“It is not happy people who are thankful, it is thankful people who are happy.”  

I love these words and find them so fitting for Sukkot. Coming on the heels of the Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe, Sukkot reminds us to stop, recognize the world around us, and give thanks and rejoice. 

What do I mean? For the past few weeks, we were inside, in our homes and shuls, focused on ourselves and our teshuvah. We were serious and introspective, and then Sukkot comes and completely changes our mindset. It calls on us to step out of ourselves and to step into the world, rejoice and give thanks.   Following a season that asks us to focus on change, Sukkot is yet another “wake up call,” this time a call for us to “stop and smell the roses.”

Too often, we are focused on ourselves and our own little world.

We go from work to home to activities, and we measure our happiness and our blessings by what we have or what we get done and experience in a day or a week. Sukkot, suggests otherwise. It reminds us to look around and notice the blessings in our lives, both big and small. 

Historically, Sukkot commemorates the 40-year period during which our ancestors wandered the desert and lived in temporary structures (sukkot).

Throughout that 40-year journey, we know from the Torah of the ups and downs, trials and travails, and the complaining, lots of complaining. Too often, as we are wont to do today, our ancestors focused on what they didn’t have and all too often forgot to give thanks for and be happy about what they did have.  

Sukkot reminds us that happy doesn’t come before thanks; rather, thanks comes before happy. Why? Because when we focus only on that which makes us happy, then we miss out and fail to notice the blessings that are right in front of us – maybe not the ones we think we want, but nonetheless blessings.  

As a Yiddish proverb reminds us: “If you cannot be grateful for what you have received, then be thankful for what you have been spared.”

When we start with gratitude and thanks, this is when we truly see and experience the beauty in the world around us. 

During this Festival of Sukkot, this season of thanksgiving and joy, may our eyes be opened to the many blessings that surround us, and may we recognize that it is gratitude and “gratefulness which makes the soul great [happy],” as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it.

Brigitte Rosenberg is Senior Rabbi at United Hebrew  Congregation and is a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical Association.