I. Simcha Is Tzmicha
How does Torah Judaism understand happiness? What is Jewish joy?
Jewish joy is growth. That is the simplest way to say it, and the truest.
Sukkot is called “Zman Simchateinu” — the Season of Our Joy — but the word simcha is not the Hebrew word for a feeling that sits still. It shares a root with tzmicha, meaning growth: a blossoming, a sprouting, a becoming.
So joy, in Jewish terms, is not a finished feeling. It is a growing one. It is not the state of having arrived somewhere. It is the state of becoming something more than you were.
Keep that definition close. Every idea below will circle back to it.
II. What Is Happiness in Judaism?
The English word “happiness” comes from an old word, “hap,” meaning luck or chance. To be happy, in that older sense, is to have things happen to fall your way — good fortune, a lucky break, something that landed on you from outside.
Simcha is the opposite of that. Simcha is not what happens to you. It is what you build, what you grow, what you choose to become. Happenstance is passive. Growth is active.
This is why “arrival” and “contentment” are not quite the same as Jewish joy, even though they sound similar. Arrival means you have stopped moving, because you got where you were going. Contentment means you are satisfied with what you already have. Both, in their own way, are a kind of standstill.
Simcha, by contrast, is a soul in motion — reaching toward G-d, closing the gap between who you are and who you could be, one small stretch of growth at a time. A tree does not feel satisfaction when it stops growing. It feels joy, if we can call it that, every single day it grows another inch toward the sun. So too the soul. Simcha is not what you have. It is what you are becoming.
III. From the Days of Judgment to the Days of Growth
To understand Sukkot, it helps to know what came just before it. Ten days earlier, Rosh Hashanah opens the Jewish new year as a day of judgment — a day when, tradition teaches, every soul is evaluated before G-d. Yom Kippur follows nine days later, the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar, spent fasting and praying for atonement. These are serious days: days of standing still and taking stock of who you have been.
Sukkot comes only five days after Yom Kippur ends. It is a seven-day festival, named for the temporary huts — sukkahs — that Jews build and dwell in throughout the week, in memory of the fragile shelters the Israelites lived in on their journey through the desert after the Exodus from Egypt.
The verdict, so to speak, is already in. So now what? Now, growth. If the High Holidays ask, “Who were you this past year?” — Sukkot asks a different question: “Who are you becoming next?”
IV. The Four Species: A Personification of Growth…
Sukkot has a distinctive mitzvah, a commanded practice, found nowhere else on the Jewish calendar: taking hold of four plants together, known as the Four Species. There is the etrog, a fragrant citron fruit; the lulav, a closed frond of a date palm; the hadas, myrtle branches; and the arava, willow branches. Jews bind the lulav, hadas, and arava together, hold the etrog alongside them, and wave all four in every direction each morning of the festival.
A classic Midrash reads each of the four as a different kind of person, based on a simple test: does the plant have taste, does it have smell, both, or neither? In this teaching, taste stands for Torah learning — something internal, studied and absorbed within a person. Smell stands for good deeds — something that reaches outward, felt and sensed by others, even at a distance.
The etrog has both taste and smell: a person whose inner learning and outer deeds match. The lulav’s fruit, the date, has taste but its branch has no smell: a person who learns, but whose good deeds have not yet caught up. The hadas has smell but no taste: a person whose good deeds are visible, but whose inner learning is still thin. The arava has neither: a person who is, for now, still becoming both.
Bind all four together, and hold them as one. This is not only a metaphor for a community made of different kinds of people. It is a metaphor for a single growing person — because every one of us is, at different moments and in different areas of life, all four of these plants at once. You are the etrog in one part of your life and the arava in another, and both are you, mid-growth.
Shaking the lulav toward every direction completes the picture. A tree cannot walk out into the world to reach people, so its branches reach outward instead. You, too, are a growing thing, reaching outward in every direction, still becoming what you will be.
V. The Sukkah: A Home Made of Unfinished Things
For the seven days of Sukkot, Jews eat, and in many communities sleep, in a sukkah — a temporary hut built outdoors, with at least three walls and a roof called schach. The schach is not ordinary building material. Jewish law requires it to be made from something that grew from the ground and has not been turned into a finished, manufactured product: branches, bamboo, cut stalks, palm fronds. Not planks. Not furniture. Not the completed handiwork of human hands.
Think about the timing. We just spent an entire year building — homes, careers, plans, the finished products of human effort and human control. And then, right after the High Holidays, we leave our sturdy houses and sit in a hut roofed with unfinished branches, open enough to see the stars through the gaps.
Why? Because for seven days, we trade the security of what man has completed for the delicate, unfinished growth of what G-d is still growing. The sukkah is not a stronger home than your house. It is a truer one. It reminds you that you, too, are schach — unfinished, growing, held together loosely, open to the sky rather than sealed off from it.
