(1) The words of Koheleth son of David, king in Jerusalem. (2) Utter futility!—said Koheleth— Utter futility! All is futile! (3) What real value is there for a man In all the gains he makes beneath the sun? (4) One generation goes, another comes, But the earth remains the same forever. (5) The sun rises, and the sun sets— And glides back to where it rises. (6) Southward blowing, Turning northward, Ever turning blows the wind; On its rounds the wind returns. (7) All streams flow into the sea, Yet the sea is never full; To the place [from] which they flow The streams flow back again. (8) All such things are wearisome: No man can ever state them; The eye never has enough of seeing, Nor the ear enough of hearing. (9) Only that shall happen Which has happened, Only that occur Which has occurred; There is nothing new Beneath the sun! (10) Sometimes there is a phenomenon of which they say, “Look, this one is new!”—it occurred long since, in ages that went by before us. (11) The earlier ones are not remembered; so too those that will occur later will no more be remembered than those that will occur at the very end. (12) I, Koheleth, was king in Jerusalem over Israel. (13) I set my mind to study and to probe with wisdom all that happens under the sun.—An unhappy business, that, which God gave men to be concerned with! (14) I observed all the happenings beneath the sun, and I found that all is futile and pursuit of wind: (15) A twisted thing that cannot be made straight, A lack that cannot be made good. (16) I said to myself: “Here I have grown richer and wiser than any that ruled before me over Jerusalem, and my mind has zealously absorbed wisdom and learning.” (17) And so I set my mind to appraise wisdom and to appraise madness and folly. And I learned—that this too was pursuit of wind: (18) For as wisdom grows, vexation grows; To increase learning is to increase heartache.
...We sit flush with the world, in a ‘house’ that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no shelter. It is not really a house. It is the interrupted idea of a house, a parody of a house… It is like that architectural feature called the broken pediment, the notch in the roofline of the facade of a house which leaves the mind to complete the line, and thus implants the idea of a line in the mind even more forcefully than an unbroken line would. So it is that the sukkah, with its broken lines, its open roof, its walls that don’t quite surround us, calls the idea of the house to mind more forcefully than a house itself might do.
And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it [...]
In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need. The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another.
Rabbi Alan Lew, z''l, from This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared
(7) Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God.