Sukkot Explained: The Festival of Booths

Just days after the most solemn day of the Jewish year, families start hammering together a small hut in the garden, on a balcony, or beside the synagogue. They eat outside under a roof of branches, carry a citrus fruit and a bundle of greenery to prayers, and invite guests into a space that is deliberately fragile.

That is Sukkot, the Festival of Booths. Why build something temporary, on purpose, at the start of autumn? The answer reaches back to a desert journey — and forward to gratitude for harvest, home, and shelter.

When Sukkot happens, and how long it lasts

Sukkot begins on the 15th day of Tishrei, just five days after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The contrast is intentional: from fasting and reflection to a festival the tradition calls a time of joy.

In Israel, Sukkot itself lasts seven days. Immediately after it come Shemini Atzeret, a separate closing festival day, and Simchat Torah, which celebrates the completion of the annual Torah reading cycle and its immediate new beginning.

In the diaspora — Jewish communities outside Israel — traditional observance adds a day to the festivals, a practice rooted in ancient calendar uncertainty. So diaspora communities traditionally count an extra day, with Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah following, often on successive days. Wherever it is kept, the week has the same shape: booths, greenery, guests, and meals outdoors.

Why booths? Remembering the wilderness

The Torah gives the reason in its own words. After the Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites travelled for forty years through the wilderness, living without permanent homes. Sukkot asks each generation to remember that journey by dwelling, for a week, the way they did.

Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are home-born in Israel 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

Leviticus 23:42-43 (JPS 1917)

Interpreters have long discussed what those original booths were — simple shelters made on the journey, or, in a famous rabbinic reading, a shelter of divine protection surrounding the travellers. The festival holds both ideas: you remember human vulnerability, and being carried through it.

Sukkot is also a harvest festival, falling as the year's ingathering ends in the land of Israel; Scripture elsewhere calls it the Feast of Ingathering. Gratitude here is not abstract: it is for food gathered, rain hoped for, and a roof — even a temporary one — overhead.

Building and living in a sukkah

The hut itself is called a sukkah, plural sukkot, which is where the festival gets its name. Its rules are simple to picture and surprisingly poetic.

A sukkah needs at least three walls. They can be wood, canvas, or other materials, and many families use a frame they store and rebuild each year. Children often decorate the inside with drawings, paper chains, and fruit.

The roof is the distinctive part. It is made of sechach — loose branches, bamboo, or other plant material — laid sparsely enough that you can see the stars through it at night, but thickly enough to give more shade than sun by day. The sky has to stay part of the room.

During the week, families eat their meals in the sukkah, and many sleep in it too, weather and custom permitting. The point is dwelling, not visiting: for a week, this fragile structure is treated as home, and the solid house becomes the annex.

If you want to read the Leviticus passage and the surrounding festival calendar in full, the Judaism lessons in Faith Map are free to read, with the Tanakh text alongside the lessons.

The Four Species and the waving

Sukkot has a second signature, carried in the hands. The Torah instructs taking four kinds of plants — together called the Four Species, or Arba'at HaMinim — and rejoicing with them during the festival.

They are the etrog, a yellow citron, held in one hand, and a bundle bound together in the other: the lulav, a palm branch, hadassim, three myrtle twigs, and aravot, two willow branches.

Each morning of the festival, except on Shabbat, the Four Species are held together and waved with a blessing — forward, to the right, back, to the left, up, and down: six directions in all. That gesture is usually explained as acknowledging God's presence in every direction, and, in a harvest festival, as a prayer carried to the winds that bring rain.

The species themselves invite interpretation. A beloved teaching notices that they combine taste and fragrance in different measures, and reads them as a picture of a whole community, held and lifted together, no one left out of the bundle.

Synagogues also process with the Four Species around the reading platform during prayers, in circuits called hoshanot, with a fuller circuit on the seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah.

Guests at the table: ushpizin

A sukkah built for one would miss the point. Hospitality is central to the week, and meals are shared — with family, neighbours, and anyone who needs a place at the table.

Layered over the ordinary invitations is a mystical tradition called ushpizin, Aramaic for guests. Each night, families welcome, by name and by invitation prayer, one of the great figures of Israel's story: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David, in a customary order. Many households pair the welcome with giving to people in real need that day — a table honouring Abraham should also feed a living guest.

Women of the tradition are honoured in a parallel custom in many communities today, welcoming Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, and Esther. However a family keeps it, the sukkah door stays open.

Rain, and the turn of the year

Sukkot looks ahead as much as back. In the land of Israel, the rainy season is about to begin, and the festival's greenery and waving have long been connected with prayers for rain in the year to come.

That prayer comes to the front on Shemini Atzeret, the day that follows Sukkot. From then, daily prayers include the formal Prayer for Rain, continuing through the winter until Passover. A week spent under branches you can see the sky through ends, fittingly, by asking that sky for what the fields need next.

Then Simchat Torah turns the community from fields to scroll: the last verses of Deuteronomy are read, and Genesis begins again immediately.

Sukkot's teaching is carried in its materials. Walls that wobble, a roof that leaks starlight, a table set for guests you cannot see and guests you can. Security, it suggests, was never only in the solidity of the house. Your faith is beautiful, and sometimes it builds a booth to prove it.