What Is Sukkos? The Festival of Booths

Four days after the gates close on Yom Kippur, Jews go outside and start building. Not a monument and not a shul - a hut. Three walls will do. The roof has to be loose enough to let the rain in. Within a week the whole thing comes down again. This is Sukkos (סֻכּוֹת, spelled Sukkot in modern transliteration), and it is the strangest and warmest of the three pilgrimage festivals: a holiday whose central mitzvah is to move out of your house.

When Sukkos falls in 2026

Sukkos begins at sundown on Friday, September 25, 2026, and the first day is Shabbos, Saturday, September 26. In the Diaspora the first two days are Yom Tov (September 26-27); in Israel only the first. The middle days - Chol HaMoed, ordinary life lived inside a festival - run September 28 through October 1, and the seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah, falls on Friday, October 2. Shmini Atzeres follows on Saturday, October 3, and Simchas Torah on Sunday, October 4. (In Israel those last two are a single day.) For the rest of the year's dates, see every Jewish holiday date for 2026-2027.

Why a hut

The Torah gives the reason itself, which it rarely does:

בַּסֻּכֹּת תֵּשְׁבוּ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים... לְמַעַן יֵדְעוּ דֹרֹתֵיכֶם כִּי בַסֻּכּוֹת הוֹשַׁבְתִּי אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּהוֹצִיאִי אוֹתָם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם

"You shall dwell in booths seven days... so that your generations will know that I settled the Children of Israel in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt" (Vayikra 23:42-43).

What the booths in the wilderness actually were is an old argument. The Gemara in Sukkah (11b) preserves a dispute: Rabbi Akiva reads them as literal huts, the shelters of a people camped in a desert, while Rabbi Eliezer reads them as the Clouds of Glory - the divine canopy that traveled with Israel for forty years. Both readings survive in the practice, and they pull in opposite directions. One says: remember how exposed you were. The other says: remember Who was covering you. Sitting in a hut for a week, you can hold both at once.

What makes a sukkah a sukkah

The walls are almost incidental - wood, canvas, a wall of your own house pressed into service. Everything hangs on the roof, called schach: it must be made of something that grew from the ground and has been cut from it, laid loosely enough that the stars show through and thickly enough that there is more shade than sun. Bamboo mats, palm fronds, and evergreen branches are the usual materials. A roof that keeps the weather out entirely is, by definition, not a sukkah.

The mitzvah is to live there for seven days - to make the hut the house and the house the temporary place. In practice that means eating meals in it, and many have the custom to sleep in it as well. Rain, cold, and a hundred local considerations affect how this is kept, and the details vary widely by community and climate; for what applies to you, ask your Rav.

There is a quiet joke in the whole arrangement. Judaism has a great deal to say about the permanent house - the bayit, and above it the Beis Hamikdash, called simply "The House." And then, once a year, it asks you to leave it and discover you are fine.

The lulav and esrog

The second mitzvah of the festival is a bundle of plants. Two verses earlier the Torah says וּלְקַחְתֶּם לָכֶם בַּיּוֹם הָרִאשׁוֹן פְּרִי עֵץ הָדָר - "you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of a beautiful tree" - along with palm branches, boughs of a leafy tree, and willows of the brook (Vayikra 23:40). Tradition identifies them as four species:

• Esrog - a citron, the fruit of the beautiful tree. It has taste and fragrance.
• Lulav - a closed palm frond. Taste, no fragrance.
• Hadas - myrtle branches. Fragrance, no taste.
• Aravah - willow branches. Neither.

The three branches are bound together and held in one hand, the esrog in the other, and the two hands are brought together while a bracha is said and the bundle is waved in each direction. The classic midrashic reading takes taste as Torah learning and fragrance as good deeds, which makes the four species four kinds of Jew - including the one with neither. The mitzvah is only valid when all four are held together. Nobody is left out of the bundle; that is the entire point of tying it.

One wrinkle applies this year. When the first day of Sukkos falls on Shabbos, as it does in 2026, the lulav and esrog are not taken that day - the same Rabbinic concern about carrying that silences the shofar on a Shabbos Rosh Hashanah. The four species are first taken on Sunday, September 27.

The season of our joy

In the prayers, Sukkos has a name of its own: זְמַן שִׂמְחָתֵנוּ - "the season of our joy." It is the only festival the Torah connects to joy repeatedly, ending with a phrase that reads almost like an instruction: וְהָיִיתָ אַךְ שָׂמֵחַ - "and you shall be only joyful" (Devarim 16:15).

The placement is deliberate. The joy does not come before the Days of Awe as a distraction from them; it comes four days after Yom Kippur, on the other side. Sukkos is also called חַג הָאָסִיף, the Festival of Ingathering (Shemos 23:16) - the farmer's harvest is in, the barns are full, and precisely then he is told to go sit in a shack. The Rambam closes his treatment of the festival with a coda worth carrying: the joy a person takes in performing a mitzvah is itself a great act of service.

Hoshana Rabbah, Shmini Atzeres, Simchas Torah

The seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah, carries an intensity the middle days do not. Where each morning of Sukkos includes one circuit around the shul with the four species and prayers beginning hoshana - "please save" - the seventh day has seven circuits, and closes with a custom of taking a separate bundle of willow branches and striking them against the ground. Many treat it as the last day of the season of judgment that opened in Elul.

Then the sukkah's job is done, and something else begins. The Torah appends an eighth day: בַּיּוֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי עֲצֶרֶת תִּהְיֶה לָכֶם - "on the eighth day you shall have an atzeres" (Bamidbar 29:35), a word meaning both an assembly and a holding back. The commentators read it as a host who cannot quite let the guests go: stay one more day. On it, and on Simchas Torah - the same day in Israel, the next day in the Diaspora - the annual Torah reading cycle finishes in Devarim and restarts immediately in Bereishis, and the scrolls themselves are carried around the room and danced with.

A house with holes in the roof

Every year the same argument is made in wood and bamboo. You build something that cannot last, you eat in it, you can see the sky through the ceiling, and for seven days that counts as home. Then you take it down and go back inside, having learned something you could not have been told: that the walls were never what was holding you up.

Bayit keeps the weekly parsha, daily tefilah, and Shabbos and holiday times in one quiet place - so the festival finds you ready to build.