Sukkot: When Jonah Was Right, You Need Shade

Every year, about four days after we finish beating ourselves up on Yom Kippur, Hashem looks down and says, essentially, now go sit outside in a hut for a week.

And not a real hut.

A temporary one, with a roof made of branches and palm fronds that has to let in more light than it blocks, which in Israel means you are sitting under something that provides approximately the same shade as a cocktail umbrella.

If you were paying attention during the Yom Kippur afternoon haftorah, you already know where I am going. The whole Jonah story ends with him sitting under a gourd plant, furious at Hashem, getting some blessed shade, and then Hashem sends a worm to kill the plant and Jonah is left sitting in the sun, miserable, wanting to die.
Hashem basically says: you can handle more than you think you can.

Now go think about that.

That is, more or less, what the rabbis designed Sukkot to be. Except with an esrog and a lulav.

The Talmud is clear that women are exempt from the mitzvah of sukkah.

This is one of those halachic facts that sounds, to the modern ear, like it is about to be followed by a very long and awkward conversation.

But look at what actually happened as a result.

Who, in practice, builds the sukkah? Who decorates it? Who strings the lights and hauls out the folding table and argues about whether the schach (the leafy roof covering) is dense enough? In most households I have ever seen, the answer is the men. The fathers. The husbands. The sons who got voluntold (olim urban dictionary reference).

So the rabbis, perhaps without intending to, created the one sacred Jewish space that men are legally obligated to build and permitted to camp out in for seven/eight days.

It is a man cave with a hechsher (rabbinical certification).

I bring this up because someone clearly missed an opportunity in the halachic literature.

We have extraordinarily detailed rabbinical guidelines about the height of the sukkah walls, the acceptable species for schach, the minimum square footage required to fulfill the mitzvah.

Someone sat down and worked out that you need at least seven by seven tefachim (hand-breadths) of floor space.

We know what kind of rain invalidates the sukkah. We know exactly how many stars you should be able to see through the roof.

But nobody, anywhere in the Shulchan Aruch, saw fit to specify that the television must be at least forty-four inches. They didn’t even mention a chessboard space, for those who argue TV wasn’t invented yet. This feels like an oversight.

Nothing mentions whether you should have a bedroom or not, an open fire (probably illegal in most places), or a pizza oven. Although there is some discussion about animals in your sukkah, which are allowed as long as they don’t use it as a bathroom. Even a discussion about using an elephant as a wall or if a sukkah can be on top of an animal!

For readers outside Israel who have not experienced this, try to picture what Sukkot looks like in a neighborhood like mine in Rehovot. Starting about a week before the holiday, you hear drills. You see men on ladders. You see PVC pipe and two-by-fours appearing in driveways, the kinds of construction projects that would normally require a permit happening in every backyard, on every mirpeset (balcony), in every available patch of outdoor space.

And then, basically overnight, the whole country is eating dinner outside under decorated temporary roofs, arguing about whether the burgers are getting cold faster because of the breeze or because someone left the sukkah flap open.

There is something genuinely moving about this, even when the moving part is the sukkah wall in a wind gust.

You build something fragile, on purpose. You eat in it, sleep in it if you are ambitious or your spouse lets you, and you welcome guests into it.

The whole point, theologically speaking, is to feel the impermanence. The walls wobble. The roof lets in starlight and the occasional jukes. You are supposed to feel a little exposed.

Jonah under his gourd knew the shade could disappear. That is the lesson.

You sit with the discomfort, and you discover you can take more than you thought.

What I have always found interesting is that in Israel, this does not feel like a religious exercise in discomfort the way it might in a backyard in New York, where it is already cold enough to make the whole thing genuinely hockey level cold.

Here in Rehovot, it is still warm. Sitting in the sukkah in the evening is actually pleasant. The discomfort is more existential than meteorological, which maybe makes it more honest.

You are not proving you can survive a chill. You are just sitting with the knowledge that the thing sheltering you was built in a weekend and could come down just as fast.

Seven/Eight days under the schach, and then you take it all apart and stack it in the storage closet until next year.

The gourd dies, Jonah survives, and Hashem’s point stands.

The sukkah never pretended to be permanent. It just asked you to live in it anyway.