Sukkot: Rootless

The hut

Any makeshift shelter is called a sukkah in the Hebrew Bible. When Jacob settles for a while somewhere between the Yabok River and the city of Shekhem, he throws together makeshift shelters for his animals:

… he built a house for himself and he made sukkot for his livestock; therefore the name of the place is called Sukkot. (Genesis 33:17)

sukkah (סֻכָּה) = hut, shack, “booth”; temporary shelter. (Plural: sukkot, סֻכּוֹת.)

Jonah, after he has finally delivered God’s prophecy to Nineveh, makes a hasty sukkah for himself on a vantage point east of the city so he can sit and see whether God destroys it or not.¹ A flimsy shelter for harvesters in the field, or for a watchman guarding a ripening crop, was also called a sukkah.²

In biblical poetry, God makes sukkot out of thunderclouds, which are also temporary and flimsy. Dark and dense at first, they evaporate when the storm is over.³

The holiday

Sukkot is also the name of a seven-day harvest holiday that Jews still celebrate today; this year it begins at sunset on September 29. The Torah readings for the first day of Sukkot are Leviticus 22:26-23:44 and Numbers 29:12-16. The festival is also mandated in Deuteronomy 16:13-17. But the three passages in the Torah do not agree on where Sukkot should be celebrated.⁴

In Numbers and Deuteronomy, Sukkot is one of the three annual pilgrimage festivals in which all men (often accompanied by their families) must come to Jerusalem and make offerings at the temple.⁵

The reading from Leviticus initially requires people to refrain from working at their jobs on the first day, and to bring offerings to God on all seven days.⁶ Next comes a two-verse conclusion to the list of holy days in the year, followed by an extra passage about Sukkot which was probably inserted later by a redactor.

In this insertion, God mandates a harvest celebration ritual suitable to conduct at home.

And on the first day you must take for yourselves fruit of the citrus tree, open hands [palm-branches] of date-palms, and branches of the myrtle tree, and willows of the creek. And you must rejoice before God, your God, seven days. (Leviticus/Vayikra 23:40)⁷

The flexible branches from the three kinds of trees (date palm, myrtle, and willow) are bound together into a lulav, which is shaken to encourage the rainy season to begin. Shaking a lulav makes a sound like rain.

Then the God in Leviticus issues a further order:

In sukkot you must dwell seven days; all the natives in Israel must dwell in sukkot, so that your generations will know that I made the children of Israel dwell in sukkot when I brought them out from the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 23:42-43)

Leviticus does not tell Israelites to dwell in sukkot in Jerusalem, where they are supposed to make the animal offerings. The book of Nehemiah, set in the mid-fifth century B.C.E., gives people two options for dwelling in sukkot: they can do it on their own property, or in the courtyards of the temple in Jerusalem. Nehemiah reports that the Jerusalemites went out to hills to collect branches of olive, pine, myrtle, and palm trees, as well as other leafy trees.⁸

And the people went out and brought them, and they made themselves sukkot, each man on his roof, and in their courtyards, and in the courtyards of the House of God … (Nehemiah 8:16)

Holiday huts

The tractate Sukkah in the Babylonian Talmud recommends that every household build a sukkah as a temporary residence for the seven days of Sukkot. (However, it is permissible to use someone else’s sukkah, as long as you have your own lulav.⁹) Most sukkot were built on the flat roofs of houses, but they could also be built on the ground, or even on a wagon or ship if someone was traveling.¹⁰

With a few exceptions, all men must eat meals and sleep in a sukkah; women and children are welcome, but not required, to join them. But if rains ruins the food, or prevents people from sleeping, everyone can go back into their permanent house to finish the meal or the night’s rest.¹¹ After all, sukkot is supposed to be a happy holiday.

The sukkah must be constructed expressly for the festival, not for any other use.¹² It must have two complete walls and a third wall that is at least a handbreadth wide; the fourth side of the structure can be open.¹³ The walls can be made out of almost anything, as long as the sukkah is a temporary structure; you can even use an elephant as part of a wall, as long as the elephant is securely tied!¹⁴ But the Talmud recommends beautifying the sukkah with colorful sheets and other ornaments, and using your best dishes and bedding when you eat and sleep in it.¹⁵

The roof is especially important. It must provide more shade than sunlight¹⁶, yet it must include some gaps through which you can see the sky. The roof cannot include animal skins or anything else that could become ritually impure.¹⁷ The framework of the roof can be made of boards, or even metal skewers.¹⁸

But something that grew from the ground should be laid over the roof frame.¹⁹ According to the Talmud,²⁰ the best kinds of roofing are straw from which grain was winnowed on the threshing floor, and vines from which the grapes have been stripped for the winepress—because the Torah says:

The festival of the Sukkot you must make for yourself seven days when you gather from your threshing floor and from your winepress. (Deuteronomy 16:13)

What if someone trained vines to grow over a potential sukkah frame? The Talmud answers:

If one trellised the grapevine, the gourd, or the ivy, climbing plants, over a sukkah while they are still attached to the ground, and he then added roofing atop them, the sukkah is unfit, as roofing attached to the ground is unfit. If the amount of fit roofing was greater than the plants attached to the ground, or if he cut the climbing plants so that they were no longer attached to the ground, it is fit.” (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 9b)²¹

The roof of a sukkah includes plant material that grew from the ground, but is no longer attached to the ground. Similarly, during Sukkot we are supposed to uproot ourselves from our grounded lives, and live in temporary shelters, flimsy and impermanent.

Rootless

The Sages taught: All seven days of Sukkot, a person renders his sukkah his permanent residence and his house his temporary residence. (Sukkah 28b)²²

For seven days only, we pretend our lives are rootless and temporary. Then we move back into our “permanent” homes—if we are fortunate enough to have them.

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Refugees from natural disasters, or from disastrous governments, often live in temporary housing in camps, waiting for months or years for their own homes.  When I leave my comfortable apartment and walk down the street, I see homeless people living in pup tents with makeshift awnings, which they set up in parking strips or under bridges—until they are ordered to move on.

A sukkah roof that looks green on the first day of Sukkot is often withered and brown by the seventh day. Can rootless human beings sustain life any better than rootless plants?

And can those of us blessed with rooted lives remember that nothing lasts forever, and our lives are temporary, too?

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1. Jonah 4:5.
2. Isaiah 1:8, Job 27:18.
3. 2 Samuel 22:11, Psalm 18:12, Job 36:29.
4. Scholars do not agree on when these three books were written, but a common theory is that Numbers and much of Deuteronomy date to around 600 BCE, while Leviticus was written later, from roughly 550 to 350 BCE.
5. The other two pilgrimage festivals are Pesach (Passover) and Shavuot.
6. Leviticus 23:35.
7. Instead of “the citrus tree”, the Hebrew says a tree of hadar (הָדָר) = splendor, beauty. The Talmud determined that meant a tree bearing a citrus fruit called an etrog (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 31a, 36a). Instead of “the myrtle tree”, the Hebrew says a tree of avot (עָבֺת) = thick foliage. The Talmud determined that this meant the myrtle tree (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 12a, 32b).
8. Nehemiah 8:13-15.
9. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 27b.
10. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 22b.
11. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 29a.
12. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 9b.
13. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 4b, 7b.
14. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 23a.
15. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 28b.
16. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 4a, 22b.
17. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 11a.
18. Boards less than four handbreadths wide are acceptable in the roof, as long as the gaps between them are as wide as the boards—and partially filled in with vegetation (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 15a). Sukkah 15a also permits metal skewers.
19. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 11a.
20. Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 12a.
21. William Davidson translation in www.sefaria.org.
22. Ibid.