Sukkot: The Feast of Booths and the Season of Our Joy

The Feast in the Torah

The festival has three names in Scripture. In Exodus it is Chag HaAsif (חג האסיף), “the Feast of Ingathering,” kept “in the end of the year, when thou hast gathered in thy labours out of the field” (Exodus 23:16). In Leviticus and Deuteronomy it is the Feast of Booths. In the historical books it is often simply HeChag, “the Feast,” as if no one needed to ask which one (1 Kings 8:2).¹

Leviticus 23: booths and branches

Leviticus 23 sets the feast on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, for seven days, with a holy convocation on the first day and an eighth day after it, which has its own article on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah (23:34–36). The chapter then returns to the festival and ties it to the harvest: “when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto Hashem seven days” (23:39). Two commandments follow. The first is to take four kinds of plant and “rejoice before Hashem your God seven days” (23:40). The second is to live in booths:

Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths: that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am Hashem your God.

A sukkah (סוכה) is a temporary shelter of branches, the kind a farmer puts up in a field at harvest (compare Genesis 33:17). At the very moment the barns are full, the Torah asks Israel to leave the solid house and remember that the nation once lived for forty years under Hashem’s protection alone. The Talmud records a disagreement about those wilderness booths: Rabbi Eliezer said they were the clouds of glory, Rabbi Akiva that they were real huts.² Both readings have shaped the feast. The sukkah recalls real poverty and real divine shelter.

Numbers 29: the seventy bulls

The festival offerings of Numbers 29:12–34 are unlike those of any other feast. Thirteen bulls are offered on the first day, twelve on the second, one fewer each day down to seven on the seventh: seventy in all, together with rams, lambs and a daily goat as a sin offering. In Genesis 10 the descendants of Noach number seventy, and Jewish tradition speaks of “the seventy nations” as a way of saying all humanity. The Talmud draws the conclusion:

These seventy bulls, what do they correspond to? To the seventy nations.

During Sukkot, then, Israel brought offerings on behalf of the whole world. Rabbi Yochanan added a lament: “Woe to the nations, who lost something and do not know what they lost. While the Temple stood, the altar atoned for them. Now who atones for them?”³

Deuteronomy 16 and 31: joy and Hakhel

Deuteronomy commands joy, and commands that it be shared:

And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates.

The paragraph closes with v’hayita ach sameach (והיית אך שמח), “therefore thou shalt surely rejoice” (16:15), literally “and you shall be only joyful.” Hence the liturgy’s name for Sukkot, “the season of our joy.”⁴ The Levite, the convert, the orphan and the widow are written into the commandment.

Deuteronomy 31:10–13 adds an assembly for every seventh year. At the Sukkot after the Shemitah year, the Torah was to be read to the whole people: “Gather the people together, men, and women, and children, and thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they may learn” (31:12). This is Hakhel (הקהל), “gather.” The Mishnah describes the king reading Deuteronomy on a wooden platform in the Temple court, and tells how King Agrippa wept at the verse forbidding a foreigner to be king, until the people cried out, “You are our brother!”⁵

Sukkot in the Prophets and Writings

Sukkot is the festival of national beginnings. Shlomo dedicated the first Beit HaMikdash “at the feast in the month Ethanim, which is the seventh month” (1 Kings 8:2). When Yarov’am broke the northern tribes away from Jerusalem, he invented a rival feast on the fifteenth of the eighth month, “in the month which he had devised of his own heart” (1 Kings 12:33).⁶

The returning exiles kept Sukkot before the foundations of the second Temple were laid: “They kept also the feast of tabernacles, as it is written” (Ezra 3:4). A generation later, when Ezra read the Torah publicly, the people found the commandment of booths and went out for “olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle branches, and palm branches, and branches of thick trees, to make booths, as it is written” (Nehemiah 8:15).

For since the days of Yeshua the son of Nun unto that day had not the children of Israel done so. And there was very great gladness.

