Galilee Diary #461, October 14, 2009 Marc Rosenstein
You shall live in booths seven days; all
citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may
know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of
the land of Egypt, I the Lord you God. -Leviticus 23:42-43
The day before Sukkot I was
walking down the street in Jerusalem, and kept having to make detours around the
"construction sites" of sidewalk sukkot being erected by restaurant workers. In
general, Sukkot offers a wonderful case study in the successful Zionist
transformation of Judaism from religion to culture. Sukkot are ubiquitous - on
roofs, balconies, courtyards, and parking lots. There are huge institutional
ones at hotels and kibbutzim and yeshivot, modest family models, and tiny ones
built by falafel stand owners to allow their customers to perform the mitzvah of
dwelling in the sukkah (usually interpreted as eating there). Indeed, the
sidewalk sukkot of Jerusalem are a classic case of the interface of religion and
capitalism: if you operate a kosher restaurant and want to keep your religiously
observant clientele during the week of Sukkot, you need to provide a sukkah or
they'll patronize the competition.
There are
different styles - in orthodox neighborhoods, the sukkot tend to be more
substantial, plywood sheets nailed on a wood frame to make permanent panels that
can be dismantled and stored from year to year. We had a sukkah like that in the
US - but that's because we always had a basement or garage to store it in. Here,
we followed the more popular option, buying a frame of square steel tubes with
interlocking brackets at the ends, on which we tie muslin sheets for walls; you
can buy these plain or printed with sukkah-themed decoration. Permanent skhakh (sukkah roofing), which seems an
oxymoron, is also extremely popular - loosely woven reed mats that can be rolled
up and saved from year to year. While these may be halachically acceptable, to
us they have always seemed not quite right, so we always cover our sukkah with
real branches; in recent years we have always been able to obtain enough by
waiting to prune the trees and bushes in our yard until the day before the
holiday.
Many people, of course, build a sukkah as a religious
obligation, and are meticulous about fulfilling the requirements of halachah
regarding dimensions and geometry and materials - and also about eating and even
sleeping in the sukkah. One of our favorite Jerusalem memories was of eating
holiday or Shabbat dinner in our sukkah and hearing the music of singing
families emanating from all the other sukkot along the parking lot of our
apartment block. However, thousands of sukkot are erected around the country -
by families, by kids in empty lots, by youth groups - not to fulfill a religious
commandment, but because that is what Jews do after Yom Kippur. In some ways,
for better or for worse, the sukkah in secular Israeli culture is like the
Christmas tree in secular American culture - a religiously attenuated yet still
very popular symbol of the season. Whether or not you believe that the Children
of Israel really lived in sukkot in the desert, whether or not you see eating in
the sukkah as a religious obligation, you cannot escape the sukkah as a feature
of the cultural - and physical - landscape, and I doubt that there are many
Jews, of any persuasion, who don't derive some joy, connection to the land and
to the seasons, family togetherness, and/or Zionist fulfillment from the sukkot
that spring up across the land for a week (which is, incidentally, a major
vacation period). And then having put ourselves at the mercy of the elements for
a week, we pack away the sukkah and go back indoors to wait (and pray) for the
rain.
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