Mijal: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam. As you hear, I’m Mijal, and this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked in the world today about Israel, about Judaism, and about the Jewish experience. We don’t have it all figured out, but this show is our way of trying to learn together, to wonder together, and ultimately to grow together.
As we say every week, we really appreciate and enjoy hearing from you. So please go ahead, send us questions, disagreements, ideas for future shows. Just email us at wonderingjews@unpacked.media.
Sukkot begins tomorrow night, so today, we’re re-releasing an episode that actually meant a lot to me, about what Sukkot is really about – joy, and what joy really means. But as Noam and I were planning this, we realized that there’s something else Sukkot is about.
See, at the end of the day, Sukkot, these FRAGILE huts we build as a temporary place to live, the holiday also symbolizes what it means to live with uncertainty.
Right now, all of us are living through uncertainty. There’s uncertainty about a possible ceasefire, about Palestinian statehood, about what the future holds for Israel and the Jewish people. None of it feels stable, and that’s one of the main themes that Sukkot is about. You leave your solid house, the thing you think makes you secure, and you step into a sukkah, a flimsy, temporary hut that could blow over in the wind.
And the theme we discuss in the episode you’re about to hear – joy – well, that too doesn’t come from certainty or control. We hope this episode helps you step into your sukkah, whether literal or metaphorical, feeling a little more grounded in joy, even in the midst of uncertainty.
Alright, let’s dive in, and have a wonderful Sukkot.
Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And this podcast is our way of trying to figure out the Jewish world. We don’t have it all figured out. Though sometimes, sometimes I think I do. But we’re trying to figure it out together.
Mijal: What does Sukkot look like for you?
Noam: I love Sukkot. It’s awesome. Let’s just do a little review. Sukkot is called by lots of different things in Judaism. It’s called Chag Ha’asif, the festival of in-gathering. I think this is interesting. You know this obviously, Mijal. But Chag is the same word as hajj, which means pilgrimage. So the Chag in Judaism was like the Chag Sukkot is going up to the temple and the pilgrimage and going Chag Pesach is the same thing. Chag Shavuot is one of the three pilgrimages that we do. It’s the hajj, it’s the Chag. So it’s what we do. so it’s got a lot of different names. I love Sukkot.
Mijal: I’ll just, no, let me add something to the name, Chag Asif, you said it’s a holiday of the ingathering, but it’s in-gathering of a harvest, right? So it’s an agricultural term and it reflects the fact that we have all of this particularly biblical Jewish holidays that really revolved around the rhythm of the agricultural cycle.
Noam: Exactly. And I love this part of the agricultural cycle. You don’t really get it so much in South Florida. So I don’t know if this is what God had in mind for anyone to live in South Florida. Shots fired. But in the Northeast and in Israel, it’s like this is like what an amazing time of life. I know like I’m fanboying a little bit over Israel right now, but there’s nothing like going to Israel for Sukkot. It’s just so nice. It’s so beautiful there.
Mijal: You know, we tried so hard to go, we couldn’t get tickets this year. We kind of had like a spontaneous, like why don’t we just go for Sukkot? And yeah, we couldn’t get tickets. It was like there just were no tickets. But but Sukkot, Sukkot. So it’s it’s a holiday that in Israel, it’s a seven day holiday. In the diaspora, we celebrated over eight days. Some of the most prominent practices of Sukkot. So I think the most visible one is to build a… Am I pronouncing it right? A hat? I can never say it. H-U-T. I said it right.
Noam: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Noam: Yeah, I mean, yeah, you said it right. It’s a H-U-T, it’s a hut, not a hat. But yes, it’s a hut. A booth.
Mijal: Yes, exactly. So we basically thank you. That’s better. Both. So we build this temporary structures that we’re supposed to pretty much live in. Eating them. We some people, I I grew up with like the many my family actually being very strict to sleep in the sukkah throughout these days. And you’re supposed to treat it as your home to decorate it. I have friends who bring couches to the sukkah, really make it really cozy and beautiful. So that’s one of the main practices of Sukkot.
The second main practice that we associate with Sukkot is, and this I don’t know the English, like it’s the four species, am I saying it right? The four species, arba minim, do you want to say their names in English, Noam? Or in Hebrew? We have the lulav, maybe just like you…
Noam: How do you say luluv etrog hadasim, aravot what is that I don’t know you come on. They’re like, but I don’t use these words any other, they’re myrtle branches. Myrtle branches, okay. Citrus fruit.
Mijal: Mm hmm. Great. Yeah. Good. Good.