VI. Nisuch HaMayim: The Water Libations
In the days of the Beis HaMikdash, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, Sukkot featured a practice found nowhere else in the year: pouring water onto the altar, alongside the usual wine libations. Water has no taste of its own, no smell, no color. It is the plainest, most modest of offerings.
And yet the Sages said something startling: whoever did not see the Simchat Beit HaShoeva, the joy of the water-drawing celebration that accompanied this offering, never saw real joy in his life. Why did the plainest offering produce the greatest joy of the year?
Because water nourishes. Water does not sit still as a finished thing; it seeps into the ground and makes things grow. To pour water on the altar was to pray for next year’s rain, at the very moment this year’s harvest was already gathered in. Joy that only looks backward at what is finished is satisfaction. Joy that looks forward, praying for more growth still to come, is simcha.
VII. Hoshana Rabba, Simchat Torah, and Your Own Piece of Torah
Hoshana Rabba is the seventh and final day of Sukkot, and it carries its own distinct character. Each morning of Sukkot, worshippers circle the synagogue once, holding the Four Species, reciting prayers called Hoshanos — “please save us.” On Hoshana Rabba, the circling happens seven times, and the service closes with a custom of beating willow branches on the ground. Tradition treats this day as the final sealing of the judgment for water and rain that began on Rosh Hashanah — the last echo of the Days of Awe, tucked inside a week that otherwise feels like pure celebration.
And then, almost immediately, comes Simchat Torah — “the joy of the Torah” — the festival marking the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah scroll from beginning to end. In the same service, the reader finishes the final words of Deuteronomy, and without pause, rolls the scroll back to the beginning and reads the opening words of Genesis. Why not pause and rest on the achievement? Because a Torah that stays finished is not a living Torah. The moment you finish learning is the moment you begin again — deeper, older, wiser than the last time you started.
Here is where the theme runs deepest. Tradition teaches that every Jewish soul is not merely connected to a letter in the Torah scroll — every soul is a piece of the Torah, one letter among 600,000, without which the scroll itself would be incomplete. That is not a static fact to file away. It is a growing one. Each year, tradition holds, the aspect of Torah you are meant to encounter and live out shifts and deepens: not just which letter you are, but which portion of that letter’s meaning you are meant to experience this year, at this stage of your life. Your letter does not move. But your grasp of it, your living of it, never finishes.
This is why learning, in Jewish life, is never only information. Learning becomes living. Discovering your piece of Torah becomes discovering yourself, and seeking it out — turning it over, returning to it every year with new eyes — becomes the very shape of your growth. Your being and your becoming are rooted in the same soil: what you learn, and what you remain willing to keep learning.
There is a verse elsewhere in Scripture that captures this same idea in a single image. Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs, is a love song describing a pilgrim’s journey up to Jerusalem, and at one point it says: “How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O prince’s daughter” (Shir HaShirim 7:2). Heard from Mrs. Racheli Indig, a phenomenal Partners educator: notice what is being praised. Not the feet arriving in the courtyard of the Beis HaMikdash, shoes removed, standing still before G-d. The feet on the road. Still wearing sandals. Still walking. Still becoming. Beauty, in this verse as on Hoshana Rabba, as in your own piece of Torah, is not the standing-still of having arrived. It is the walking.
VIII. Koheles: Why We Read It Now
On the Shabbos that falls during Sukkot, called Shabbos Chol HaMoed, it is traditional in many communities to read Koheles — the Book of Ecclesiastes, traditionally attributed to King Solomon. Of all the books in the Hebrew Bible, it is the strangest one to read during “the Season of Our Joy.”
Koheles is Shlomo HaMelech’s unflinching account of a man who had everything a person could want — wealth, pleasure, achievement, even wisdom itself — and found it all “hevel,” a word usually translated as vapor, or fleeting breath, something that cannot be grasped or held onto.
Here is the answer hiding inside the difficulty. Koheles is not read despite the joy of Sukkot. It is read because of it. Koheles proves, from painful firsthand experience, that finished things cannot make a person joyful — not houses, not gardens, not wealth, not even the finished pursuit of wisdom. Only growing things can. Sit in your fragile, growing sukkah, holding your still-becoming lulav and etrog, and you understand Koheles’s despair, and its cure, at the very same time.
IX. The Bookend
We opened with a claim: Jewish joy is growth. By now, you have seen that claim from every angle this festival offers.
In an etrog that has both taste and smell, and an arava that has neither yet — and in the fact that you are, honestly, a little of both at once. In a hut roofed with things still holding the memory of soil, open to the sky rather than sealed against it. In plain water, poured out in prayer for a year not yet grown. In a Torah scroll finished on one day and begun again on the next, and in a soul that is not only connected to a letter of that scroll but is one, called each year to grow into a new depth of it. In a verse that finds beauty in sandaled feet still on the road, not bare feet standing still in the courtyard.
Sukkot does not celebrate what you finished this year.
Sukkot celebrates what, please G-d, you are still becoming.
That is Jewish joy. That is Jewish happiness — not happenstance, not arrival, not contentment.
Growth.
