Sukkot 2024: How can we celebrate, rejoice amid a year of war?

Amid this annus horribilis, how do we fulfill the mitzvah to “surely rejoice” during Sukkot as we are commanded in the Torah (Deut. 16: 13-15)? 

We are not the first generation to face personal and liturgical challenges in the fulfillment of this mitzvah – the history of Judaism is tragically composed of too many periods of suffering. Hannah Kaye, the web content and social media coordinator at Yad Vashem, reminds us that in “the Warsaw ghetto in 1941, Jews stood in line for hours waiting for the opportunity to make the blessing for sitting in the sukkah. They also queued for hours to make the blessing over a set of the traditional Four Species (lulav and etrog) that had been smuggled in from Switzerland.”

Under the cruelest of conditions, we see Jews doing what they could to observe Sukkot. But joy is not mentioned. We wonder if joy was impossible under those circumstances and whether the doing was all that could be summoned. Or was there joy, only it was not mentioned in these descriptions? We do know from other accounts of events during the Shoah that joy was woven into the observation of mitzvot. 

How can we bring joy into our Sukkot observance this year?

With all of this, we are still left this year with the question: How can we bring joy into our Sukkot observance this year? Where is the joy in this year of the unspeakable, inhuman ordeal forced upon the residents of the Gaza border communities; the taking and the murder of hostages; the displacement of evacuees from the South and the North; the missiles fired at Israel from all directions; and of the toll on soldiers, reservists, and their families. 

We mourn for the loss of our own and feel, too, for the suffering of those on the other side who are innocent. We cannot forget, even during this most trying period, the universal message of Sukkot found in the offering of the 70 bulls in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem as atonement on behalf of the 70 nations of the world.

We note in Ecclesiastes (3:1): “There is a time for everything…” The question is, does “a time” mean a separate time from other moments or a period that can be concurrent, happening while the opposite happens simultaneously? While it is emotionally easier to experience things separately, life is often a tapestry of many emotions and feelings woven into one cloth.

JUDAISM REMINDS us of that existential reality. At a wedding, we temper our joy by breaking a glass to remember national and personal losses in our lives and our history. During the Passover Seder, we temper our joy by spilling 10 drops of wine to pause and remember the death of our enemies so that we could become free.

In that orientation of simultaneous duality, the “Mourner’s Kaddish” says nothing about death but is an affirmation of the continuum of being, reality, and holy presence. 

Related, Jewish holidays truncate shiva, the seven-day mourning period, reducing shiva from seven days to a single day – a hard concept for many since we are taught about the wisdom of the seven-day shiva period as the transition from mourning to memory. There seems to be such a randomness in this Jewish law, but maybe that is the point: Life is not a perfectly wrapped gift, it is much more complex.

Judaism’s approach to life is holistic, recognizing the array of emotions our state of mind experiences. There is a challenging tension in not wanting to cheat or dilute all that we experience. At the same time, we resist allowing pain, suffering, and anger to monopolize who we are to avoid becoming stuck in a state of despondency. 

That is where the call to be joyful on Sukkot comes from, even during this agonizing year.

We find this same sentiment in the following lesson from the Talmud (Ketubot 17a): “If a funeral procession and a wedding procession meet at an intersection, the wedding procession goes first.”

That is to say, sorrow defers to joy.

We are reminded of this approach in the tradition that the haftarah reading must always end on an uplifting note. If the reading ends on a somber note, a more positive verse read earlier in the same haftarah is repeated.

THIS LEADS us to this year during which, as Hebrew University of Jerusalem lecturer Abraham Silver writes, we have felt so much, “heartbreak, devastation, and despair.” How can we be joyful this Sukkot as we mark this shocking year and chapter in our history? 

Guidance for an answer can be found in the wording of the text itself: “You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your communities. You shall hold a festival for the Lord your God seven days, in the place that the Lord will choose; for the Lord your God will bless all your crops and all your undertakings, and you shall have nothing but joy (Deuteronomy 16:14-15).”

The first sentence tells us to “rejoice (vesamachta)” and the sentence that follows it tells us to “have nothing but joy (ach sameach).” 

Why the need to talk about the same holiday in both sentences? And in that repetition, why the addition of the word “ach”? What is the meaning/function of ach? Ach is a word that modifies. In our case, we can read the sentence as “and you shall have joy even if you need to overcome what you may also be experiencing.” 

What extraordinary wisdom. 

There is the commandment to rejoice on Sukkot, but it comes with that very human understanding that joy cannot be automatically preprogrammed. The rabbis even ask how can we obtain joy within that directive to be joyful. In the Talmud (Pesachim 109a) they come up with several ways to help us reach that emotional state: wine, colorful clothes, eating meat. Joy, they say, is obtained by different means according to our different individual needs and abilities.

While we are commanded – even after all the hardship, pain, sadness, and loss we have experienced – to be joyful as a people this Sukkot, mitigating elements will see us individually try to reach for joy but in different keys. 

Some of us will achieve this by simply and quietly reading or hearing the line from the Torah reading of the first day of Sukkot: “…and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days (Leviticus 23:40).” For others, joy will manifest itself more emphatically in, for example, how loudly we sing or the number of people we welcome into our sukkot.

We are told that the lulav and the etrog of Sukkot represent different types of people while at the same time, we hold them together to show unity. This year, joy will not sound, look, or feel the same for everyone, but strengthened by that diversity, we can create a harmony composed of diverse keys and chords, reminding us that Kol Yisrael arevim ze leze (All of Israel is responsible for each other).

The writer is a Reconstructionist rabbi emeritus of the Israel Congregation in Manchester Center, Vermont. He teaches at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura and at Bennington College.