Sukkot: you can learn a lot from a booth

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 (we use wooden lattices for our "walls"), but it should be open on a substantial portion of the fourth wall. You know, like a good stage set.**

It is to be big enough to "dwell in," though it is apparently okay if your definition of "dwell" only adds up to eating one meal a day. To be fair, though, in this modern life I hardly do much more "dwelling" than that in my real house most days of the week.

Oh - and it should have room for an extra chair for the ushpizin, the legendary wanderers out of the pages of the Tanakh, a different one of whom we are to invite each night to stay with us.

It's not anything I ever would have thought to put in my backyard if I came up with this myself, that's for sure.

And yet, now that it's there, I really like it.

Because to complain about the design flaws inherent in the sukkah is to miss the point entirely. The sages of old who tell us how to build a sukkah were not out to create stable structures, but stable lives. They were makers of meaning, not of camping gear. They sought to teach lessons that would last far longer than any booth, tent, tabernacle or hut ever could.

Judaism is replete with ritual objects, and while most are quite pleasant to behold, none is designed purely for aesthetics. The sukkah may be the oddest of Jewish ritual objects, it is certainly the most cumbersome, and it is easily the one that requires the most effort, but it takes its place alongside the hanukkiah (Hanukkah menorah), the seder plate, and the havdalah set as objects designed with the purpose of conveying meanings.

So what can we learn from a sukkah? Here's my short list...feel free to add your own in the comments.

• Everything in life is temporary. Your home, your job, your health, your happiness -- any of it can change at what seems like a moment's notice. Heck, life itself is temporary. So appreciate the value of the temporary while it's here, and when it's time to move on...move on.

• A change in perspective is worth a lot. The same family, eating the same meals we often eat in the house, is transformed in the sukkah. It's cozy. It opens up our eyes to nature (or what passes for it in suburbia) and reminds us that, no matter how technically advanced we become, we still depend on growing-things for our sustenance and our survival. It corrals the family together, and helps us see each other again. It shuts out the world of clocks and to-do lists that try to rule our lives and the big-screen and small-screen distractions that try to disrupt those lives. Like Shabbat, it puts our attention back on what's important.

• In a world where almost everything is made for us, we can still make things for ourselves. With $150 and an afternoon of pretty heavy labor, a modern family can build ourselves a little home in our backyard. I grant you, it has no electricity or plumbing or HVAC or all of that, but it's a little home in our backyard and we built it ourselves. How cool is that?

• Shelter is important. Having a home is important. If three porous walls and half a roof transform a little corner of our backyard into a home outside of home, why is it that there are so many home-less people out there? We can do this, people. We have the technology!

• Hospitality and friendship are dying arts, and they too need structures to support them. That is why the sukkah is open on one side. Now, I have to admit that we have not been brave enough to invite any friends over to our sukkah yet this year, but we intend to. Or maybe next year if we don't manage it this time around. Really. At least we can still invite stuffed animals and ushpizin, right?

So, what are you all waiting for? Pick up some two-by-fours and go build yourself a booth. You have your own life lessons for it to teach you!

Happy Sukkot, everybody!

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* from what I can tell, Reform Jews feel free to disregard this requirement, making all or part of their sukkah a permanent installation. Both of the Reform synagogues I attend leave the main skeleton of their booth up year 'round, but achieve a spirit of temporariness by attaching a roof and walls each Sukkot and taking them down after the holiday ends. I may end up settling on such a compromise myself.

** you can't even get away with using of those pop-up shelters you can buy at sporting goods stores -- the kind that give you a roof and four poles. You could keep the four poles, but you would have to replace the roof with an incomplete cover of living material and find some way to add three walls. As long as you're going to that much trouble, just build your own darned sukkah. Which, of course, we did.