Mijal: Correct. Yeah, yeah. A citrus fruit, a citrus fruit, a palm, palm leaves thingies. Thank you. And then what’s at the at the same? It’s like, I don’t know. I usually say like little triangle leaves.
Noam: Palm fronds, by the way. I think they’re actually called palm fronds.
Noam: Let’s look that up. Hadassim is a branch of the myrtle tree. And I’m right. Lulav is a palm frond. You didn’t know the word frond before this. There’s no way.
Mijal: I did not, my AP English teacher did not teach me that word. It’s catching up now, catching up. So these are the two of the main practices, yeah.
Noam: And do you do this in the Sephardic world? In the Ashkenazi world, we read one of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh called Kohelet on one of the days of Sukkot. Do you do that?
Mijal: We don’t do it with the same prominence that you guys do it like Ashkenazim like read it in shul, like in a way that like is almost like prominent and thin. We don’t do it in the same way.
Noam: Yeah, it’s an amazing book, by the way. Highly recommend it.
Mijal: But we do think about the Book of Kohelet and the themes, as part of the themes. And that’s actually really interesting, by the way, now, because we talk about practices. We also talk about themes and practices. So we actually have a big mitzvah, a big commandment. We are literally commandment to be joyous, to be happy in this holiday. And there’s something really paradoxical about it, because it is both the holiday in which we are supposed to almost like renounce our permanent homes and go outside. And it is also the holiday in which we read Kohelet, Kohelet, which is a scroll that the sages attribute to King Solomon. And it is one of the most, what do you say, one of the more like nihilistic kind of like how would you describe it? Like nihilistic books of the Bible in which you basically have this author philosopher who looks at the world and who, in anguish, kind of cries out, what is the meaning of this all? Of course, there’s like a resolution to it at one point, but in itself, the Book of Kohelet, it’s an interesting book to be read in the holiday of happiness and joy.
Noam: Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. I think that that is a very, very good point. really do recommend everyone reading Kohelet. I think it’s got, you know, pound for pound, you know, maybe that versus Proverbs, some of the best lines in all of Tanakh. I Just like you were able to look at your life. I remember when I was 18 years old and I opened the book up for the first time in my life after when I went to Israel.
I never read it before, and I was like, holy lord, there’s a lot of wisdom in here. A little depressing at times, a little, but then I was like, about what is joy? What is happiness?
And so I kind of want to get into that. I want to get into what is joy and why is Judaism so obsessed with joy? Because it really is so obsessed with joy. It is called, like you said, the holiday itself is called Z’man simchatenu, or the time of our joy, the time of our happiness.
And when we think about Judaism, I think very often people, people look at their own Judaism and the way they describe it is it’s in the form of like anxiety is like the way people would make fun of the Jew. Or you know, when Judaism, when people think about their own Judaism, it’s fighting antisemitism.
Or it’s worrying. It’s like you have Woody Allen as like the face of Judaism often.
Mijal: It’s a very Ashkenazi, by the way, characterization, like Ashkenazi American.
Noam: Okay, Ashkenazi American makeup, what percentage of Americans?
Mijal: I would guess about 90%.
Noam: Okay, so I don’t mind representing 90 % of how it is represented within the US. And the remaining 10%, the Ashkenazi have a heck of a lot to learn from. But of that 90%, I think that that’s how, at least externally, and yes, it should change, like the Larry David Jew, the Jerry Seinfeld Jew, that is how people perceive it. So I think that that is such a mistake because I wouldn’t just say it’s a Ashkenazi.
Mijal: Go for it, go for it, Noam.
Noam: the way people think of Ashkenazi Jews. I actually think it’s a part of the Hasidic, which is also, I guess, Ashkenazi, though it transcends it in many ways, is this focus on joy. It’s so much so that Rabbi Nachman, who is the grandson of the founder of Hasidut, the Baal Shem Tov, he said, Mitzvah gedola l’h’yot B’simcha Tamid, that it’s a commandment to always be in a state of joy. Okay?
Follow me here. He says it’s a commandment to always be in a state of joy. And Sukkot is known as the holiday of joy. And that’s what it’s called, Z’man Simchatenu. And the question is, for me, that I’m thinking about is how do you arrive at joy? How do you be in a state of joy at all times? Is that possible? What does it mean to be in a state of joy? Obviously, there’s tremendously difficult things going on in the world and there’s always tremendously difficult things going on in the world, whether that’s internally, personally, or it’s communally, collectively. But how do we live in a state of joy and how do you even, how do you actually live a life of being commanded to be in a state of joy? Right? How do you think about that?
