Mitzvot and Mindfulness: Extreme Sukkah Edition

By Rabbi Elyse Winick
KOACH Director

In a world of do-it-yourself shows and home improvement competitions, how fortunate we are to have an annual construction opportunity built into our calendar. Last year a New York competition took the sukkah building experience to the next level with a Sukkot-long festival of architectural imagination. We house and dorm-dwellers crave the adventure of living outdoors, we crave the ability to decorate and design and relish the temporary quality which frees us to create without limitation. The sound of hammer on nail echoes in our souls.

We could easily get carried away by the Sukkot aesthetic, easily forget the identity of the sukkah as shelter in God’s presence or harvest hideaway. Or worse, forget that what is in the sukkah matters far more.

The halakhot (laws) of the sukkah require specific minimum dimensions and numbers of walls. They obligate us to feel that we truly dwell there, taking our meals in the sukkah and even sleeping there if that is an option. When is a dwelling place truly ours? When we invite guests to share our space and dine with us. The Kabbalists took this to a higher spiritual level, inviting ushpizin, Biblical guests whose presence honors us, even as we honor them. They are a reminder of the first act of hospitality, when Avraham welcomed the three stranger-angels into his home.

The notion of hospitality as the ultimate fulfillment of our Sukkot observance resonates for me. We are remembering a time when we were rootless, placeless. Guests in our sukkot help us bridge the permanence of home with the impermanence of wandering. They allow us to celebrate that in some sense, that wandering is over.

This year, fill your sukkah with guests, old friends and new, even if it simply means inviting someone to join you in the Hillel sukkah. If you’d like to add a mystical dimension, the ritual for ushpizin can be found in a traditional festival prayerbook; an egalitarian version can be found here.

May your Sukkot be free from rain and bees and may your sukkah be a gathering place and a place of learning.

[Posted 9/28/11]