Making Meaning of Our Fleeting Days — Sukkot Day 1 5787

When I was in elementary school, I got in trouble for something (which happened frequently) and my father sent me to my room (also not an unusual occurrence). I don’t remember what I had done, or exactly how long I was up there. It felt like several hours, although I suspect my recollection may not be entirely reliable on that point.

What I do remember is the argument I made when my dad came back for our “very serious conversation.” As best as I can recall, I tried to explain why whatever I had done shouldn’t matter. We were, after all, just specks of dust in the universe. In the grand scheme of things, what difference did any of this make?

I suspect that my argument had more to do with wanting to get out of trouble than with a serious concern about the meaning of life. Still, the conversation has stayed with me, even as I hope my reasoning has matured somewhat since elementary school (I know – jury’s still out). But seriously – why build a business, nurture a community, or get involved in a cause, when our efforts seem so small in the grand sweep of history, so insignificant against the backdrop of an infinite cosmos, and whatever we accomplish can be left unfinished, and ultimately undone? 

The question presses on us especially in our time. These days in particular, we see cruelty rewarded and decency dismissed as weakness, the futile and foolish endeavors of people who clearly don’t understand how the world works. We struggle for progress, only to discover how easily our achievements can be dismantled. There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from caring about things we cannot fix, at least not permanently.

You might expect our tradition to reject this point of view out of hand, or at least offer some reassurance. Surely our sacred texts will tell us that our work matters, that goodness triumphs, that something of what we accomplish will endure. 

And then we open the book of Kohelet, or Ecclesiastes, from which we read today.

“Hevel havalim,” it begins. “Utter futility! … All is futile!” And then, almost as if it had been listening to my childhood argument: “What real value is there for a person in all the gains they make beneath the sun?” One generation goes, another comes. The earth remains as it was. The people who came before us are forgotten, and those who come after us will eventually be forgotten, too (Ecclesiastes 1:2–4, 11). 

Think about the contrast Kohelet is drawing: each generation pours itself into its work, its ambitions, its struggles. Yet the earth carries on, and eventually even the memory of all that striving disappears. What, then, does all our effort amount to? 

The author of Kohelet considers this problem by conducting a series of experiments: Perhaps wealth will give life enduring value and cosmic significance. Perhaps pleasure will. Perhaps wisdom. He builds and acquires, seeks pleasure and pursues understanding, testing whether any of these endeavors will give him something he can hold on to. Yet whatever he achieves will pass into someone else’s hands. He cannot control what they will do with it. And ultimately all of it will be forgotten or else rendered meaningless.

His discussion of wisdom is especially surprising. “I found that wisdom is superior to folly as light is superior to darkness,” he says. “A wise man has his eyes in his head, whereas a fool walks in darkness.” Nevertheless, he concludes: “But I also realized that the same fate awaits them both.” The wise person dies, just like the fool. Both will eventually be forgotten. “To what advantage, then, have I been wise?” Kohelet asks (Ecclesiastes 2:13–16).

Kohelet’s analysis of righteousness is even more shocking for a biblical text: “The same fate is in store for all,” he says, “for the righteous, and for the wicked.” Goodness offers no exemption from mortality. We cannot count on virtue to secure a longer life, or even a more comfortable one (Ecclesiastes 9:2). If so, then why bother being good?

I think about the answer my dad gave me all those years ago when I challenged him about the meaning of existence. My dad, for those of you who don’t know, is a heart surgeon. He has dedicated his life to healing those who are hurt and caring for those who are sick. And he told me that day that while his work may not have mattered much on a cosmic scale, he felt satisfied that it had immediate significance in the lives of the people he helped. To someone who was suffering, relief mattered. Being able to return home, to resume the ordinary activities of life, to spend more time with someone they loved — these things mattered, at least to them.

My dad acknowledged that his patients’ lives might barely register in the grand sweep of history. But his point was that, to someone in pain, relief was not insignificant. His work did not have to change the course of the universe to make a difference worth making.

My dad couldn’t give his patients eternal life or cosmic significance. But he could help give them more time with the people they loved. Why should the fact that those days would eventually end, or that those relationships would never register on a historical or cosmic scale, make them any less precious?

Of course we want the good we do to endure. We should work to sustain it as best as we can, for as long as we can. But if only what lasts forever or makes a mark on history can matter, then most of what we do will never be enough. 

But, Kohelet teaches, that’s not the only way to define a meaningful life. In chapter nine, Kohelet concludes: “Go, eat your bread in gladness and drink your wine in joy…Enjoy life with a loving partner all the fleeting days of life that have been granted to you under the sun…Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might, for there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going.” Carpe diem. Gather ye rosebuds. Or, as the band CAKE puts it in the song “Sheep Go to Heaven”: “As soon as you’re born, you start dying, so you might as well have a good time.” Our limited reach and fleeting days give us reason to put ourselves fully into whatever we can do while we can do it. Enjoy life’s simple pleasures – nourishing food, good wine, loving relationships – while you can. These quotidian delights will never make the history books, but can still make a life worth living. Indeed, it is the very fact that we will not get to hold on to these gifts indefinitely that makes them precious and worth savoring.

Precisely because our days are fleeting, we have reason to cherish them — to enjoy what we can, to love whom we can, and to do what we can, for as long as we can. 

But if you are left feeling that “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” doesn’t quite sound like a fully Jewish answer to this classic existential question, you’re not alone. it turns out that Kohelet isn’t fully satisfied with it either – which helps explain why the book actually ends by saying: “The end of the matter, as all is heard: Revere God and observe the commandments – for this is the totality of human existence.” 

