The Joys of Being Bored
Sukkot as Anti-Mitzvah
“You shall dwell in Sukkot (huts) for seven days…” (Leviticus 23:42)
“In the muffled, sometimes irritable confusion of boredom we are reaching out to a recurrent sense of emptiness out of which our real desire can crystallize.”
Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored
“All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.”
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
The Jewish holiday of Sukkot is one in which we are commanded just to be. We’ve worked hard on ourselves over the days of Awe and it’s time to rest. “Come and dwell in the Sukkah, no need to do much more.”
The Sukkah requires building, yes, but it’s a humble structure. Type-A personalities might ask, but what can I do this holiday? All I have to do is hang out in a tent? But, of course, just being can be its own difficult endeavor. Presence, as any meditator knows, is far more elusive than worldly conquest. Taoists have long understood that effortlessness itself takes great effort.
It is customary to read the Book of Ecclesiastes on Sukkot. Why read a book that seems so depressing on a holiday most acutely associated with joy? The rabbis said that if it weren’t for their own commentary on Ecclesiastes, walking back its most despairing parts, the book would have to be “canceled.” (See Ecclesiastes Rabbah 1).
One of the classic rabbinic moves conducted on Ecclesiastes is this: Kohelet says “there is nothing new under the sun.” But the sages say, “above the sun, there is something new.” While Kohelet, on its face, says there is no transcendence, the rabbis smuggle it back in. Through a life of piety and observance, one can find meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. Their gloss saves the book—and saves us—from bottomless melancholy.
We can eye-roll at this move, which seems like an inability to let the despair be what it is. And yet…
If you read Ecclesiastes, it’s largely an account of boredom. It’s the memoir of someone who has tried it all and has found it empty. Psychologist Adam Phillips writes that boredom is a developmental achievement! The ability to be bored opens one to the experience of desire and creativity. It is our discomfort with boredom—not boredom itself—that causes us to mute our longing and our insight.
Phillips helps us see that the rabbinic interpretation of Ecclesiastes is not at odds with the plain meaning of the book. Rather, Ecclesiastes and its rabbinic interpretation form an emotional pair. It is by being bored (and thinking there is nothing new under the sun), that we are able to find that there is indeed newness in our midst. If we stopped ourselves from being bored we’d be worse off.
This may be one reason why we read Ecclesiastes on Sukkot. Sukkot is about the joy that we discover by doing nothing, the insight on the other side of restlessness, the vistas “above the sun” that we earn only by feeling trapped “under the sun.”
On Sukkot we are commanded to be joyful. But what is often overlooked is what it takes to get there. Paradoxically, Sukkot can be understood as a commandment to be bored, commandment to feel like there’s nothing to do. A mitzvah that is an anti-mitzvah, the Jewish version of Wei-Wu-Wei (“effortless effort”).
Having spent over a month confessing that we haven’t done enough, we now move to acceptance. We don’t have to have done enough, because we are enough. Having moved within a framework of what appeared to be conditional love, we come to rest in the joy of being loved unconditionally. In terms familiar to Christians, but which are also native to Judaism, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur emphasize “works” (Massim tovim) while Sukkot is a time for “grace” (Chein).
Sukkot are temporary structures, just as boredom is temporary. Life should not be boring. But the ability to sit with feelings of discomfort often initiates a clearing of higher awareness. While contrition is necessary for moral development, guilt can be distracting. Who are we when have nothing to confess, nothing to work on? The difficult question is enough to depress a King Solomon, but it is also the key to the closest intimacy we can have with ourselves and with God. Just by existing we find ourselves encompassed in what the Midrash imagines are “clouds of glory.”
Chag Sameach
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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