A sukkah. Photo: Wiki Commons.

A curious thing happened the other day.

Some of his former classmates, who are today studying to be movie directors, thought he would aim higher and choose a career in media. Others, headed to finance, were sure he would choose a more lucrative vocation. Still others, planning to go into politics, thought he would pursue something with real power and influence.

Yes, I realize that money has always been important, and not just in the Jewish community. But there was a time – not all that long ago – when rabbis were the heads of the community, due to the qualifications conferred upon them by immersion in Jewish texts and a commitment to Jewish values.

Today, of course, philanthropists call the shots. In many synagogues, rabbis have been neutered by the boards who determine their contracts, rendering them harmless and colorless, bereft of opinion and conviction, and therefore, inspiration.

To be sure, some philanthropists are eminently qualified to give the community direction, especially those who are focused on deepening Jewish tradition and identity among our youth. On September 29 in New York City, our organization, This World: The Jewish Values Network, is staging an event on genocide, Syria, and the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak featuring President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Professor Elie Wiesel in conversation.

The event will feature Sheldon Adelson and Michael Steinhardt, and not just because they are the most generous of communal philanthropists but because, through Birthright Israel, both have reached hundreds of thousands of Jewish youth whom the rabbis did not.

But even they would agree that after experiencing Israel, these young men and women who are Birthright alumni require charismatic, spiritual professionals to fan the glowing ambers of identity into a lasting flame.

Here is where the festival of Tabernacles and the impermanence of the sukkah resonates with our generation in particular. The evanescence of property is the universal lesson and theme behind Sukkot, where God evicts us from our fancy homes and forces us to live in temporary huts, lest we grow so dependent on material comforts that they come to define our existence.

Displacing us from our comfort zone seems to be the consistent theme behind the High Holy Days and Sukkot. On Rosh Hashana, we are deprived of the surety of our very lives. As the “Unetaneh Tokef” prayer captures so powerfully, the day determines “Who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time.” Then, on Yom Kippur, we are deprived of food and sustenance. Finally, on Sukkot, we’re dispossessed of our very homes. But amid the deprivation there is peace.

This Sukkot coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Wall Street meltdown, where people discovered that the bricks and mortar of their homes are so ephemeral that they can be repossessed by a bank over a delinquency of just a few thousand dollars. The message: there is nothing lasting in life save for a man’s convictions and a woman’s beliefs.

Some in America today see capitalism as a heartless expression of gluttony and investment bankers as leeches who have sucked the blood out of the financial system to fund their Ferraris. Others argue that capitalism is the very engine of economic prosperity and view the Wall Street protesters as envious anarchists who would transform the United States into a bankrupt socialist state.

As a capitalist, I agree that expecting the government to subsidize those capable of work creates an undignified dependency. “Man is born to work,” the Bible declares. But as a rabbi, I know that materialism is slowly suffocating our souls and hardening our hearts. Bear Stearns, Lehman, and Merrill Lynch collapsed not because their employees didn’t work hard enough, but because of the decadence of their values.

Sukkot forces us to focus on the transient nature of property so that we dare never allow material possessions to give our lives meaning. Life ought never be reduced to the vulgar acquisition of things. Rather, it is the family that moves into the sukkah with us that lends our fleeting existence permanence and our transitory lives purpose.

And it is the rabbis who inspire us to be more committed to the religious beliefs that give us something higher to live for than mere material acquisition.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood will shortly publish “Kosher Lust.” Tickets for the Kagame-Wiesel event, which he is moderating, can be booked here. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.