Maidenhead Synagogue – 26 September 2026 / 15 Tishrei 5787
Many years ago I watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Little Buddha, and one scene has stayed with me ever since. An old Tibetan monk, Lama Norbu, is teaching a young American boy called Jesse about impermanence. As I remember it, he invites the boy to look at the people around them and tells him that in a hundred years none of them will be here.
When we realise that everything and everyone we see will pass, we face a choice. We can give way to despair, or we can accept it. I choose acceptance. For me, that means living in the present, carrying the past without being ruled by it and meeting the future without being ruled by fear of it.
Last night we began the festival of Sukkot. In our festival prayers, each of the three pilgrimage festivals has its own name, and Sukkot is called zman simchatenu, the time of our happiness. The Torah itself commands this happiness. In Leviticus we are told to rejoice before the Eternal for seven days (Leviticus 23:40). Deuteronomy tells us to rejoice at the festival together with our children, our servants, the Levite, the stranger, the orphan and the widow (Deuteronomy 16:14).
Sukkot is a harvest festival. The produce of the year has been gathered in, and we might expect to celebrate it in the comfort of our homes. Yet the same chapter of Leviticus sends us out of our houses to live for seven days in booths so that each generation will know that our ancestors lived in booths when the Eternal brought them out of Egypt (Leviticus 23:42–43). The sukkah is a fragile hut, open to the wind and the rain, and at the end of the week we take it down.
This may sound strange, but I believe the fragility of the sukkah is what makes the other joys of the festival possible. The joy of the harvest and the joy of sharing it with others both depend on knowing that none of it is ours to keep. Knowing that things pass is what allows joy, because we stop appreciating something when we believe it will last, and when we realise that something is lent to us, we receive it with gratitude.
The rabbis understood something of this. The Mishnah, the first great collection of Rabbinic teaching, completed around the year 200, describes a celebration held in the Temple in Jerusalem during Sukkot. During the festival, a priest filled a golden flask with water from the spring of Shiloach below the city and poured it into a basin on the altar (Mishnah Sukkah 4:9). To understand why, we need to know that Sukkot comes at the beginning of the rainy season in the Land of Israel. Whether enough rain fell that winter would decide whether there would be enough water for harvest for the whole year. The Mishnah therefore teaches that at Sukkot the world is judged for water (Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2), and the Talmud explains that the water was poured so that the rains of the year might be blessed (Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 16a). So, the priests poured out some of the water they had at the very moment when the water they would need was being decided by heavens. Their greatest joy came when they were most aware that their lives depended on something they could not control. At night, great lamps were lit in the Temple courtyard, with wicks made from the worn-out clothes of the priests, and there was no courtyard in Jerusalem that was not lit by their light (Mishnah Sukkah 5:3). The Mishnah says that anyone who has not seen the rejoicing of the water drawing has never seen joy in their life (Mishnah Sukkah 5:1).
Now think of who wrote those words. When the Mishnah was compiled, the Temple had been destroyed for more than a century, and none of the Rabbis had ever seen that joy. They remembered it, and they went on keeping the festival. Their joy lived inside their loss. This is what I mean by resilience: the capacity to rejoice that grows from knowing that what we love will pass.
The book of Ecclesiastes, Kohelet in Hebrew, is traditionally read during Sukkot, and it says something similar in its own way. Its best-known word (hevel) is often translated as ‘vanity’, but it means breath or vapour, something that is here and then gone. Yet Kohelet tells us again and again to rejoice. Go, he says, eat your bread with joy, and enjoy life with the one you love all the days of your fleeting life (Ecclesiastes 9:7–9). The joy is found within those fleeting days. Kohelet also calls the ability to eat, drink and find pleasure in our work a gift of God (Ecclesiastes 3:13). Happiness, for him, is something we receive.
If this is true, it may help us understand our own time. We have more comfort than any generation before us. Two centuries ago, more than one child in three died before their fifth birthday; today, across the world, it is about one in twenty-seven. And yet many of us sense that people around us are anxious and unhappy, and the mood of our public life often feels like a waiting for catastrophe.
Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps, wrote that happiness cannot be pursued by chasing the satisfaction of selfish and immediate desires, and has to follow from something else.
I would describe it like this. Happiness is rooted in gratitude for what we have, in letting go of desires that cannot be fulfilled, and in contentment. It is close to the Buddhist understanding that Lama Norbu tried to give Jesse, with one difference that matters to us as Jews. Our acceptance does not take us out of the world. Happiness is not withdrawing from the world but inhabiting it fully, with awareness. The sukkah is built in our own gardens, beside our neighbours’ houses, and we eat in it and welcome guests into it before we take it down. I do not always manage this myself, and I worry about the future as much as anyone. But each year the sukkah reminds me where happiness is to be found, in the impermanence of things and the liberating awareness it gives me.
May this festival teach us to give thanks for what we have while it is with us, to let go of what we cannot hold, and to find, in the fragile shelter of the sukkah, the time of our happiness.