Over the years, I have had a love-hate relationship with Sukkot. When I worked in Boston, it was my favorite Jewish holiday. In New England, Sukkot is a full on fall holiday – the air is cool, the apples are crisp and the sunlight is dappled and delicious. You can spend hours “dwelling in your booth” and it’s not goofing off. You are fulfilling a religious obligation. In Houston where I also worked for a number of years, I dreaded Sukkot. In Texas, the summer lingers on well past October. When the holiday rolls around, the temperatures are still stifling, the humidity is off the charts and the mosquitoes are ravenous. In Houston, spending ten minutes in the sukkah is a punishment.
Regardless of your GPS coordinates, the Torah still identifies the festival as he-chag, THE holiday, the festival par excellence; and the prayer book refers to it as zeman simchatynu, the season of our rejoicing. So if Rosh Hashanah is about judgment and Yom Kippur is about atonement then Sukkot is surely all about joy. After the heavy work of self-evaluation and re-assessment that launches us into a new year, it’s a relief to focus on elation and delight.
In ancient Israel, Sukkot was the last of the harvest festivals. The produce had been gathered in and for an agricultural people there was relief from work and worry. In Leviticus, the Torah commands “Take the branches of a palm tree, the leaves of the myrtle and willow trees, and the fruit of a goodly tree (the lulav and etrog) and rejoice before the Lord seven days.” Why these four species specifically and why they should prompt an outpouring of joy is beyond me. Maybe the four species - as they are called - are just an annual prompt to consider the questions: ‘What is joy?’ and ‘What are the things that bring true pleasure to life and the living of our days?’
Happiness and joy are not identical. Both are worthy and positive emotions. Happiness derives from persons and things external to the self. Happiness is most often triggered by other people, places, thoughts and things. As such, it tends to be momentary and springs from short term contentment. Happiness is fleeting. It is situational. Joy on the other hand is independent of current circumstance. It grows out the inner-self itself. Joy comes when you make peace with who you are, why you are and how you are.
Interestingly, the Hebrew language has ten words for what we refer to with the one English word joy. I take this to be an indication that Judaism expects that we will have joy in such abundance that we will need all ten words to describe the variations, subtleties and nuanced differences in the emotion. To be sure, joy is a hard concept to get your head around. And come to think of it, how can you command someone to be joyous. Wouldn’t that make it a counterfeit emotion?
In the oft-repeated second section of the Shema, the v’ahavtah, we are told, “You shall love the Lord your God.” When asked how anyone could be commanded to love someone or something, Martin Buber explained that the only reasonable and totally predictable outcome of a true understanding of God would be the experience of loving adoration. Not so other human beings. The injunction ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is better translated as “Act lovingly towards your neighbor” even if your neighbor is a jerk.
So how can the Torah command rejoicing? Joy is like love. In the sukkah - surrounded by the bounty of the harvest, newly forgiven and reconciled to your Maker, surrounded by family and invited guests, resting up from the exertion and stress of your work – the reasonable and totally predictable outcome should be the experience of joy. But it’s more than just these blessings. Peering up through the open roofing of your booth into the vast and infinite reaches of the heaven, can you not help but be overjoyed that the Master and Maker of Heaven and Earth has regard for you? And not only regard but loving and dedicated regard at that. What a relief to know that I am not totally dependent on what others say or write on my Facebook page for my sense of self. Rather, as we read in the Book of Nehemiah: “The delight of the Lord is your strength.”
Who, why and what am I? Sukkot provides an answer. But little lower than the angels, endowed and endorsed with inalienable dignity and worth. And if you can hold on to that, knowing that the very Source of the Universe delights in your being you, you are better able to emerge from the refuge of the sukkah joyously or at least strengthened to meet the challenges of life.
Chag Saeach. Happy or better yet Realize a Joyous Sukkot.
Rabbi Whiman