On Leviticus 22:26–23:44 and the architecture of Sukkot
I have never been sure what to do with a roof I can see through.
That is what the sukkah asks of you, and the text is specific. Leviticus 23:42 says teishvu, you shall sit in booths seven days, and the roof covering has to come from what grew and was cut down, branches and leaves, laid loosely enough that starlight and rain get in. The root of the sukkah is skhakh, to cover or weave together, and the covering, unlike a thatched roof, was never meant to seal you off from the sky. It was meant to let you feel the sky while still being inside.
The reason for this is in the next verse: So that your descendants will know I had the people of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of Egypt. The sukkah is not a shelter you build because you need one. We build it from memory, with our own hands, concretizing the story for our children.
The timing of this is important. Four days earlier, on Yom Kippur, we stood fully exposed and vulnerable, asking to be seen and forgiven. The Torah’s answer to that kind of exposure is not to hand you back your walls and their security; it shouldn’t be back to business as usual; it marks a change and a fresh start. We build a weaker version of our home on purpose, and then we are commanded, more explicitly than anywhere else in the text, to be joyful inside it. U’smachta lifnei Hashem Elokecha shivat yamim (Lev 23:40), you shall rejoice before your God seven days. Not despite the thin roof. Inside it.
This understanding challenges a common assumption: joy comes only after you are safe. The Torah seems to argue something very different. The joy the Torah commands does not come after vulnerability is resolved. It comes while vulnerability remains, literally overhead, with stars and the moon peeking through.
Sukkot is also called Chag Ha’Asif, the festival of the ingathering, the harvest at its fullest. The same seven days celebrate the year’s greatest abundance and the temporary dwelling you build to remind you how little you actually control. The text wants to hold these in tension. You can have enough, even abundance, and still go outside and sleep under branches, because fullness was never what made you truly secure to begin with.
Secure space is different from sacred space. The text doesn’t offer a simple answer to that question here. The sukkah doesn’t keep out the weather. It keeps you sitting with people who chose to sit with you, under a flimsy roof that offers no protection. The shelter isn’t in the structure; it is in the people who showed up to dwell in the sukkah with you. Quoting my own tagline: “God’s miracle isn’t in the thunder and lightning but in people sheltering others from the storm.”
Most of what we build in our lives, including our institutions, our homes, even our religious practice, is built for permanence. We reinforce it and want it to hold. And once a year, our tradition asks us to build the opposite on purpose, something that cannot hold, and to call that the dwelling place of joy.
So, my conclusion isn’t a conclusion at all. Instead, I am left with a couple of questions: Where in your life this year is the sturdiest structure, and where is the one with the roof you can see through, the one that only stands because people chose to sit inside it with you? And which one, if you are honest, has actually made you feel safe?
Wishing you a sweet good 5787!
Rabbi David Levin is the president of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia and founder of the Jewish Relationships Initiative.
