Is the sukkah really a psychological test: does a person feel safe because of the walls around them, or because of something deeper?
Yes - as a psychological reading, one can see the sukkah as a kind of yearly experiment in one of a person’s deepest fears: what really gives me a sense of security?
It is important to be precise: the Sages do not call the sukkah a “psychological test”. But the structure they give the commandment almost invites this question.
Rava says in the Talmud:
“The Torah said: all seven days, go out of your permanent dwelling and sit in a temporary dwelling”
Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 2a.
Notice the first word:
Go out.
Not only build a sukkah.
Not only sit somewhere else.
Go out of your permanent dwelling.
And the Mishnah describes the opposite movement:
“All seven days a person makes his sukkah permanent and his house temporary.”
Mishnah Sukkah 2:9.
The Rambam rules in the same language:
“And all seven days, a person makes his house temporary and his sukkah permanent”
Mishneh Torah by the Rambam, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 6:5.
And now the homily begins.
Think about what the house does to the soul
All year long a person lives inside a system of protections.
Walls.
A door.
A lock.
A roof.
Possessions.
A bank account.
A work plan.
Insurance.
A schedule.
We need all of these, and there is nothing wrong with them.
But there is a subtle danger:
Gradually we may move from the thought:
I have a house
to the thought:
The house holds me up.
From the thought:
I have money
to the thought:
Money guarantees my future.
From the thought:
I made a plan
to the thought:
So things will happen the way I planned.
And then Sukkot arrives.
And the person does something a little strange.
They leave the place where they are used to feeling protected, and enter a structure that is, by its very nature, meant to be fit for a temporary dwelling.
And suddenly the sky is closer
The sukkah has walls, but the feeling is different.
The branches are above you.
The wind is felt.
The heat is felt.
Nature is close.
It is impossible to forget entirely that you live in a world you do not control.
And here, as an interpretation, the “test” begins:
If I take away from you for a moment some of the things you are used to leaning on - does your sense of security collapse?
If so, perhaps you have discovered that your security was tied to the walls more than you thought.
But the Torah does not send you into the wilderness without protection.
It sends you precisely to a place that recalls the protection Israel had after the Exodus from Egypt.
The Torah itself gives the reason for the commandment:
“So that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”
Leviticus 23:43.
In other words, on the explicit level, the sukkah brings us back to the memory of dwelling in booths after the Exodus from Egypt.
And on the psychological level that can be drawn from here:
A person leaves the protection they built for themselves, in order to remember a protection that does not depend only on what they built.
And there is a beautiful paradox here
The house looks strong.
The sukkah looks weak.
But the question of Sukkot is perhaps:
Who is truly safer - a person who sits behind strong walls convinced that they guarantee control, or a person who knows that even behind the strongest walls their life still depends on things that are not in their hands?
This is not a call to belittle effort, the home, or practical security.
On the contrary.
The idea is to distinguish between the tool that protects me and the source in which I place my ultimate security.
And perhaps this is why the exercise lasts only seven days
This is my own interpretation, not a source:
The Torah does not tell a person to tear down the house.
It tells them to leave it for a limited time.
And that is a huge difference.
The goal is not to live without walls.
The goal is to return to the walls after you have learned that they are walls.
They are important.
They protect.
But they are not God.
And here Sukkot can become a true exercise of the soul:
On the first day you leave the house.
But perhaps on the eighth day you return to it as a different person.
The same house.
The same lock.
The same bank account.
The same plans.
But something small has changed within you:
You use them - but you do not worship them.
And if I had to sum up the whole idea in one sentence:
The sukkah does not come to teach that there is no need for walls. It comes to remind us that even when there are walls - they are not the ultimate source of our security.
Or, more sharply:
A person leaves the permanent dwelling to discover that the true permanence in their life is not made of concrete.
On the connection between the sukkah and what happens on Yom Kippur, see also: Why, precisely after the Days of Awe, when we stand in awe before the Holy One, does a festival come whose central commandment is to rejoice?