the head. They are meant to be lived into.
One way to embody a concept is to create a ritual that makes it tangible.
The Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which we are celebrating this week, is an example of how to turn an amorphous concept into tangible practice.
On Yom Kippur, we practiced teshuva: turning away from the sins we committed in the past. One of the core themes of the Day of Atonement is returning to faith.
It is our lack of faith that is the underlying root cause of our “sinful” behavior — the behavior for which we apologize.
It’s one thing to talk about faith and another to live it.
That’s where Sukkot comes in.
Sukkot is the ritual that takes the concept of faith and turns it into a lived experience.
If you wanted to plan a holiday where you lived in a hut for a week, you would likely choose a season where the weather is warm and chances of rain are low.
You wouldn’t choose the fall.
Living in an unsecured hut for a week, with no doors or locks, an open roof, exposed to the elements, during the start of the rainy season, requires faith.
It requires us to give over to God’s plan and God’s protection.
It requires us to trust in something we cannot see.
Faith isn’t just a concept to read about or think about. We must live it and embody it.
This is true for all concepts. It’s not the learning that creates change. It’s the implementation into practice.
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