Hag Sameach. And it truly is a Hag Sameach, because Succot in rabbinic literature is called “HeHag,” the Hag, the Rolls Royce of Jewish festivals (More on that later.) But the fact is, that whereas Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are all about soul-searching and T’shuvah, and Pesach is all about cleaning our houses and preparing for a Seder, and Shavuot is all about receiving the Torah from Mt. Sinai and staying up late to study; Succot is simply about having fun.
What, you don’t believe me, it’s in the Bible, so it must be true! In the book of Dvarim it says
That you should rejoice on Succot, you, your entire family and your entire household
וְשָֽׂמַחְתָּ בְּחַגֶּךָ .............
In fact the Torah even tells us…
וְהָיִיתָ אַךְ שָׂמֵֽחַ:
That we should only be happy on the festival of Succot!
The fact is that, compared to the other major festivals Succot is relatively easy to achieve in our day. After all in order to gather the Arba Minim, the four species of the Lulav, the Etrog, the Willow and the Myrtle together, all you have to do is order a set from Gershon Levine our executive director. He’ll even go to Brookline to pick them up for you!
So that’s it, it’s an open and shut case, No soul-searching, no fasting, no cleaning…. Succot is clearly the easiest holiday to prepare for and therefore the most fun as well.
Have I left anything out? Oh…I have? What…the Succah? Oh, I guess I did forget about that little ol’ thing. I guess I failed to mention the fact that another elemental part of the Succot holiday is the commandment to eat, sleep and live in a rickety booth of questionable architectural design for eight days. I guess that I also forgot to mention that in addition to the Torah telling us to only be happy on Succot, it also tells us that “We should dwell in booths for a week, in order to remember that God gave us shelter while we were wandering in the desert.” So that might throw a wrench into our plans for fun this week.
So now, instead of sitting back and relaxing between Yom Kippur and Succot, I have to go make six trips to Home Depot, charge the power drill and do some manual labor?
Well…maybe not.
You see there was an article in last weeks New York Times entitled “Bless this Hut: The Rise of the Prefab Sukkah.” Perhaps you saw it. It was written by a Jew from Minneapolis who ordered a prefab sukkah from just about every online site and tested them out. Yes, you heard me right…there are hundreds of online sites which sell ready to assemble sukkot in various styles and price ranges.
First there is sukkot.com which offers traditional wood framed sukkot as well as “tubular” frames made out of pvc pipe. Depending on the wall paneling, decoration and schach options you could be looking at a $400 to $1000 investment.
Then there is designersukkahs.com. This site has a variety of sukkot most coming with plastic walls decorated with pictures of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, The Kotel or even a Matisse-esque mosaic of Jewish holiday images. Not surprisingly, these sukkot are a little more on the expensive side of things, especially if you want the canvas walls, which I imagine is a good idea for the New England climate in October.
Finally there is sukkahdepot.com which offers a wood panel Sukkah, with a look of rich mahogany. It even comes with an optional door with a key-lock, in order to keep out those unwanted ‘sukkah squatters.’ Lazer Cohen, the manager of Sukkahdepot’s New York showroom (I’m not making this up,) calls this sukkah the Rolls Royce of sukkot. It will cost you close to $1500 and that’s not including the shipping for a 700 pound parcel.
So there you have it, the modern world has made the one difficult part of the Sukkot holiday, the construction of a temporary dwelling in your backyard, as easy as point and click. V’Hayita Ach Sameah, and you should only be happy!
But there was an interesting conversation in reaction to this article which appeared on Ravnet (the list-serve for Conservative Rabbis) early last week. In it, a colleague questioned whether or not this concept of a ready-made, solidly-constructed and exorbitantly expensive Sukkah is actually defeating the purpose the sukkah is supposed to be teaching us.
After all, isn’t the holiday of succot supposed to remind us of our sojourning in the desert for forty years? Isn’t it supposed to make us leave the comfort of our solid homes behind in order to give ourselves a taste of the vulnerability that our ancestors must have felt all those years ago? Aren’t we supposed to build these succot with our own hands? And lastly, should we really be spending fifteen-hundred dollars on ‘The Rolls Royce’ of sukkot, do we think that this is what the Torah had in mind for us?
Well, maybe it’s not exactly what the Torah had in mind for us, but maybe it is what the rabbis envisioned sukkot should be. In the Gemara of Masechet Sukkah the rabbis are of the opinion that one must lug all of their belongings up to the sukkah (their sukkot were on their roofs mostly) for the entire holiday. That means your dining room table, your mattress and even your pillows and blankets, anything that wouldn’t give you a hernia to lift. The phrase that the rabbis use is “Teshvu- k’ain Taduru,” your sitting in a sukkah, should be just like living in your house. And they give plenty of examples, just as you eat twice a day in your house, so too you should eat twice a day in your succah etc. etc.
So maybe these pre-fab sukkot are perfect examples of this…just as you spend a small fortune on your house…so it should be with your sukkah as well.
There is also a well-known concept of hidur mitzvah, ‘the beautification of a mitzvah’ as well. This concept encourages us not simply to perform the mitzvot, but to love performing them and to make everything about them beautiful. This is why we decorate our sukkot, why we choose to buy beautiful candlesticks and why the very idea of a Synagogue Gift Shop exists in the first place. In fact, when I was living in Israel a few years back, they set up these markets where you can go and personally assemble your own Lulav and Etrog sets. You can touch each etrog, looking for the perfect one, just big enough, with lots of bumps, a bright color and a wonderful smell. Indeed the concept of hidur mitzvah applies well to the etrog in particular, seeing as the Torah calls it “P’ri Etz Hadar”; the fruit of a beautiful citron tree.
So there you have it, I think I have convinced myself and maybe you as well that purchasing a fancy pre-fab sukkah is not only permissible, it may very well be religiously meaningful thing to do.
However, before I conclude today, I do want to put a good word in for the home-made kind. This year I enjoyed going to home depot a half a dozen times and still ending up with a sukkah design that required some last minute, emergency structural fortification. There is something to be said for the memories I have of helping my dad put up our family sukkah. It is heart-warming to think of Eliana’s family sukkah with magic marker outlines of her and her brother at ages eight and eleven. It is wonderful when our sukkot have more than just a little touch of our own families in them.
These home-made sukkot, may not be the prettiest, or the most well-made, or the most expensive; in fact they may be down-right dangerous to eat in at all; but they are certainly beautiful too.
May we all enjoy the comforts of our own sukkot and the sukkot of family and friends in the coming week, and may we rejoice together in the warmth that always comes with the beautification of a mitzvah.
Hag Sameach.
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