A brief thought:
The day after a Jewish Holiday is called “Isru Chag”, which literally means to “bind the Holiday”.
Aside from the technical reason for the name, which has to do with the Temple service, it dawned on me that perhaps there can also be another, more personal meaning, for the name. During the Holidays we stretch ourselves to attain that unique Holiday consciousness. When the Holiday concludes, we need to go back to our normative lives. There can be, and ought to be, a gap between these two states of consciousness. But it’s not the way of Judaism to allow such a gap to remain.
So on this day, we “bind” the consciousness of the Holiday to our normative lives. We download the light of Holiday consciousness into the vessels of our normative lives, infusing our normative lives with that wonderful expansiveness which only a Holiday can provide. We literally “bind the Holiday”.
To what? To our normative lives!
