The woman who would years later become my late stepmother picked up the phone to hear the voice of one of her daughters, calling from the hospital to share good news: the birth of a baby girl.
Then the caller added other news, that the newborn had been diagnosed as blind.
“Bobby Ethel”—Ethel Bagry Shafran, aleha hashalom—responded: “Oh, wow! You’re going to be the best mother! I always wanted to learn Braille! You’re going to be great, everything’s going to work out wonderfully!” She wasn’t just being reassuring, her daughter recounted; she was enthusiastic. (And Bobby Ethel merited to dance at that granddaughter’s chasunah; and the baby-turned-kallah is today a mother herself.)
My rebbi, Rav Yaakov Weinberg, zt”l, observed that the description of Sukkos as “zman simchaseinu,” the “time of our joy,” isn’t a mere default option, born of a lack of parallel to the zman cheiruseinu of Pesach and zman mattan Toraseinu of Shavuos.
Although joy is indeed part of every regel, he explained, the Torah pointedly introduces the idea of simchas Yom Tov regarding Sukkos. And so, just as Pesach is meant to heighten our sensitivity to cheirus, Sukkos is to do the same for simchah.
Simchah, Rav Weinberg continued, isn’t something that happens to us. It is something created by us. That is why we can be commanded, as we are on Yom Tov, to be samei’ach.
He drew a compelling verbal picture of two elderly women in a nursing home, both experiencing the very same thing—a weekly visit from one of their children and the gift of hand-drawn good wishes from the visitor’s toddlers. One resident bemoans her lot and the other exults over it. “Only once a week!” vs. “Every single week!” “You call a child’s drawing a gift?” vs. “What a precious gift! An adorable drawing!”
Returning to my stepmother, well, you know which approach was hers. It is something all of us are to embrace, in life in general, on Yom Tov more specifically, and especially on Sukkos.
What defines a truly wealthy person, Chazal tell us in Avos, isn’t that he’s satisfied with his lot, but that—whatever that lot may be—he is samei’ach b’chelko, he rejoices in it.
Why, though, should Sukkos in particular be associated with simchah?
The first mention of the root letters of the word “sukkah” in the Torah is the name Yiskah (Bereishis 11:29), who, as Rabbi Yitzchak says (Megillah 14a), “Sachsa b’ruach hakodesh—perceived with the spirit of holiness.” The Kad Hakemach says that the sukkah has the power to impart ruach hakodesh.
But even those of us who may not merit ruach hakodesh can nevertheless glean a straightforward perception from living in the sukkah. Because when we sit in our rudimentary week-houses, it’s easier to perceive that the stuff we accumulate in our homes and driveways are not essential to us. When we obtain them, we might feel “happy,” but happy wears off quickly, and its legacy is just a desire for another fix.
In the words of Chazal, “He who has a hundred wants two hundred.”
Does anyone really think that the possession-endowed—entertainers, sports figures, best-selling authors, old-moneyed heirs and lottery-winners—are, as a result of their riches, happy? Their grand estates are no more of a home (likely considerably less of one) than the simplest, cozy Yiddisheh heim.
Simchah, true joy, comes from things more rarified than what we can buy. It comes from things available to us even in our most rudimentary abodes: The relationships we have not with things, but with people—parents, spouses, children, friends, neighbors—and with our community, and, ultimately, with our Creator.
The sukkah, removing us from our usual environments, affords us the realization that, ultimately, what we really have is not what we have, but what we are—to others and to Hashem.
So as we sit in our sukkos, we might take a moment to gaze through the window into the house, or, if the sukkah is at a distance, at least mentally visualize the rooms and their contents that we have abandoned for a week. They are outside of our lives now. They’re not part of us. They never were.
They don’t define who we are. They never did and never will.
That way lies simchah.
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