Since Ezra 3:4 has just mentioned the feast, this cannot mean that no one had built a sukkah since Yehoshua. The Talmud reads it as a statement about the renewal of the people, not the absence of the practice.⁷ Ezra read from the Torah every day of the feast, “and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the manner” (8:18).

The prophets use the booth as an image of redemption. Hashem “will yet make thee to dwell in tabernacles, as in the days of the solemn feast” (Hosea 12:9). Over restored Zion “there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime from the heat” (Isaiah 4:6). And Zechariah makes Sukkot the festival of the nations, as we will see below.

Sukkot in the Second Temple Period

Josephus calls Sukkot a feast “most holy and most eminent” among the Jews, and Philo of Alexandria explains the booths as a lesson for the prosperous to remember the wilderness.⁸ The book of Jubilees, from the second century BCE, retells the patriarchal history so that Avraham becomes the first to keep the feast, circling the altar with palm branches.⁹ That is legend, but it shows how old the customs already were. When the Maccabees purified the Temple in 164 BCE, they celebrated eight days “as in the feast of the tabernacles,” carrying “branches, and fair boughs, and palms also,” a Sukkot they had been unable to keep in its season.¹⁰ This is one of the oldest explanations of why Chanukah lasts eight days.

The water libation and the Rejoicing of the Water-Drawing

The best-known Temple ceremony of Sukkot is not described in the written Torah. Every morning of the feast, the Mishnah records, a priest filled a golden flask at the pool of Shiloach (Siloam) and carried it up through the Water Gate to the sound of the shofar. At the altar he poured it into a silver bowl beside the bowl for the wine, and the water ran down into the altar’s base.¹¹ This was the nisuch hamayim (ניסוך המים), “the pouring of the water.” The sages found hints for it in Numbers 29 and an oral tradition going back to Moshe, and tied it to the season: “on the Festival the world is judged for water.”¹² Sukkot stands at the edge of the rainy season, and life in the Land depended on what fell from the sky.

Every night the pouring was anticipated by Simchat Beit HaSho’evah (שמחת בית השואבה), “the Rejoicing of the House of Water-Drawing.” The Mishnah describes giant golden lamps in the Court of the Women, filled by young priests on ladders, with wicks made from the priests’ worn-out garments, so that “there was not a courtyard in Jerusalem that was not lit up.” Pious men danced with burning torches; the Levites played on the fifteen steps that correspond to the fifteen Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120–134). At dawn the priests led the people to the eastern gate, turned back toward the sanctuary, and declared that their fathers in that place had bowed eastward to the sun, “but as for us, our eyes are to Yah.”¹³

Whoever has not seen the Rejoicing of the Beit HaSho’evah has never seen joy in his life.

The Talmud remembers Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel juggling eight flaming torches and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananiah recalling that they hardly slept all week.¹⁴ The Jerusalem Talmud explains the name spiritually: it was called the House of Drawing “because from there they drew the Ruach HaKodesh,” quoting Isaiah 12:3, “with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation,” and says the prophet Jonah received prophecy while rejoicing there.¹⁵ That tradition matters for John 7.

A king pelted with etrogim

The water libation was a flashpoint between Pharisees, who received it as oral Torah, and Sadducees, who rejected it. The Mishnah says the people would call to the priest, “Raise your hand!”, because once a priest poured the water on his feet instead of the altar, “and all the people pelted him with their etrogim.” The Talmud calls him a Sadducee, the Tosefta a Boethusian.¹⁶

Josephus tells a similar story about the Hasmonean king and high priest Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE). At the feast of tabernacles, as he stood at the altar to sacrifice, the people “pelted him with citrons” and mocked him as unfit for the priesthood. He sent in his soldiers, and Josephus says about six thousand were killed.¹⁷ Many historians think both accounts remember one event. That is plausible but not certain: Josephus does not mention water, and the Mishnah does not name the king. Both show how seriously ordinary Jews took the festival, and how a feast of joy could turn to bloodshed under rulers the people did not trust.

