A House With One Side Always Left Open on Sukkot
Where I live, unfortunately, building a sukkah simply isn’t possible. But I came to understand, later than I would have liked, that this impossibility doesn’t mean I can never step beneath that fragile roof, because certain houses can be entered through thought alone. The place I first grasped this, oddly enough, was in the sukkah’s own shape, because that shape, it turns out, already belonged to a far older letter.
This same second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Bet, is built from three strokes, standing before you like a square left open on one side. A kosher sukkah is bound to that same geometry, required to have three walls, yet also required to leave a single gap open, toward the sky, toward the outside, toward whatever unexpected guest might arrive. At this letter’s root sits bayit, house, and the Torah’s very first word, Bereshit, opens, not by accident, with this exact letter. The sages find, in the letter’s three strokes, the three pillars the world is said to stand on, Torah, prayer, and good deeds, so that a person who fulfills all three is considered to have built a house for God. Perhaps this is exactly why, even without setting foot beneath a roof woven from branches, I can always step, without obstruction, into the open side the letter itself leaves behind.
I think, with the same patience, about the four plants meant to be held inside a sukkah, one by one, a citron, a palm frond, a few myrtle sprigs, a few willow branches, none of them carrying much to say on its own. According to an old teaching, each corresponds to a different kind of person. The etrog, good in both taste and fragrance, stands for someone able to carry knowledge and goodness together. The palm frond, sweet yet scentless, stands for someone with knowledge who never found time for goodness. The myrtle, fragrant yet tasteless, stands for someone capable of goodness who never reached deep learning. And the willow, neither sweet nor fragrant, stands for someone left without either. But God, rather than shaming this last one, asks instead that all four be bound together, so that what one lacks might be covered by what the others carry. The lulav is only considered kosher when these four are held as one, and if even a single one goes missing, the entire bundle in hand becomes invalid. The more I sit with this, the more I remember that no knowledge, no goodness, was ever enough standing alone, that what’s missing only gets completed by whoever stands beside it, and that perhaps even my own absence, spoken in this festival’s own language, isn’t a flaw too heavy to carry.
Those same four plants, in another teaching entirely, turn into the parts of a person’s own body, the etrog becoming the heart, the palm frond the spine standing upright, the myrtle’s small, eye-shaped leaves becoming the eyes, the willow’s delicate leaves becoming the lips. Right after Yom Kippur, with a page wiped a little cleaner, these four parts are rededicated to God, the heart kept open, the spine held straight, the eyes turned kindly toward others, the lips opened only for good words. None of this requires a branch held in the hand, since all four already live, on their own, somewhere deep inside the body. And deeper still, spoken of far less, sits a third layer, a teaching that ties these same four plants to God’s own four-letter name. Here too, the point never changes, remembering that everything that looks separate still sprouted from a single root.
A scene from the Temple’s own era rises in my mind as well. Across seven days, there, a total of seventy bulls were once offered, and the Talmud insists this number was no accident, that it corresponded instead to the seventy nations of the world. Which means this festival was never only my own people’s festival, it was built, too, for the wellbeing of an entire world that doesn’t even know it. On that same page, a sage adds that had the nations known this worth, they would have sent soldiers to protect the Temple rather than destroy it. Whenever I read this, I can’t help thinking of a generosity that was never once returned.
I think, too, about the seven ancient guests invited into the sukkah each night, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David. Kabbalistic tradition ties each one to a sefirah of its own, Abraham to kindness, Isaac to strength, Jacob to beauty, all the way to David, to kingship itself. This invitation needs no sukkah at all, since the distance between generations can close with nothing more than a single thought, the founding ancestors settling, uninvited yet somehow expected, at my own mind’s table.
I carry, too, an argument that the tradition itself never closed, about what a sukkah actually is. One sage insists that what protected the Israelites in the wilderness were real clouds, the clouds of God’s own glory. Another insists they were real, touchable tents. The same wilderness, the same forty years, read by one as miracle, and by the other, within those very same events, as nothing more than ordinary labor. I find myself thinking that my own circumstance may add a third reading to this old argument, because sometimes protection arrives neither as a cloud descending from the sky nor as a roof woven by hand, it simply gets remembered, and remembering, on its own, can become a roof too.
The season of our joy is this festival’s own official name. It stands alone on the Jewish calendar as the one holiday whose very name openly holds the word joy, and this arrives, never by accident, right on the heels of the heaviest day of all, Yom Kippur. Perhaps everything I’ve said here repeats one single lesson, over and over, in a different language each time. A letter leaves one side forever open. Four plants remain incomplete without each other. A people finds itself bound to a world that never notices. Today finds itself bound to the founding generations. A miracle finds itself bound to ordinary labor. And the heaviest day, in the end, finds itself bound to the lightest one.
This year, sitting in my own home, without a roof woven from branches of my own, I want to believe that the open side that letter leaves behind was left exactly for people like me. Not a place that can never be entered, but a place that always, for everyone, leaves a way in.