Mijal: Well, I think it invites us to first of all ask ourselves, what is joy? And we’re using happiness and joy as though it’s the same. And the Hebrew simcha doesn’t have an exact translation.
But I think that we live in a society in which people are always busy with the pursuit of happiness. But I wonder if part of what the holiday is demanding for us to do is to interrogate, what are we pursuing and is this really the road to joy? What is joy actually? So let me start with that. Now, I’m like, if you had to think about what joy means, let’s use joy instead of happiness for now. How would you define that, just for yourself. Or you know what, or give me like a moment where you felt like you were truly enjoying it.
Noam: You know, it’s kind of like in Hebrew, there are so many names that the Bible gives for, that we have for joy. There’s Chedva, there’s Sason, there’s Rina, there’s Gila, there’s Osher. There’s so many different Hebrew words. And then that says a heck of a lot about its culture. So Hebrew has a heck of a lot of terms for this concept called joy. So I think the question is, when do I feel a state of equanimity, a state of like, I feel good right now. So I think it’s when I, this is my like unbridled, unfiltered, very clear answer. When I feel secure.
I feel happy when, like I’m just being real with you, I feel joyful when, I’m closing my eyes to think about it, when I’m surrounded by people that I love in a non-threatening way, where don’t feel like I have to strike up conversation, when I feel like I’ve just accomplished something, and I don’t feel like, what’s the next thing to accomplish, what’s the next thing to achieve. And when I’m in that state of security, accompanied by some state of like a spiritual ecstasy, like this joy, like this connection between me and something above, me and something around me and me and something internally. that’s what it is. So that’s what it is.
I just imagined all of that. So when I have that, then I’m in a state of joy. That’s simcha for me. That’s what it is.
Mijal: That’s beautiful.
Noam: What about you, Mijal?
Mijal: Well, it’s interesting. What you described really captured a lot of my own memories. Like if I think about moments of joy, even on Sukkot, I’m just imagining sitting in a Sukkot with my family.
I’m one of seven kids. And everyone except for me and my family has a ridiculously good voice for singing. It’s very sad. I have to work through that, but it’s very happy when we’re all together and just singing and just that experience of sitting together, singing. And there’s something there that you’re a part of something bigger than yourself and that you feel just really. I liked what you said, like you’re not trying to achieve something. You’re you’re present in the moment.
Moments of presence, of real presence with loved ones. You know what is reminding me of now? There’s this book that I read whose name I forgot. I look it up and I put it in the show notes. It was a book basically describing and summarizing one of the most significant longitudinal studies on human flourishing and happiness. was conducted in Harvard. It described how over decades you basically had teams of researchers who decided to study, was mostly men. So it was boys and then going into men, and just to study them year after year after year, interviewing them, looking at their health and just trying to understand what makes them happy, what makes them feel like they have a good life, what makes them be healthy. And some of these people, accompanied from being young to old men in their 70s or 80s. So it’s like an unbelievable study that tries to ask some of the biggest questions about what it means to live a good life.
And it’s funny because the authors of the book and the study basically confess at the end that they came back to something that is almost like incredibly simple, which is that it is the embeddedness in human relationships. Like nothing more and nothing less. The embeddedness in human relationships. Right? Where you feel cared for and you care in return. That makes all the difference between different trajectories in life. So I find that very, very powerful. So how does this connect to Sukkot? Let’s bring it back to Sukkot now.
Noam: So this is exactly why, so now we’re nailing it, because this is exactly why Sukkot is known as the holiday of joy. Think about it. What we do is, a book that my parents introduced me to, they’re they’re therapists. So they introduced me to this book about joy years ago from Martin Seligman. So he created this model called PERMA, P-E-R-M-A. So it’s a good mnemonic or acronym to help think about how do you bring joy. So he writes P is positive emotions, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning, and A is achievement. Like I actually wrote about this a long time ago. I wrote this cover story for the Jewish journal six years ago. So I applied it to Sukkot.
Mijal: Can we put it in the show notes also?
Noam: Sure, if our producer lets us, but the P.
Mijal: I’ll fight for it now. Yes.
Noam: Thank you. That means so much to me. Okay.
So P is the positive emotions that I wrote. It refers to the pleasant life, feeling good, optimism, joy, hope, gratitude. And that’s key to what we feel on Sukkot.
Noam: E is engagement, is the presence of a flow state and what sometimes people call being in the zone. Did you enjoy building your sukkah? Were you completely absorbed by what you were doing? Were you enveloped in the experience?