The Sukkah: Halacha and Meaning

The laws of the sukkah fill the first two chapters of Mishnah Sukkah, the Rambam’s Laws of Sukkah, and the Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayim 625–644.¹⁸ The basics:

• Walls: at least three (the third may be partial), of any material; at least ten handbreadths high and no more than twenty cubits.
• Roof: the s’chach (סכך) must be plant material that grew from the ground and has been cut from it (branches, palm fronds, bamboo), not a manufactured article, giving more shade than sun. Tradition likes the stars to show through.
• Under the open sky, not under a tree or a roof.
• Living in it: the Talmud’s principle is teshvu k’ein taduru, “dwell as you would live.” Meals are eaten there with the blessing leishev basukkah, “to dwell in the sukkah,” and many study and sleep there. On the first night one must eat at least an olive’s size of bread in the sukkah.

Two rules show its humane spirit. One genuinely uncomfortable, from rain, cold or illness, is exempt; the Mishnah compares rain on Sukkot to a servant whose master throws the pitcher back in his face. And in cold northern lands, the Rema notes, many Ashkenazim did not sleep in the sukkah.¹⁹ The Torah is given to be lived.

The sukkah’s meaning grows from its fragility: walls of stone are not what keeps anyone safe. Coming right after the Days of Awe, it carries holiness out of the synagogue into eating, talking and sleeping.

The Four Species

The Torah’s words in Leviticus 23:40 are general; Jewish tradition, attested already by Josephus, identifies them precisely:²⁰

• Pri etz hadar, “fruit of a goodly tree”: the etrog (אתרוג), citron.
• Kapot temarim, “branches of palm trees”: the lulav (לולב), a closed young palm frond.
• Anaf etz avot, “boughs of thick trees”: the hadas (הדס), myrtle.
• Arvei nachal, “willows of the brook”: the aravah (ערבה).

Three myrtles and two willows are bound to the lulav, and the etrog is held beside them with the blessing al netilat lulav. The Mishnah has them waved during Hallel at “Give thanks to Hashem” and at Ana Hashem hoshi’a na, “Save now, I beseech thee, O Hashem” (Psalm 118:1, 25).²¹ Today they are waved to the four directions, up and down; many Ashkenazim follow the order given by the Rema, while Sephardim and Chasidim follow the Arizal. They are not taken on Shabbat, a rabbinic safeguard against carrying them in a public place.²²

Bar Kochba’s coins bear the lulav and etrog, ancient synagogue mosaics set them beside the menorah, and a letter found by Yigal Yadin in the Cave of Letters in 1960 has Shimon bar Kochba ordering palm branches and citrons, myrtles and willows for his camp during the revolt of 132–135 CE.²³

The best-known interpretation is a midrash. The etrog, with taste and fragrance, is like Israelites with both Torah and good deeds; the lulav’s fruit has taste but no fragrance, like those with Torah but not deeds; the myrtle is fragrant but tasteless, like those with deeds but little Torah; the willow has neither. “Let them all be bound together in one bundle,” says the Holy One, “and they will atone for one another.”²⁴ It is homiletics, not halacha, and its lesson is plain: the community is not complete when it leaves out those it considers least worthy.

Hoshana Rabbah and the Willows

In the Temple, long willow branches cut at Motza were stood around the altar. Each day the priests circled the altar once singing Ana Hashem hoshi’a na; on the seventh day, seven times. The Mishnah calls that last day “the seventh day of the willow.”²⁵

The synagogue keeps the memory. Each day of Sukkot the congregation circles the bimah with the four species, reciting Hoshanot, litanies of “Hosha na,” “Save, please.” On the seventh day, 21 Tishrei, the circuits are made seven times, and the day is called Hoshana Rabbah (הושענא רבה), “the Great Hoshana.” A bundle of willows is beaten on the ground and the prayers ask for rain and redemption. Later kabbalistic tradition treats Hoshana Rabbah as the final sealing of the judgment begun at Rosh Hashanah; many stay up the night before reading Deuteronomy and Psalms and wish one another pitka tava, “a good note.” That is a medieval tradition, not a teaching of the Torah or the Talmud.

Prayers, Readings and Customs

Hallel and Musaf. The full Hallel (Psalms 113–118) is said every day of Sukkot. Musaf recalls the day’s offerings from Numbers 29.