I have often thought of that closing instruction as something tacked on by religious editors uncomfortable with the book’s questions and more hedonic conclusions. I always thought the book’s real point was chapter nine: enjoy the life you have been given while you have it. Then later, some more puritanical redactor took it upon themselves to add: “Yes that. But also, more than anything, just be a good Jew.” It didn’t seem to fit. 

Now I wonder whether, whatever the history of the book’s composition, we are meant to hear those teachings as complementary: celebrate, and also sanctify. 

Arthur C. Brooks, who writes about the science of happiness, distinguishes between hedonia, the happiness of feeling good, and eudaimonia, the fulfillment of living with purpose. We need both, he argues: “Hedonia without eudaimonia devolves into empty pleasure; eudaimonia without hedonia can become dry.” We need reasons to get out of bed in the morning, and we need occasions to enjoy the day once we’re up. Read together, Kohelet’s teachings make room for both. The instruction to revere God and observe the commandments is not in place of the instruction to eat, drink, and be merry. Rather, it reminds us that enjoyment alone is insufficient. We also need purpose and significance. Our work, our relationships, even the way we eat and share a meal can become expressions of our commitments and our connections across time and space. That is what a life of mitzvot offers us. Even when the scale of our actions is small and their effects are temporary, through a life of mitzvot, we can understand our deeds as contributing to something greater than ourselves.

The final verse brings that responsibility into focus: God will call our deeds to account, including what is hidden, whether good or bad. (Ecclesiastes 12:13–14) That includes deeds no one applauds, deeds that never become part of the public record. At the beginning of the book, whole generations disappear from memory. At its end, even hidden acts are subject to God’s judgment. Whether we have done good or harm matters to God, even when history takes no notice. This does not erase the book’s tensions: good and evil do not reliably receive their due. Yet the book concludes by insisting that the difference matters before God. We remain responsible for our actions even when we cannot guarantee their results.

My dad’s work mattered in this sense because the people he cared for mattered. Their pain mattered. So did their capacity for joy. The commandments call us to take that seriously: to dedicate ourselves to good that may be small, that may be temporary, but that matters to those whose lives it touches, and ultimately to God who sees, cares for, and consecrates all across space and time.

On Sukkot, we practice both of these dispositions – at once enjoying and sanctifying. And we do it through an endeavor that can itself seem almost comically futile: building a sukkah. We erect our sukkot knowing full well that their end is to be taken down.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always experienced the idea of dwelling in a sukkah as much more pleasant than the reality of actually doing it. You go to eat in your sukkah, and it’s always either too hot or too cold. By the time you get all your cooked food from your kitchen to your hut, it’s no longer at the optimum temperature or consistency. Swarms of greedy flies seem to materialize out of thin air. Sudden gusts of wind send napkins flying and leaves into your soup bowls. You rush to eat while rain clouds threaten, only to have them disappear right as you finish.

And then, after a week of dealing with all this tzuris, let alone all the headaches involved in building the darn thing in the first place, down it comes, gone until the cycle starts over again next year. What a weird tradition! Like, let me just eat my meals in my house.

So much effort for a little hut that won’t even stay up! And yet, we build anyway. We make these temporary shelters beautiful and inviting. We fill them with food, family, and friends. We move our lives into these fragile shelters, filling them with light and laughter. The fact that the sukkah will come down does not make the meal less nourishing, the company less precious, or the joy less real. What we build does not have to last forever to be worth building.

And we build it for the purpose of fulfilling a mitzvah. We dedicate our labor, our hospitality, even the ordinary act of eating, to something sacred. This temporary structure becomes a place in which to encounter God and one another. We know how briefly it will stand, and we still recite a blessing there. We enjoy and we sanctify: we receive the beauty and bounty of this world, and we share them; we celebrate the life we have been given, and we use it to bless and benefit others.

After all, so much of what makes life worthwhile has to be done again. The hungry person we feed today will be hungry again tomorrow. Relationships need continual attention. A community depends on people who keep showing up. Justice requires people willing to defend what has been achieved and repair what has been damaged. That these things need to be done again does not mean they were pointless the first time. It means there is more for us to do.

Nor does accepting impermanence mean that we should become indifferent to what is destroyed. The people who suffer when a protection is removed or a community falls apart matter just as much as the people who benefited from building it. We have reason to mourn what is lost, to preserve what we can … and to begin the work of repair again.

Perhaps there is something you have hesitated to do because it seemed too small, or too temporary, or too easily undone. Someone you could help, a relationship you could tend, a cause to which you could contribute. This festival invites us to take that next step. We can do something worthwhile without being able to guarantee everything that follows.

So we build the sukkah. We set the table. We make room for one another. And we offer a prayer:

Infinite One, teach us to sanctify our fleeting days.

Give us the wisdom to recognize the worth of what seems small — the kindness no one notices, the work history will not remember, the good that must be done again.

Give us the gratitude to receive the gifts of this life — to eat our bread in gladness, to drink our wine in joy, to love the people with whom we are privileged to share our days.

Give us the courage to dedicate ourselves to something greater than ourselves — to help those who hurt, to feed those who hunger, to make room for those who need a place to belong.

Give us the strength to build what we cannot make permanent — to tend what is fragile, to defend what is just, to repair what is broken, and to begin again when our work is undone.

May the shelters we build become places of blessing. May the lives we touch be eased of suffering and enlarged with joy. And may we use the time You have given us to bless and benefit one another, to bring holiness into this world, all the fleeting days of our lives.

So may it be God’s will. Amen.