Dwelling in Fragility

The greatest strain on our marriage, my wife and I agree, is building our sukkah. It’s always a project left for the afternoon before the holiday of Sukkot starts, with only a few hours before it needs to be finished, while food sits on the stove and children dart around us, trying to “help.” A bamboo pole or two will conk me on the head and I’ll start to lose my temper; we’ll mutter in mutual frustration when I forget, as we try to put the roof up, that I’m five inches taller than her.

Yet there it will stand before the sun sets: our little hut, about twelve feet by six, a green mesh netting wrapped around and bungeed to its aluminum frame, a mat of bamboo slats tossed above for a roof, a few small tree branches that fell in a late-summer storm tossed haphazardly above to keep the thin covering from blowing off.

This, the space we’re commanded to “dwell” in during Sukkot, is where we will spend much of the next seven days. If the weather is warm, bees and wasps will harry us, seeing in our meals one last morsel of food before winter; if it’s cold, we’ll shiver in heavy coats over steaming bowls of soup. Whatever the temperature, both rain and starlight will easily find their way through the porous roof above us.

The only Sukkot holiday we really enjoyed building a sukkah together was the first year we celebrated the holiday together – and I’m still uncertain whether we actually fulfilled the requirements Jewish law sets out.

This was over a dozen years ago, before our engagement, when I had left Chicago for grad school four hours away. I came back to visit over Sukkot. We hauled bags of PVC piping, a small table and two chairs, sandbags, and a small potted tree to the roof of her downtown apartment and, working without any kind of design, built a small sukkah. We tried to weight the PVC frame in place with sand, borrowed the roof’s railing for two of its walls and tied (I think) a sheet in place for the third. That poor tree was cut apart and its branches and leaves tossed above for the skakh – the open, incomplete roof that makes a sukkah a sukkah.

It was a pitiful, ramshackle structure; still, it served its purpose, at least for an evening. We lit candles, welcomed the holiday, and ate a meal.

Photograph by ZUMA Press Inc / Alamy Stock Photo.

But this was Chicago, and the Windy City had no mercy on our little construction. At some point that night, it collapsed on itself, scattering branches, sand, and piping over the roof’s edge.

The biblical text simply instructs that future generations “dwell in sukkot” (booths) as an act of remembrance for doing the same during the Exodus from Egypt.  Like Judaism’s two other pilgrimage festivals, Passover and Shavuot, Sukkot contains an agricultural layer as well: it is a harvest festival. So a sukkah recalls the temporary, booth-like shelters of the Exodus, the divine shelter of the pillar of cloud that guided the Israelites, and the field huts that sheltered sleeping farmers during harvesttime.

Much of the discussion in tractate Sukkah, the volume of Talmud dealing with the laws of the holiday, focuses on the details of its construction: its minimum and maximum height, the materials that can be used for the roof, the nature of its walls, how to distinguish its nature as a “temporary” dwelling from a home’s permanence.

Ours was certainly temporary. But possibly too temporary. A sukkah must be completed before the holiday begins, and built with the intention of dwelling in it for the duration of Sukkot for it to be kosher. It can be repaired or even rebuilt during the holiday, but it must initially be capable of standing for Sukkot’s full seven days. Was ours? Well, maybe.

Temporary structures do not need to be fragile. Consider, for instance, the modern sukkah kit – like the one I now use. We follow a step-by-step design, using eye-pins to screw aluminum pipes together. There’s little room for user error; it’s not going to collapse on itself; even when I see the wind lift it slightly off the ground and move it a foot or two, its corners stay square. Or consider my more architecturally inclined friend, who has used the same self-designed wooden frame for around thirty years – more durable, I’d venture, than the prefab storage sheds you can buy at Home Depot.

A sukkah’s fragility lies not within its walls but its roof. This must be incomplete, with gaps large enough to see the stars and sky directly above. The material itself must be both natural, something that originally grew from the ground, and incapable of acquiring ritual impurity – that is, not yet transformed into a crafted thing. No metal, no plastic, no shingles. If you look at a sukkah today, you’re likely to see a roof made of tree branches on which drying leaves are still spread out, a mat of split bamboo poles, or, in the American Midwest, corn stalks. A sukkah’s roof is fragile not just because these materials leave gaps, but because they are light and loose – because even a light breeze might move them or pull them off. Even inside the frame of a sukkah, one can’t fulfill the mitzvah of dwelling there in any spot that’s left uncovered.

Our bodies, like a sukkah, are fickle and in need of repair. They can betray us and collapse on themselves – or be betrayed, by the whims of nature or by our own neglect.

On Sukkot mornings, I wake, pour a cup of coffee, and check to see if the skakh is still up. In the Talmud, as in rabbinic commentary throughout the millennia, there’s a great deal of discussion about what it means for a structure to be temporary; how to distinguish a sukkah from a house and what, on deeper levels, that distinction might mean. A sukkah cannot be permanent, but it must be capable of standing at least seven days. So, the Mishna, the Oral Torah, asks: Can you repair it or rebuild it during the holiday? After all, it should last the whole time. The answer is swift and the Gemara’s explication of the Mishna minimal: Yes, of course you can repair it. Why wouldn’t you?

It’s an answer that’s interesting primarily for what it takes for granted: that a sukkah will very likely require some kind of substantive repair, without which it wouldn’t be usable, during the holiday’s seven days. This is quite different from the kind of maintenance that a permanent structure – a house, for instance – requires. That a house’s chimney needs repointing or its shingles replacing every few decades is a sign of its durability. A sukkah only needs to be capable of lasting a week, but in practical terms, the structure will begin to fall apart before then. It’s fragile by nature and design.