Ushpizin. Many families invite seven “exalted guests,” ushpizin (אושפיזין, Aramaic for “guests”): Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov, Moshe, Aharon, Yosef and David. The custom comes from the Zohar, which insists that the guests’ portion belongs to the poor; whoever welcomes the patriarchs and turns away the poor has not hosted them at all.²⁶ It spread widely in the sixteenth century under the Arizal’s influence. It puts Deuteronomy 16:14 into practice.

Kohelet. Ashkenazim read Ecclesiastes on Shabbat Chol HaMoed (or on Shemini Atzeret when no Shabbat falls in the intermediate days). The earliest sources are the post-Talmudic tractate Soferim and the twelfth-century Machzor Vitry.²⁷ Reasons offered include “give a portion to seven, and also to eight” (Ecclesiastes 11:2), the seven days and the eighth, and a midrash that Shlomo spoke the book at Hakhel. A book that calls riches “vanity” is a sober companion for a harvest feast, and it ends where Sukkot points: “Fear God, and keep his commandments” (12:13).

The readings. The first day (and outside Israel the second) reads Leviticus 22:26–23:44, with Numbers 29:12–16 as maftir. The haftarah of the first day is Zechariah 14; outside Israel the second day’s is 1 Kings 8:2–21, Shlomo’s dedication. Shabbat Chol HaMoed reads Exodus 33:12–34:26, with Ezekiel 38:18–39:16 as haftarah. Weekdays read that day’s offerings from Numbers 29. See our page of readings for Sukkot.²⁸

Two days outside Israel. In the Land only 15 Tishrei is yom tov; outside Israel 15 and 16 Tishrei are kept, a practice from the time when distant communities could not know which day Jerusalem had fixed the new moon. Even after the fixed calendar, the sages told the diaspora to “keep the custom of their fathers.”²⁹ See our calendar for this year’s dates.

Chol HaMoed. The intermediate days, Chol HaMoed (חול המועד), are half festival, half weekday: work is limited where possible, meals continue in the sukkah, and the four species are taken each weekday.

Yeshua at the Feast of Booths

Read in its Jewish setting, John 7 is one of the clearest windows we have onto Sukkot in the late Second Temple period. “Now the Jews’ feast of tabernacles was at hand” (John 7:2). Yeshua went up quietly, and “about the midst of the feast” he taught in the Temple courts (7:10, 14). Asked how he knew so much without a recognized teacher, he defined his authority entirely by the Father: “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me” (7:16). He then argued, from the accepted practice of circumcising on Shabbat, that healing a whole man on Shabbat was permitted (7:22–23), reasoning within Jewish law, not against it. Then came the climax:

In the last day, that great day of the feast, Yeshua stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.

After a week of watching the golden flask carried up from Shiloach and poured out with prayers for rain and the words of Isaiah 12:3, no one in the court could miss the meaning. Mayim chayim (מים חיים), “living water,” is running, spring water. No single verse says exactly what Yeshua quotes; the strongest candidates are Zechariah 14:8, “living waters shall go out from Jerusalem,” the haftarah of the feast’s first day, and Ezekiel 47, where a river flows from under the Temple threshold. Rabbinic tradition links the libation with these same prophecies.³⁰ John explains: “But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive” (7:39). The Jerusalem Talmud’s saying that the people “drew the Ruach HaKodesh” at the water-drawing shows that water, joy and the Spirit were already joined in the feast. Whether “the last day” was the seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah, or the eighth, Shemini Atzeret, is discussed in our article on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.

The festival’s light follows:

I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

John notes that Yeshua spoke “in the treasury” (8:20), where the thirteen collection chests stood in the Court of the Women, the very court of the great golden lamps.³¹ Then he healed a man born blind and sent him to wash in “the pool of Siloam” (John 9:7), the source of the altar’s water. This is not a reinterpretation imposed on Sukkot, but a Jewish teacher using the festival’s own symbols, water, light and the house of God, to show what the Father was doing through him.