R is the relationships, like you said, it’s everything. The presence of family, friends, sharing in the intimacy of those around you. When was the last time you laughed with best friends? Invest in these relationships and honor them, I wrote above all else. It’s the ultimate irony. If we selfishly want to feel good, like you said, Mijal, we need to be with others to do that.
M is the meaning, is the awareness that something is bigger than us. It’s when we ask questions, engage in dialogue, clarify purpose and tell our story. And what better time to do that than in a sukkah, on sukkot.
And then finally, A, achievement. We just finished the high holidays, right? Like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, we went through that. Now like be present, just be in that moment.
And then, and so then on top of all of that, there’s this Danish word that was all the rage like six, seven years ago called hygge.
H Y G G E. It’s the Danish and Norwegian word that describes the feeling of contentment and coziness and And that’s that is joy is hygge and the reason that all of these top countries in that in like Finland and Denmark and all these countries very often are in the top five of happiness when they do the World Happiness Index, as many people say it’s because of this concept known as hygge. And fascinatingly, guess who else is in the top five of happiness in the world? It’s Israel.
Mijal: Well, Israel has been in the top categories of happiness for a long time, even with all of the wars and all of the challenges.
Noam: for a long time. But in 2024, even after the tragic and painful year that it’s been, it’s top five happiest country in the world. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s such a purpose-driven society. It’s a society that’s very communally oriented. And there is a lot of PERMA going on. There’s a lot of Shabbat going on. There’s a lot of that opportunity to be present and to have meaning and be driven. And Sukkot is this memory that we all bring to ourselves and living wherever we live.
And we say, you know what? There are hurricanes around us. Literally for me, there are hurricanes around us. There are thunderstorms around us. This house that you built that you think is everything that you, know, it’s my might that I’ve accomplished all of this, it’s a line from the Hebrew Bible.
You know what? Actually, like, you know where your joy is gonna be found? Not in that house, but in that flimsy hut that might have those couches that you mentioned, Mijal. it’s not gonna be in the consumerism of Western society. It’s not gonna be on that amazing thing that you got from Crate and Barrel that you purchased and you put on your kitchen table. It’s actually not gonna be that. It’s gonna be the joy of being around other people that you love. And guess what? That’s gonna actually bring you so much happiness, but you gotta do it and you gotta live it. And you gotta remember that it’s not all coming from you.
And then it’s one more thing. I’m gonna just finish with this. One more thing. Maimonides writes actually, Joy, I’m not gonna get the exact quote, but basically like, if you think that Joy is just eating amazing food and drinking amazing drink, and you don’t actually give, you don’t actually give to other people, make sure that other people in your community have the ability to enjoy that also, then that’s not joy. He calls that simchat kriso. That’s the joy of your belly speaking. Meaning that is consumerism, that’s materialism, that is hedonism. But that’s not joy, that’s something else. So that’s this holiday. That’s why Sukkot’s amazing.
Mijal: Yeah, yeah, I love what you said, Noam, and I think it’s really it’s not that I think Sukkot is is a polemic against our understanding of what it means to be happy here in America. Right. We’re bombarded constantly with, know, if you just buy this thing or like achieve that next milestone or compete for this or achieve that. it’s all about having things that are external to you. AI love our tradition so much because we have this really, we have this like ancient holidays. So it’s supposed to be about like what happened in the wilderness that we built hats there or that God covered us with clouds of glory. It’s like so long ago and it was, you know, structured around an agricultural agrarian society. And we’re living here in like urban life. Is Florida urban? Yes. Urban life. Just kidding. Urban life in like 2024.
And we have this ancient holiday that comes to us and says, I’m going to literally give you a gift. I’m to give you a cult countercultural definition of what happiness is in a society that is so lonely and a society that is actually so deeply depressed in so many places, even as it has more and more and more. And I love that.
And I’ll say something else, Noam, about what you were saying before about Israel. I think Israel teaches us that happiness is not about having an easy life. You know what I mean? Like joy and happiness is not about taking away all the obstacles. And I think joy, it’s like you’re supposed to leave all the things that make you comfortable behind. And you’re supposed to acknowledge the flimsiness of it all, the existential fragility of what life is and discover that happiness comes. I’ll quote here, you know Jonathan Haidt speaks about. It’s talking about morality, but I’ll say like happiness. I’ll borrow from his work. Happiness comes from between. Right. The things in between the relationships with other people in our tradition. So I think it’s almost like I have to remind myself of this.
It’s an important reminder that we can do really hard things and those things can actually make us not just better but more joyful.
Noam: Agreed. Agreed. Mijal, I will see you soon, my friend. Take care, bye.
Mijal: Yeah, thanks. See you now. Bye. Chag sameach.