Sukkot: Learning to Let Joy In

There is something wonderfully strange about Sukkot. Just days after Yom Kippur, we build a structure that is not supposed to protect us particularly well, move some of ordinary life into it, invite people over, eat, and are told to rejoice. The roof is open. The weather gets in. The whole thing is temporary. And somehow, none of that is considered a problem.

The more I think about it, the more psychologically sophisticated this feels. We spend so much of our lives trying to create the conditions under which we will finally feel safe enough to relax into joy. When the relationship is secure, the body is healthy, the children are okay, the work succeeds, the world feels less frightening, or we finally know how the story ends. But life offers very few of those guarantees. If certainty becomes the condition for joy, we can spend an enormous amount of our lives waiting.

And joy is surprisingly vulnerable. To really experience it means letting something matter without knowing whether we get to keep it. Loving someone knowing we can lose them. Becoming excited without knowing how things will turn out. Standing inside a beautiful moment knowing we cannot make it stay. The mind has all kinds of clever ways of protecting us from this vulnerability. Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't trust it yet. What could go wrong? Sometimes fear even sounds like discernment or realism. We keep waiting for enough certainty to give ourselves permission to be happy, but there is no certainty, so the permission never comes.

This is where Sukkot sits so beautifully in the Jewish calendar. Tisha B'Av asks us to attend to destruction rather than rush toward repair. The weeks that follow move toward consolation. Rosh Hashanah asks us to turn and look honestly at ourselves, and Yom Kippur takes us more deeply into accountability, forgiveness and return. And then, almost abruptly, the direction changes. We are sent back outside.

The order matters to me. We do not bypass suffering to get to joy. We mourn what has shattered. We stay long enough to know something about it. We turn toward ourselves and one another. We repair what can be repaired. But Jewish tradition does not allow us to remain indefinitely in the work of examining and repairing ourselves. At some point, we build a sukkah.

We leave the apparent solidity of our homes and spend time in a temporary structure, exposed to weather and change, under a roof deliberately open enough that we remain connected to what is beyond it. The fragility isn't a problem to be solved before the celebration begins. It is part of the setting in which we are asked to rejoice.

This has made me think differently about equanimity. We usually talk about equanimity in relation to suffering: staying with unpleasant experience without pushing it away or becoming governed by it. But equanimity also applies to pleasure. Can I stay with what feels good without grasping for it? Can I love without immediately becoming frightened of loss? Can I let happiness move through my body without asking whether it is safe to trust?

This may also be another way of understanding surrender. Not blind faith and certainly not pretending everything will work out. It is giving up the demand to know how everything turns out before allowing ourselves to inhabit what is happening now. The sukkah does not promise permanence. It offers presence. We sit inside something temporary and allow the meal, the people, the gratitude, the laughter and the joy to be real anyway.

For Sea Glass, that matters. Healing cannot simply mean increasing our capacity to tolerate suffering. Eventually it should also expand our capacity for relationship, pleasure, meaning, belonging and joy. We cannot spend our whole lives preparing ourselves for what might happen to life. At some point we have to participate in it.

Maybe that is what I find so beautiful about Sukkot. Judaism does not give us a fortress and then tell us to celebrate because nothing can hurt us. It gives us a sukkah. The walls move. The weather gets in. Nothing about it promises permanence.

And we bring dinner anyway.