The Season of Our Joy

In Torah, “simcha,” the Hebrew word for “joy,” is written zero times in the description of Passover, once in the description of Shavuot, and three times in the description of Sukkot. This gives Sukkot its alternate name: Z’man Simchateinu, “the season of our joy.”  In an impassioned speech to a congregation, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once asked: “Tell me–If you didn’t know any of this, which is the most joyous festival? Which is the one you would have chosen? Pesach–you get liberated from slavery to freedom! On that you can rejoice….I would have chosen Pesach. Or God comes down from heaven and speaks to you personally! (alluding to Shavuot), On that I would rejoice.” 

Why are we compelled to rejoice on the holiday which honors something specifically non-miraculous, the changing of the seasons?

So why Sukkot? Why are we compelled to rejoice on the holiday which honors something specifically non-miraculous, the changing of the seasons, when during other holidays we remember a single drop of oil lasting for eight nights and consequently saving the Jewish people from destruction?  Recalling my personal Jewish upbringing, I remember Purim baking contests and Rosh Hashanah shofar blasts with significantly more smiles than sitting in my synagogue’s sukkah in the blazing Arizona sun. But Torah says we must rejoice, and so my rabbis did their best to inspire with their lulav waving and etrog worship. 

It’s been over a decade since I last sat in my childhood sukkah. I write these words as a recent college graduate in a small apartment in New York City. The only place to build the walls of a sukkah in this space is on my tiny (but cherished) fire escape, which a friend recently told me was called “The Williamsburg Way,” alluding to the Jewish neighborhood where one week per year, small huts replace what usually constitute the iconic metallic frames of fire escapes. I found myself walking past them several years ago and wondered how it must feel to be inside them. Surely it must be odd, considering you can still hear cars, sirens, and of course the occasional street bickerings and sound systems that come with the package of New York. Could it still be meaningful? Knowing that just below lay the famously unspiritual, harsh realities of the city?  Though I am very lucky to be of good health and good spirits, those harsh realities have come for me as well. 

I arrived in New York at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when the majority of shops, restaurants, and activities were either half or fully closed. Then came a particularly biting winter, made all the more harsh by finishing my senior year of college virtually, thousands of miles away from my university. When I completed my last course, I didn’t get the balloons and cap and gown and night-out-on-the-town with my friends to celebrate. Instead, I received a “I’m very proud of you” text from my father, and a glass of wine on my again, tiny (but cherished) fire escape. Amidst all of this was financial stress, family stress, relationships coming and going, and of course, the time I locked myself out of my apartment in a hurricane and had to pay an extraordinary amount of money for an Israeli locksmith to open my door. Later I was given a discount for being Jewish, but I digress…

I matured, and I believe all of Generation Z matured, faster than we would have preferred during the years 2020 and 2021. We’ve grown accustomed, and at this point desensitized, to how fast things can change, how quickly plans can fall apart, and how to accommodate the merciless winds of nature.  I believe I will someday regard these last eighteen months as the most formative of my life, simply because of the perspective the endless exhaustion offered. If you were to have asked me during this era what would bring me the most joy, I would not answer with a vacation in Hawaii or a new luxury car. I would say that seeing my grandparents for dinner, attending my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah, or going to the movie theater with friends would bring the most pleasure. These were all things I once took for granted, swept away by that which I could not control.

The days will grow shorter, the nights will grow colder, and Judaism responds to this by finding joy, whether a Jew finds himself in the throes of a Roman takeover of Judea or in the seemingly endless slog of the coronavirus.  

Perhaps the ancient Israelites were onto something when they designated Sukkot as the ‘festival of our joy.’”  In turbulent times, the sweetest reprieve does not take the form of extravagance or miraculousness, but rather, of the routine. Of that which we take for granted. The harvest providing nourishment during the summer to sustain us during the winter is something we can rely upon, a certainty, a promise. The days will grow shorter, the nights will grow colder, and Judaism responds to this by finding joy, whether a Jew finds himself in the throes of a Roman takeover of Judea or in the seemingly endless slog of the coronavirus. 

Of course spending time in a “Williamsburg Way” sukkah is still meaningful. Not in spite of hovering above a Brooklyn street, but because of it. It allows for us Jews to make a point. “Look God,” we say, five floors above wailing taxi cabs, “I see the unpredictability and mayhem of all of this. And yet I will allow myself to revel in the important things that stay the same.”

The Sukkah does not only symbolize our relationship to the earth and its splendors, but also our primal need for stability. On this Z’man Simchateinu, I will take a break from the trials and tribulations of modern life, comfortably protected by the walls of a sukkah. And  I will find great joy in this, as the Torah commands.

Blake Flayton is New Media Director and columnist at the Jewish Journal.