Sukkot is the Jewish Harvest Festival. Sometime in October according to the Jewish calendar, we are commanded to go outside and construct a small dwelling. This little bower is called a Sukkah (or as my aunt would call it, a sukkus). Then, for a week, we dwell in it, eating our meals and lighting our candles out in the open autumn air. Some really serious Jews even sleep in their sukkah. I haven’t gone that far yet, but I want to when I have the time and space do it right.
Sukkot (pronounced sue-koe) is a special holiday because it asks us to engage our creative side. As human beings, we are unique among animals in that we collect various materials and combine them to build elaborate places to live. Only birds and termites and beavers come close. This holiday acknowledges our special talent, and asks us to spend some of our time working with our hands directly to make something useful. If you have never built a standing structure before, the task is actually quite hard! My own sukkah last year barely stood up. I definitely couldn’t lean on it, but it managed to survive the wind and the rain. It eventually withstood the snows too. I was damn proud of it, and I made it with dead wood from the backyard nailed together and bound with some twine I picked up at Home Depot. Sukkot is a craftsman’s holiday.
There is something transcendental about Sukkot as well. God is asking us to abandon our comfortable (and heated) homes for the harder reality of the sukkah. He wants us to eat and drink under the stars like the shepherds of old. For folks that have never roughed it before, Sukkot is a wake up call. Even an hour out in the cold is enough to teach a little humility. I can’t think of any other holidays that demand its practitioners literally go outside and experience the elements just for the sake of remembering that they are there. It shows us how far we’ve come, and also how much we’ve lost along the way.
I definitely faced some hard reality when I tried my hand at making a sukkah for the first time last year. I pictured in my mind a fully enclosed cabin with chairs and a table, a little window and maybe even a shelf to hold things. Well, the final product didn’t even have walls. Just trying to dig 4 post holes in that petrous New England soil was nearly impossible. I dented the tip of my shovel on a glacial boulder lurking not a foot beneath my favored spot. I used thick branches as legs to buttress my sukkah’s main posts from the ground, but perhaps it would have been smarter to create tresses attached to ceiling so that the structure could internally support itself. Fitting the wood was laborious– my only cutting tools were a little leatherman knife and battery powered sawzall my uncle let me borrow. The roof of my sukkah was composed of as many branches as I could fit together, bound with twine, but I just couldn’t get them thick enough. Pine branches with their needles intact provided the best cover, but rain penetrated the whole structure regardless. I plopped a mold plastic chair inside and called it a day.
Faulty as it was, I loved that thing. I made it, it was mine. The neighbors thought I was a little nuts, but I pushed through the shame and sat and ate in it. Smoking in it was nice.
The joy of that Sukkot was cut short unexpectedly when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023. Smack dab in the middle of Sukkot, as I remember it. My stomach dropped when I read the news– not because of the atrocious violence that was committed against my fellow Jewish people, but because I knew immediately that this was the start of another horrific episode in the violent hatred of the Israelis and the Palestinian People. I was proved right in short order. 2000 Palestinians were dead within the first few weeks, and over months the number of direct deaths grew to tens of thousands (untold tens of thousands more have died from complications arising from the annihilation of all infrastructure). As of now, almost every school, hospital, and university in the Gaza strip has been leveled. In the name of revenge, Israel has literally transformed Gaza into a sandy parking lot. The Jews have succeeded in taking everything from the Gazans.
While I was having my cozy transcendental experience building my sukkah in the woods of New England, Israeli settlers in the west bank were interpreting the holiday in a darker way. In Huwara, a town in the west bank, the sukkah was being weaponized as a symbol of conquest. A funeral procession was being held for Labib Dumedi, a 19 year old Palestinian that was shot and killed by a settler. Zvi Sukkot, a member of the Knesset (Israeli government), decided to erect a sukkah right in the middle of Huwara’s main road, blocking the procession and daring the Palestinians to get angry about it. And so, Zvi illustrated the dark side of construction– colonization, the claiming and transforming of land for the benefit of the settler at the expense of previous occupants. He used the sukkah as a political icon. A weapon.
This incident occurred two days before the events of October 7th.
This year, some Israelis are rallying behind Sukkot not as a means of connecting with God and nature, but as an exercise in settlment. An organization called the Nachala Settlement Movement is holding a “Preparing to Resettle Gaza Conference”, stating that the conference was “planned not only as a theoretical conference, but as a practical exercise and practical preparation for resettlement in Gaza.” They built 50 sukkahs along the Gaza-Israel border.
“The return to settlement in Gaza is no longer an idea, but a move that is currently in an advanced stage with the support of the government and the public.”
I like my Sukkot better. Humility, modesty, and a love of God and the miraculous world he created for us…. that is what the Sukkah should represent. Using it as a tool of conquest, the germ of an expanding empire that seeks dominion over others, that’s just not right. As human beings, we have the power to create and destroy. The choice is ours!
I did not build a Sukkah this year. But I did build a little log hut in Minecraft.