Patrick Comerford
The Jewish Festival of Sukkot this year begins at sunset this evening (6 October 2025) and ends at nightfall next Monday (13 October 2025).
Sukkot is known as the ‘Festival of Tabernacles’ or the ‘Feast of Booths,’ and it is one of the three central pilgrimage festivals in Judaism, along with Passover and Shavuot. It is traditional in Jewish families and homes to mark this festival by building a sukkah or a temporary hut to stay over in during the holiday.
Sukkot is a time to be reminded of vulnerability and insecurity, recalling the fragile condition of the fleeing slaves wandering in the wilderness for 40 years and their total reliance on God.
These feelings of vulnerability and insecurity are so relevant today from all who continue to deal with the horrors of the Yom Kippur attack on Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester or who fear the rise of antisemitism in Britain and globally, to everyone who watches what is happening at the talks in Cairo with a mixture of fear and hope, trepidation and anticipation, waiting and praying for the end to hatred and to the killings, for the release of the hostages and for peace and justice for all in Gaza, Israel, Palestine and throughout the Middle East.
Sukkot customs include shaking a lulav and an etrog daily throughout the festival: the lulav is a palm branch joined with myrtle and willow branches; an etrog is a citron fruit, usually a lemon.
A sukkah is a temporary dwelling in which farmers once lived during the harvest. Today, it is a reminder of the fragile dwellings in which the people lived during their 40 years wandering through the wilderness after fleeing slavery in Egypt.
Throughout the holiday, meals are eaten inside the sukkah and some people even sleep there as well. On each day of the holiday, it is traditional to perform a waving ceremony with the ‘Four Species’ or specified plants: citrus trees, palm trees, thick or leafy trees and willows.
Sukkot is a joyous and upbeat celebration, and is celebrated today with its own customs and practices.
The interim days of Sukkot, known as hol HaMoed (חול המועד, festival weekdays), are often marked with special meals in the sukkah, when guests are welcomed.
The Shabbat that falls during the week of Sukkot, beginning next Friday evening (10 October), is known as Shabbat Hol haMoed. The Book of Ecclesiastes is read, with its emphasis on the ephemeral nature of life: ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ This echoes the theme of the sukkah, while its emphasis on death reflects the time of year in which Sukkot falls, the ‘autumn’ of life.
On her blog Velveteen Rabbi, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat shared these thoughts for Sukkot some years ago [19 October 2019], which I have adapted poetically:
https://velveteenrabbi.com/2019/10/19/broken-and-whole-a-dvarling-for-shabbat-chol-hamoed-sukkot/
In one of his teachings on Sukkot,
the Hasidic master known as the Sfat Emet writes:
This is wholeness: a person with a broken heart …
and in every place that God dwells, there is wholeness.
God makes every incompleteness whole.
This is wholeness: a person with a broken heart.
At first glance it’s almost a koan.
Broken equals whole?
How does that work, exactly?
…
A person whose heart isn’t broken,
at least some of the time,
isn’t paying attention.
A person whose heart isn’t sometimes cracked-open
by the exquisite and sometimes devastating fragility of this world
isn’t paying attention.
A person whose heart is so impermeable —
whether to our dangerously warming planet,
or to the inevitable griefs and losses that come with loving human beings who disappoint us, and who will die —
that’s not wholeness. That’s by-passing.
After Yom Kippur, you feel like
your skin is too thin and your heart is so open
that re-entry into the ‘regular world’
is almost more than you can bear.
Sukkot says: keep your heart open a little longer.
Sukkot is an opportunity to keep our hearts open wide.
We build and decorate these fragile little houses.
Their roofs have to be made out of plants
that are harvested from the earth,
and open enough to let in the stars and the rain.
A sukkah is almost a sketch of a house,
a parody of a house,
a hint of a house.
You can see the outlines of a house,
but it’s flimsy and the roof leaks
and as soon as it’s built,
it starts succumbing to the rain and the wind and the weather.
Our bodies are like sukkot.
Our lives are like sukkot.
The whole planet is like a sukkah.
It’s heartbreaking, when we let ourselves stop and feel it.
But here’s the thing:
when we let ourselves stop and feel it,
that’s when we let God in.
If that word doesn’t work for you, try another one.
When we let ourselves feel, we let compassion in.
When we let ourselves feel, we let wholeness in.
When we let ourselves feel, we let hope in.
We let in grace, and kindness, and truth.
In the Torah reading assigned to … the Shabbat that falls during Sukkot,
we read about Moshe asking to see God’s face.
God says, no one can look upon me and live,
but I’ll shelter you in this cleft of rock
and you can see my afterimage.
And then God passes by, proclaiming who God is:
the source of mercy and compassion, kindness and truth.
When we let ourselves feel, we feel what hurts – and we also feel what uplifts.
What endures beyond every broken place.
Sukkot is called zman simchateinu,
the time of our rejoicing …
Rejoicing doesn’t mean pretending away what hurts.
It means authenticity.
It means opening our hearts to everything:
the bitter and the sweet.
…
During Sukkot, may we be able to open our hearts —
and when we do,
may we be blessed with comfort and uplift and hope
to balm every broken place,
and may that strengthen us
to bring hope and justice into our fragile world.
מועד טובֿ מועדים לשמחה
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