What A Sukkah Really Is

by Devorah Fineblum Schabb

 

Take a night drive through a Hareidi neighborhood in Jerusalem this week and you are surrounded by a host of sukkahs. Built on the tiniest mirpesot (balconies), tucked into alleyways and parking lots, on rooftops and sidewalks. Big ones, small ones. Fashioned of wood, nylon, plastic sheeting, metal fittings, PVC piping. Festooned with flashing lights, plastic fruits swinging in the breeze, childish artwork. It’s a week that must give Israeli fire marshalls nightmares. But build – and dwell therein – we must.

 

Religious and secular and everything in between, Israelis love their sukkahs.

 

But when you think of it, what does a sukkah do but push out our boundaries? Building a sukkah adjacent to our homes, we literally extend our homes and thereby ourselves. We extend ourselves with others; with the guest we might not invite into our home the rest of the year. Reminding us of what Abraham our father taught – he the first of the Ushpuzim (holy guests) we ceremoniously welcome into our sukkahs, the one who visits on the first night of the holiday. We extend ourselves spiritually, as we finish the final lap of this month of holidays designed specifically to cleanse and strengthen our souls for the rigors of the coming year.

 

All of our sukkahs are connected in Shemayim, in the Higher Realms, it has been said. No matter how many miles and oceans separate us. No matter how differently we pray or dress. When we sit in our sukkahs, we are one family.

 

And now, the headlines tell us, when we sit in our sukkah here in our land, in extending ourselves, we also make ourselves vulnerable in ways we never thought we would be here, never again. At last count, two Israeli children have been shot in their family sukkahs, one of them fighting for his life after emergency surgery. Just a couple hundred kilometers from where I sit typing these words tonight.

 

But there are no words for these children and their parents, or for the Henkin family or the Lavi family (Forty-one-year-old Rabbi Lavi was killed last night in the Old City, leaving a wife and seven young children). Except our prayers pleading for comfort for the bereaved, rising up of the departed ones’ souls, healing for the injured and protection for all of Am Yisroel in Eretz Yisroel and wherever we are. So we can sit in our sukkahs next year and the next and the next and none of us needs to be afraid.

 

 

Photo Credit: Tehillah Hessler