This is a strange place to dwell during zeman simkhateinu, “the season of our rejoicing,” as Sukkot is called. It’s not only that Jews are commanded to dwell in a sukkah during the holiday, but that we must be joyful as we do so. For no other holiday does Jewish law impose this kind of emotional requirement. The season of our rejoicing – in a hut exposed to the rain and cold that has only three walls, and is in constant need of repair?

The easy answer might be found in a platitude about how the cold and constant drip-drip-drip of rain leads us to pay attention or take joy in the company around a table, in the very people we might otherwise take for granted. And it might do these things; it sometimes does. But, just as often, it can do the opposite: the hurried meal, the soup-stained winter coat, the rush to get children back into the warmth of the home, the realization it’s not especially comfortable to spend a meal sitting on your hands to keep them warm.

Turn instead to another oddity of this holiday: the reading of Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes, during holiday services. On Yom Kippur, we read Jonah, on the fast day of Tisha B’Av, Lamentations; Song of Songs on Passover; Ruth on Shavuot – there is a logic to the pairings. But Kohelet’s cynicism and skepticism in this, the season of our rejoicing? “A time to be born, and a time to die … A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance … A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.” Human nature, let alone the cold and leaky sukkah, is obstacle enough to joyfulness: must we consider these reminders too?

And then there’s Ecclesiastes’ famous beginning, the sentence the KJV renders, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Is it that all we need is this bare, temporary sukkah to rejoice – all our other trappings mere vanity? But wouldn’t even this dwelling be caught up in that all-encompassing “all”?

In Hebrew, the sentence reads, Havel havalim ha-kol havel. Hevel, which accounts for three of its four words, can mean vanity. That translation – like many others: futility, vapor, meaninglessness, smoke, emptiness – isn’t exactly accurate, but it brings hevel into English as a metaphor. In Hebrew, it’s one of several words for breath – not the deep breath, the ru’akh, of one’s spirit, but a shallow, ragged breath. Hevel, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks observes, is the theme of Kohelet, deployed thirty-eight times, more than in all other books of the Bible combined. “What obsesses Kohelet,” Rabbi Sacks writes, “is that all that separates life from death is a shallow breath. He is obsessed by the fragility and brevity of life, as contrasted with the seeming eternity of the universe…. Take breath away and a living body becomes a mere corpse.”

Put otherwise, we already know what it means to spend the season of joy in a fragile, temporary dwelling that will soon be taken down; we know it so well that we take it for granted. We experience all joy housed in a fragile, temporary structure: our imperfect bodies. A sukkah is meant to stand seven days; our bodies, tradition holds, seventy years. Perhaps, if you build immediately following Yom Kippur, twelve days; perhaps, should you live to the age of Moses, one-hundred and twenty years. (Biz hundert un tsvantsik, goes the Yiddish birthday toast, Until a hundred and twenty.)

Our bodies, like a sukkah, are fickle and in need of repair. They can betray us and collapse on themselves – or be betrayed, by the whims of nature or by our own neglect. A house, built well and well-maintained, is something we hope will outlive us. Our bodies simply cannot. We repair them, we maintain them – not to avoid their fragile impermanence but because of it.

Memento mori, one might be tempted to say, though Latin and Jewish thought don’t fit hand-in-glove. I’m more drawn to the novelist Philip Roth’s reputed refrain from his later years: “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Or is found, at least, in the fact that it ends. Defiantly secular, Roth nonetheless reached the same conclusion as Solomon.

And, perhaps, Tolkien. Consider, if you will, the latter’s Elves, who gaze on human mortality and call it, with wonder, “the gift of Ilúvatar,” God’s gift to Men. It’s not that they long to die, but for the purpose, the meaning, that the known fact of an ending can bring, even if that ending remains unknown. Eärendil’s story must end; Elrond’s might never. Without ending, the Elves fade. Read the saga of Middle-Earth from beginning to end and you know this doesn’t mean that they grow pale or translucent. What they lose, gradually, over millennia, is their capacity for rejoicing. There is a zeman simkhateinu in the Shire in a way that is not true of Rivendell.

Fragility, whether that of the sukkah or the human body itself, opens the space for zeman simkhateinu. On Sukkot, Kohelet becomes the voice of simkha, of rejoicing, and the sukkah its dwelling place precisely because nothing can endure forever. There is a time for everything under the sun; all is hevel – as fragile as a human breath.

But here is the image of a third sukkah, the empty sukkah at the end of the holiday: a skeleton frame in the dark, chairs at crooked angles, legs sinking into the lawn, debris from meals casting small shadows in dim, inconsistent light from our back porch. The skakh dangles precariously between bamboo poles, swaying in the breeze, threatening to fall.

During Sukkot, the grace after meals contains an additional line: “Merciful One, raise up for us the fallen sukkah of David.” The line is commonly read as a reference to the Messianic age – to rebuild the Temple, to restore the kingship of David’s house. But if the human body itself is a sukkah, this becomes an expression of an even deeper faith – that God will restore and repair not just His dwelling place on this earth, but our own.

At seventy, David’s body failed him. We find him bedridden, shivering beneath layers of clothes and blankets, impotent. We have all seen this happen, will all see it happen again and again, until – and this is a fact that we store away in the back storerooms of our minds – it inevitably befalls our own bodies.

That God will knit together my dry bones, restore the living flesh to them, breathe my soul into me again – I find this far harder to conceive, to truly believe, than in the restoration of a mere building. I am, in fact, not wholly certain that my mind does believe it. But if my brain struggles to accept this faith, my body nevertheless expresses it. If the body is a sukkah, then each act of repair to the one in my yard, each branch placed, each beam squared away, becomes, year after year, its own act of faith, the living practice of faith.