Why do we know so much about people and know them so little?
We know who traveled abroad, who changed jobs, what someone ate yesterday and where their children study. Never have we had so much information about people. Yet loneliness has become one of the defining experiences of the age. Information is not relationship.
The Torah says about the joy of the festival: “You shall rejoice… you, your son and daughter… the stranger, the orphan and the widow within your gates” (Deuteronomy 16:14). The joy of Sukkot is not a private project. Maimonides writes that one who closes his doors, eats with his family and does not feed the poor and the brokenhearted is not experiencing the proper joy of a mitzvah (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Rest on a Festival 6:18).
A person can have thousands of “friends” online and no one to call at ten at night when the heart breaks. Sukkot asks not how many people follow us, but for whom there is a place at our table.
Loneliness is not always having nobody around. Sometimes it is having hundreds of people who know what you posted today while nobody knows what is actually happening inside you. Perhaps one of the deepest acts of the festival is to make one person feel that they are not invisible.