Adventures in Judaism

It struck me at first as a poorly-conceived construction project. I mean, from an engineer's standpoint, a kosher sukkah just seems like an exercise in bad design choices. It is to be deliberately temporary, built to go up once, last a week, and then come down -- to be built again anew next year.* We built our sukkah last year to be such a deliberately un-sturdy structure, and it was no picnic to get it set up and stable. And even so it lasted in place until early spring, and taking it down was much more of a chore than it should have been! The roof is to be made of recently-living material, and it is to provide "more shade than sun" -- but only just so, with room to see several stars in the sky between branches or leaves or whatever you choose to use. That is, if you can see any stars in the sky at all in your part of the world. And if it's raining, you are just out of luck. It is to have three walls, covered in however solid or porous a material you like (...

New year holidays are interesting things. Somewhere on our calendar, we humans mark an arbitrary division between one year and the next, not representing any real change in the world around us. The natural world doesn't notice that we have changed the year number on our calendars, and yet we feel that something rather cosmic is happening, possibly something deeply personal as well. One way or another, we are aware at the marking of a new year that this is a time of endings and beginnings, both inside and out. And our reactions to this are somewhat bipolar. On the one hand, a new year is a time for celebration: we celebrate having survived yet another year, and we celebrate having another year to look forward to. In our secular New Year, at least here in America, we hold or attend lavish parties, staying up until midnight to experience the last few minutes of the old year and the first few minutes of the new. Oddly enough, by doing this we don't actually celebrate much of th...