Sukkot 2038

The dates

Sukkot is the festival on which people move outdoors. Seven days, from 15 to 21 Tishrei, spent eating, and often sleeping, in a temporary hut put up in a yard, on a balcony or in a parking space. This year it runs 14-20/10/38.

Only five days separate it from Yom Kippur, and the calendar holds no sharper turn: from the quietest, most abstract day of the year to the most physical festival there is, one you cannot keep at all without picking up boards and branches and building something. The liturgy calls it "the season of our rejoicing"; in Israel it is also the autumn's great week off.

The festival day by day

A harvest festival that became a memory

Sukkot has had two faces from the start. It is an agricultural festival: the ingathering, at the close of the season, when the grain is stored and the fruit is picked; the last of the three pilgrimage festivals, and in Temple times the busiest of them. It is also an act of memory: the hut recalls forty years of temporary dwelling in the wilderness.

The liveliest picture of it left to us is in the book of Nehemiah. The returning exiles, reading the Torah at the start of Tishrei, found the command about huts in it, and went out to build them on their roofs, in their courtyards and in the Temple courts. Scripture adds a startling line: "for the Israelites had not done so since the days of Joshua son of Nun until that day, and there was very great joy" ¹.

It is one of the few places in the Bible where you can watch a custom being restarted in real time: a group of people reading a text, understanding what it says, and going out to build.

A hut and four species

The Torah gave this festival two commands you can hold in your hands, and that is very nearly all of it.

The first is the hut: "You shall dwell in booths seven days; every citizen in Israel shall dwell in booths, so that your generations may know that I made the Israelites dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt" ². The reason offered is not law but memory, and it is phrased as an instruction to the future: so that they will know.

The second is the four species: "On the first day you shall take the fruit of a goodly tree, palm fronds, a bough of a leafy tree and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days" ³. The Torah never says which tree bears the goodly fruit, or which one is leafy; tradition identified them as the citron and the myrtle, alongside the palm frond and the willow.

And note how the verse ends. The word attached to this festival more often than any other is rejoice.

What people actually do

Building the sukkah. The basic rule concerns the roof: the schach must be cut plant matter (branches, reeds, mats). It has to give more shade than light, and still leave gaps enough to see stars through at night. Construction starts the moment Yom Kippur ends, and in Israeli neighbourhoods the sound of hammering is what the days between the festivals sound like.

Decorating it. Paper chains, children's drawings, hanging fruit, string lights. It may be the one part of the Jewish year handed over entirely to children.

Taking the four species. A palm frond, a citron, three myrtles and two willows are bound together, blessed each morning of the festival and waved to the six directions. The markets that open beforehand are an experience in themselves, and choosing a citron there is done with a magnifying glass.

Ushpizin. A custom that invites a different biblical "guest" into the hut each evening. In plenty of homes it doubles as a good reason to invite actual guests.

Chol HaMoed. The intermediate days between the first and last are a half-holiday: travel and limited work are permitted, and in Israel they have become the country's great hiking week.

Hoshana Rabbah. On the seventh day the congregation circles the platform seven times, and at the end five willow branches are beaten against the ground, an ancient, unexplained custom that remains one of the most vivid moments of the year.

Simchat Beit HaShoevah. In Temple times the nights of the festival held a water-drawing ceremony and a celebration the Mishnah sums up in one unbeatable line: "whoever has not seen the rejoicing at the water-drawing has never seen rejoicing in his life" ⁴. The name came back into use in recent generations for evenings of music and dancing during the intermediate days.

Clouds of glory, or actual huts

What exactly were the booths the Torah tells us to remember? Two of the greatest of the early sages disagreed about it, and their answers are about as far apart as answers get.

An early tradition sets them side by side: "'For I made the Israelites dwell in booths' — they were clouds of glory, the words of Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Akiva says: they made themselves actual booths" ⁵.

For Rabbi Eliezer the hut recalls a miracle: clouds that enclosed the camp in the wilderness, a shelter no human hand built. For Rabbi Akiva it recalls precisely the opposite: people out in a desert improvising shade from whatever they had.

What is best about it is that the practice never settled the argument. The hut anyone builds today is both at once: a flimsy structure a person puts up himself, and still called tzila d'meheimnuta, the shade of faith. Sitting in one in the evening and catching a star through the roof, both answers feel right.

Why here, and why now

The order of Tishrei is what gives Sukkot its point. Five days earlier everyone stood for twenty-five hours without food, without water and without leather shoes, inside a day made entirely of words. And then, immediately, they go outside and build a shack.

There is nothing abstract about it. After a day on which everything was interior, the next festival asks for boards, nails and a roof you can see the sky through. Whoever spent Yom Kippur asking for something in words is now asked to live for a week in a structure a wind could shift.

Which is probably why this, of all festivals, is the one called the season of our rejoicing. The real house stays where it is, solid and shut; the festival asks you to step out of it for a week, not to give it up, but to remember that it is not the only thing holding you.

The seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah, closes the festival. Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah follow immediately, but they are a separate festival day, not the eighth day of Sukkot.

Common questions about Sukkot

When is Sukkot?

Sukkot always begins on 15 Tishrei and lasts seven days (14-20/10/38). On the civil calendar it drifts between late September and late October.

When does Sukkot start?

At candle-lighting before sunset on 14 Tishrei (13/10/38), four days after Yom Kippur. Exact times for your location appear at the top of this page.

How long does Sukkot last?

Seven days. In Israel only the first is a full festival day, followed by five intermediate days and Hoshana Rabbah. In the Diaspora the first two days are full festival days and the intermediate days number four.

When is Chol HaMoed Sukkot?

In the Diaspora, from the third day of the festival through Hoshana Rabbah (16/10/38 to 20/10/38). In Israel it starts a day earlier, on the second day (15/10/38), because only the first day there is a full festival day. Travel and limited work are permitted on these days, and Israeli schools are closed for the whole week.

What is Hoshana Rabbah?

The seventh and last day of Sukkot, 21 Tishrei. The congregation circles the platform seven times holding the four species, and at the end beats five willow branches against the ground. Tradition treats it as the sealing of the sequence that opened on Rosh Hashanah.

When does Sukkot end?

The festival itself ends at nightfall on Hoshana Rabbah (20/10/38). Shemini Atzeret begins immediately afterwards, but it is a separate festival day rather than the eighth day of Sukkot, and it has a page of its own.

Sukkot 2038 and after: dates and links

The festival begins at candle-lighting the evening before. The grid at the top of the page shows all seven days in sequence, the intermediate days among them, and the civil date beside the Hebrew one.

• Every festival of the year at a glance: Jewish holidays 2026
• The full printable calendar: home page
• The month it falls in: Tishrei

Related pages

• Printable calendar for October 2038
• The Hebrew month of Tishrei 5799
• All the Jewish holidays of 2038
• Printable 2026 Jewish calendar with holidays