Tractate Sukkah holds a further surprise. Discussing the separation of men and women at the Simchat Beit HaSho’evah, the Talmud cites Zechariah 12:10–12, the mourning for the one “whom they have pierced,” and explains it as mourning for Mashiach ben Yosef, who will be slain.³² In the tractate on Sukkot we meet the suffering Messiah son of Yosef, the pattern of Yeshua’s first coming, before the revelation of Mashiach ben David.

“He Tabernacled Among Us”

John’s prologue uses Sukkot language at its key moment: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). The Greek eskēnōsen means “pitched a tent” or “tabernacled,” from skēnē, the Greek Bible’s word for both the Mishkan and the sukkah. It echoes the Mishkan filled with Hashem’s glory (Exodus 40:34) and Ben Sira’s Wisdom, whose Creator “caused my tabernacle to rest, and said, Let thy dwelling be in Jacob.”³³ John’s claim is that the Father’s Word and purpose came to dwell among Israel in the life of the Messiah He sent. It is a statement about Hashem’s presence with His people, not about a birthday.

On the mount of the Transfiguration, Peter said, “Master, it is good for us to be here: if you will, let us make here three tabernacles; one for you, and one for Moshe, and one for Eliyahu” (Matthew 17:4). The Gospels do not date the event to Sukkot, but Peter’s instinct is a Sukkot instinct: when glory appears, build a booth. The voice from the cloud, “This is my beloved Son… hear ye him” (17:5), echoes Moshe’s words about the coming prophet, “unto him ye shall hearken” (Deuteronomy 18:15).

Was Yeshua born at Sukkot?

A popular Messianic theory holds that Yeshua was born during Sukkot. Its main arguments:

1. Avijah’s course. Zechariah served in the course of Avijah (Luke 1:5), eighth of the twenty-four priestly divisions (1 Chronicles 24:10). If the courses began in Nisan, Yochanan the Immerser (John the Baptist) would be conceived in early summer and Yeshua, six months younger (Luke 1:26), born in the autumn.
2. Shepherds in the fields at night (Luke 2:8) suggest a milder season than winter.
3. “No room in the inn” (2:7) might reflect festival crowds near Jerusalem.
4. “Good tidings of great joy” (2:10) is heard as an echo of the season of our joy, and John 1:14’s “tabernacled” as a clue.

The weaknesses are serious. Each course served a week twice a year, and all served at the pilgrim festivals, so Zechariah’s service could fall in either half of the year. We do not know how the cycle stood in that year; reconstructions work backward from a Talmudic tradition that the course of Yehoyariv was serving when the Temple fell in 70 CE,³⁴ across seven decades of intercalated months. Luke does not say Yochanan was conceived right after the service. Shepherds kept flocks outdoors much of the Judean year. Luke attributes the crowds to a Roman census, which was not timed to Jewish feasts. “Great joy” is a favorite phrase of Luke (24:52), and John 1:14 is theology, not chronology.

The fair verdict: a Sukkot birth is possible but unprovable, and the Brit Hadashah (the New Testament) never claims it. Sukkot’s connection to Yeshua does not depend on his birthday; it rests on what he said and did at the feast.

The apostles also used the sukkah as a picture of present life. Avraham lived in the land of promise “dwelling in tabernacles with Yitzchak and Yaakov… for he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:9–10). Paul calls the mortal body “our earthly house of this tabernacle” (2 Corinthians 5:1). Life now is temporary; what lasts is still to come, not as escape from the earth but as resurrection and the city Hashem will build.

The Fallen Sukkah of David and the Feast of the Nations

Zechariah 14

The prophetic heart of Sukkot is Zechariah 14, read on the first day. After the final battle for Jerusalem, Hashem’s feet stand on the Mount of Olives, “living waters shall go out from Jerusalem” (14:8), and “Hashem shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one Hashem, and his name one” (14:9). Then:

And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to year to worship the King, Hashem of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles.

