Finding Joy in the Temporary: Lessons from the Sukkah

The sukkah is a fragile. It’s hardly what anyone would call “sturdy housing.” Yet the Torah calls the sukkah a dirat arai, a temporary dwelling, and commands us to rejoice in it.

That’s a strange mitzvah: Be joyful—in something impermanent.

We spend so much of life trying to build what lasts: careers, homes, reputations, institutions. But Sukkot asks us to find holiness not in what endures, but in what doesn’t. To sit, eat, sing, and bless inside something that we know won’t last past the week.

The sukkah becomes a kind of spiritual classroom.It teaches us humility—because we can’t control the wind. It teaches us gratitude—because even fragile shelter is still shelter. And it teaches us presence—because when the walls are thin, we’re reminded of the world beyond them: our neighbors, the natural world, and those who have no roof at all.

This week, as we step into the sukkah—our fragile, beautiful, temporary home—may we learn to see joy not as something that depends on permanence, but as something that can bloom even in uncertainty.

Because the truth is, life itself is a sukkah. Temporary and precious.