• Table For Five

What can we learn from dwelling in a sukkah?

Table for Five: Sukkot

In partnership with the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

Edited by Nina Litvak & Salvador Litvak, the Accidental Talmudist

For a seven day period you shall live in booths. Every resident among the Israelites shall live in booths, in order that your [ensuing] generations should know that I had the children of Israel live in booths when I took them out of the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. – Leviticus 23:42-43

Rabbi Elchanan Shoff
Head of School – The New Yeshiva High School of LA

Any “ezrach” or “resident” must dwell in a sukka. The Torah calls us all “residents.” A person who feels permanent with a sense of belonging and identity can forget that we are all just visiting this earth. He can fail to stay humble, remembering that life’s a gift – precious and fragile.

Judaism teaches that far more important than anything that this world has to offer is spiritual Truth. Abraham allows himself to be thrown into the fiery furnace rather than deny the One True God. Throughout the ages, Jewish people have sacrificed their lives with Shema on their lips – rather than give in to wicked people. Because this world is simply not all that important when compared to spirituality and a relationship with the infinite God. We love and cherish life – it is the most magnificent opportunity to connect with God and Truth and refine ourselves so that we can eternally enjoy our relationship with God in the world to come. It is a place where we can be kind, loving, loyal, and charitable. This world is a means to a very important end – and so extremely important. But the world isn’t worth much on its own. It’s temporary. Leave your home! Remember that the roof isn’t what really protects you – it is God. What is real and important is not our temporary homes – they are but means to find our way into the embrace of God.

Rabbi Janet Madden, PhD.
Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue

We decorate our sukkot for beauty and comfort; we roof them with branches, exposing ourselves to wind, rain, sun, stars. And, as our pasuk states, every ezrach, (“citizen”) of Israel must dwell in sukkot for seven days, the cyclic number of completion.

The shoresh of ezrach, zarach, means to “rise/ shine/spring up.” The ezrach, then, is one who rises, shining, springing up from the land like the trees whose branches and fruit we use to bless in every direction. Commanded to dwell for a week in sukkot, the ezrach reconnects to—somatically reenacts—leaving the land of constriction so as to be led home and rooted there.

Being an ezrach is not an individual experience. Sukkot 27b advises: “It is fitting for all of Israel to sit in one sukkah.” This image of mutuality within a singe fragile structure reminds us that life itself is a shared liminal experience. In the sukkah, we sit, eat, study and sleep in the fragility of impermanence. We live as part of the natural world—not apart from it—generationally re-rooting in our history and land.

Surely, this commanded experience of liminality is intended to teach us, in the words of Thích Nhất Hạnh, “to respect and value every moment and all the precious things around us and inside of us.” Living for a week in shared liberatory joy, including our ancestral guests, shows us how to simplify and focus, how to live connective holy lives, springing up so that we can shine.

Abe Mezrich
Author: Words for a Dazzling Firmament

You live in your country.

No: You live in a hut, a shack.

No: You live in the unshackling,

in your release

into nothing you own,

into all that is God’s.

Which is everything.

Michael Berenbaum
Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, American Jewish University

What We Remember, What We Forget

Whenever I am invited to comment on one verse of the Torah for the Table for Five, I try to read it anew, to imagine that I have never read the verse before. In essence that it is what we must do for while the Torah does not change, we do. This year I was taken by the verse: “I had the children of Israel live in booths when I took them out of the land of Egypt.”

A historian might describe it much differently. “I had the children of Israel live in booths as they struggled for 40 years in the desert.” After all the booths were temporary, fragile, portable, quasi-protective, transportable, somewhat easy to assemble, somewhat easy to take down. In Halakhah, the Sukkah must offer greater shade than sunlight but must offer only partial protection from the elements.

Think of how Jeremiah remembered this history. We just chanted in the Zichronot: “Go proclaim to Jerusalem: Thus said GOD:

I accounted to your favor

The devotion of your youth,

Your love as a bride—

How you followed Me in the wilderness,

In a land not sown.  (Jeremiah 2:2)

Both God and the Jewish people want to remember the great moment – the Exodus, the exhilaration of the first breath of freedom and not the drudgery of the arduous journey to the Promised Land, standing at Sinai, not building the Golden Calf. As we retell our history, we too have a selective memory and too often, selective amnesia.

David Sacks
Happy Minyan of Los Angeles

The sukkah represents the vulnerability of life. After Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, our faith in G-d is so high that we can dwell in this rickety little hut, and say, “I’m in Your Hands, G-d. And not only do I feel safe, I feel great!” The holy Ari teaches that the sukkah is a Divine hug! Sitting in the sukkah, we feel in the deepest way that our security doesn’t come from our bank account, or the four walls of our house, or our burglar alarm, but only from G-d.

The sukkah, though, has its own surprising requirement. If the walls of a sukkah are made out of curtains, and the curtains are too billowy, meaning to say, if the wind can blow the curtains of the sukkah back and forth, believe it or not, the sukkah is not kosher. In other words, while the sukkah represents the impermanence of the world, you also need to have stability.

That is the balance that the Torah asks us to walk through life with. This world is not an illusion. On the other hand, if we believe too much in the laws of nature, and not enough in the miraculous, then that’s not Torah, either.

We need Divine balance. As Reb Shlomo taught, the hardest thing is to have your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground. The sukkah teaches us how to do both!

With thanks to Rabbi Elchanan Shoff, Rabbi Janet Madden, Abe Mezrich, Michael Berenbaum, and David Sacks.

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