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?
There is a wonderful movement here: Sukkot is not the opposite of the Days of Awe. It is their outcome.
On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur a person stands before the Holy One and asks: Who am I? What have I done? What do I need to repair? On Sukkot a different question arrives: after I have passed through judgment, repentance and atonement - what does my life look like now?
The Torah itself emphasizes joy on Sukkot in an exceptional way. About the four species it says:
“And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of a goodly tree, branches of palm trees, boughs of thick trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.”
Leviticus 23:40.
Notice the two astonishing words: “you shall rejoice before”.
Joy is not an escape from the Holy One after ten serious days. On the contrary - the joy itself takes place before God. In other words, awe and closeness are not two separate worlds. One can stand before the Holy One on Rosh Hashanah in awe, and in that very same presence stand before Him on Sukkot in joy.
And in the book of Deuteronomy the Torah adds:
“Vesamachta bechagecha”, “And you shall rejoice in your festival”
Deuteronomy 16:14.
And further on in the same passage:
“vehayita Akh sameach”, “and you shall be only joyful.”
Deuteronomy 16:15.
But here comes the truly surprising part.
Midrash Tanchuma explicitly describes the passage from Yom Kippur to Sukkot. The midrash explains the phrase “on the first day” in the commandment of the four species and asks how it can be “first”, when it is the fifteenth day of the month. Its answer is that it is “the first for the reckoning of sins”. The midrash describes Israel on Yom Kippur fasting, asking for mercy and being granted forgiveness, and afterwards coming to Sukkot with their lulavs and praising the Holy One. Source: Midrash Tanchuma, Emor 22.
And this changes the whole picture.
According to the midrash, Sukkot does not come five days after Yom Kippur by chance. It presents a new stage: after forgiveness, one begins again.
And here, from this moment, I move from quotations to idea and interpretation:
The month of Tishrei can be described as three stages in the soul.
On Rosh Hashanah a person says: the Holy One is the King, and I am not the center of the world.
On Yom Kippur they say: I was wrong, I drifted away, and I want to return.
And on Sukkot they say: and now I want to live with You.
And this is perhaps the most beautiful thing.
On Yom Kippur a person arrives almost without a body - not eating, not drinking, withdrawing from daily life. On Sukkot the direction reverses completely. One enters the commandment with the body. Eating in the sukkah, drinking in the sukkah, sitting in the sukkah, hosting in the sukkah and living inside it.
The idea here is that after a person has been lifted up on Yom Kippur, the goal is not to stay up there. The goal is to bring holiness back down into life.
And there is another point.
A person might think that true repentance should leave them broken: if I truly understood my sins, how can I suddenly rejoice?
And the answer of Sukkot, as a spiritual idea, is almost the opposite:
If you have repented but are unable to reach joy from it, perhaps you have not yet internalized the meaning of forgiveness.
Awe says: my deeds have meaning.
Repentance says: I am capable of changing.
And joy says: the relationship has not ended.
That is why Sukkot does not come in spite of Yom Kippur.
It comes because of Yom Kippur.
And perhaps this is why the joy of Sukkot is so deep: it is not the joy of a person who never fell. It is the joy of a person who fell, stood in judgment, asked for forgiveness - and discovered that the door is still open.
And then, five days after Yom Kippur, the Torah, as it were, does not send them to a magnificent palace.
It sends them to a sukkah.
A simple, temporary structure, with branches overhead.
And this is an even deeper question: why, precisely after a person has been granted forgiveness, does the Holy One, as it were, tell them to leave their safe home and sit in a temporary dwelling?
The next point is idea and interpretation, not a claim that the Torah itself explicitly says this is the reason Yom Kippur and Sukkot are close together.
Because after Yom Kippur one very dangerous question remains for a person:
What are you leaning on now?
On Yom Kippur a person stands with almost nothing. No food, no drink, no business, no possessions. They stand before the Holy One as a human being alone.
And then the fast ends.
They go back home.
To the door. To the lock. To the bank account. To the possessions. To work. To all the things that give them the feeling that life is under control again.
And then, a few days later, the sukkah arrives.
And the Torah commands moving from the house to the sukkah. In Leviticus 23:42-43 the commandment of dwelling in the sukkah is explicitly tied to the memory of the Israelites dwelling in booths when they left Egypt.
And the Rambam, in the laws of Sukkah, gives an almost unsettling formulation:
“A person makes his house temporary and his sukkah permanent”
Mishneh Torah by the Rambam, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 6:5 (its source is the Mishnah, Sukkah 2:9).
Think about what is being said here.
All year long a person invests enormous effort in making their life “permanent”.
A permanent home.
A permanent livelihood.
Permanent plans.
A permanent status.
Permanent security.
And once a year they are told: now go outside.
Not because the house is bad.
But so that you do not get confused and think that the house is what holds you up.
And then the secret of the sukkah is revealed:
Yom Kippur deals with sin.
Sukkot, as an idea, deals with something deeper:
The illusion of control.
A person can come out of Yom Kippur completely clean and still return to exactly the same outlook on life: I am safe because I have walls, money, plans and connections.
And so one can interpret that the next stage is the sukkah.
You enter a place where the roof is deliberately not an ordinary roof.
The wind is felt.
The outside is felt.
The sky is not so far away.
And the person discovers something paradoxical:
One can be less protected from the outside, and feel more held from within.
And this also explains something very beautiful about the timing.
Sukkot falls in the season of the harvest ingathering. The Torah itself places the festival of Sukkot at the time of gathering in the produce of the land, in Leviticus 23:39.
Precisely when the storehouses are filling up…
Precisely when a person looks at the crop and says to themselves: this year I managed…
Precisely then they leave their home.
It is almost the opposite of what we would expect.
When you have nothing, it is relatively easy to say that you depend on the Holy One.
The greater challenge is to say it when you have everything.
And so, as an idea and a homily, one can see an astonishing sequence:
On Rosh Hashanah the Holy One, as it were, says to a person: remember who the King is.
On Yom Kippur: remember that you can return.
And on Sukkot: now, after I have forgiven you, let us see whether you can also trust Me.
And here is the point that, in my eyes, makes Sukkot a far deeper festival than it seems:
The Holy One does not, as it were, send a person out of the house as a punishment after Yom Kippur.
On the contrary.
One can interpret that He sends them outside precisely because the relationship has been repaired.
As if they were told:
Until now you stood before Me as a defendant asking for forgiveness.
Now you are no longer a defendant.
Now you are a guest.
And now we can sit together in the sukkah.
This is no longer the awe of the courtroom.
This is closeness.
And so perhaps there is no contradiction between the flimsy sukkah and the fact that Sukkot is a time of joy.
Perhaps this is exactly the joy:
To discover that what held you up was never the house and the walls, but trust in God.