Nations that will not come up will have no rain (14:17–19), the very blessing for which the water was poured on the altar. The seventy bulls offered for the nations find their answer: the nations themselves come. The Talmud has a pointed parable. In the age to come the nations ask for a chance to keep the commandments, and Hashem gives them an easy one, the sukkah; when the sun blazes, they leave their booths and kick them on the way out. Israel, too, may leave a sukkah when it is truly uncomfortable, the sages note, but does not kick it.³⁵ The difference is love. For Benei Avraham, a congregation of Jews and of people from the nations who have joined themselves to Hashem (Isaiah 56:6–7), keeping Sukkot is a foretaste of Zechariah 14.

Amos 9 and Acts 15

Amos closes with a promise: “In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof” (Amos 9:11). The Hebrew is sukkat David hanofelet (סכת דוד הנפלת), “the fallen sukkah of David,” a dynasty reduced to a hut. The Talmud reads it messianically, calling the Messiah bar nafli, “son of the fallen,” because Hashem will raise the fallen sukkah of David.³⁶ At the Jerusalem council, Yaakov (James), Yeshua’s brother, quoted this passage, “After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down” (Acts 15:16), to explain why Gentiles were seeking the God of Israel without first becoming Jews (15:17). The restoration of David’s house and the ingathering of the nations belong together, and Amos goes straight on to the regathering of Israel: “I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up” (Amos 9:15).

Gog and Magog

The haftarah of Shabbat Chol HaMoed, Ezekiel 38–39, describes nations led by “Gog, of the land of Magog” coming against a restored Israel and being defeated by Hashem Himself, “that the heathen may know me” (38:16). Jewish commentators often connect this war with the battle of Zechariah 14, and tradition associates it with the autumn season, one reason it is read at Sukkot.³⁷ The final peace follows a final crisis, and the victory is Hashem’s. Every generation has tried to map Gog onto its own empires, and every map has failed. The passage teaches Hashem’s faithfulness to a regathered Israel and the sanctification of His Name. It is not a news commentary or a timetable.

The sukkah of Leviathan and the tabernacle of God

The sages pictured the age to come as a feast in a sukkah: the Holy One will make a sukkah for the righteous from the skin of Leviathan.³⁸ Many prayer books include a short prayer on leaving the sukkah at the end of the festival, asking to be worthy of sitting in the sukkah of Leviathan’s skin. It is aggadah, a picture rather than a doctrine, but it is true to Isaiah’s “feast of fat things” for all peoples (Isaiah 25:6).

Revelation draws on the same imagery. John sees “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,” standing before the throne “clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands” (Revelation 7:9). The One on the throne will “dwell among them” (literally, spread His tabernacle over them); they will not hunger, thirst or suffer the sun’s heat, and will be led “unto living fountains of waters” (7:15–17). Palms, shade, living water: scholars have long recognized the feast of booths here.³⁹ At the end of the book comes the promise of Leviticus 26:11–12 fulfilled:

Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

That is where Sukkot points: to the resurrection of the dead, the restoration of Israel, the nations streaming to Jerusalem, and Hashem dwelling with His people in a renewed world. Until then, we live in booths.

Keeping Sukkot

Some general guidance for households and congregations:

• Build a sukkah, even a small one on a patio or balcony, and eat in it as weather allows. Children love to decorate it. Many begin building right after Yom Kippur.
• Take the four species with the blessing each weekday of the festival (not on Shabbat), ideally during Hallel. Ask someone experienced to show you how to hold and wave them.
• Invite guests. Let the ushpizin custom remind you to bring in people who might be alone, and to give tzedakah.
• Rejoice. Sing Psalm 118 and the Songs of Ascents. Read John 7–9 and Zechariah 14 during the week.
• Read Kohelet on Shabbat Chol HaMoed, and let it keep the joy honest.
• Pray for Jerusalem and for the day when all nations come up to worship the King.
• Keep the yom tov days (the first day, and the first two outside Israel) with rest, candle-lighting, Kiddush and festive meals.

See our calendar for this year’s dates and our readings for Sukkot for the portions. Sukkot leads directly into the eighth day, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, when the booths are left behind and Israel rejoices with the Torah itself.