The sukkah is not a safe space

At one of the October 7th commemoration ceremonies I recently attended, I ran into an old friend. We greeted each other the way Jews greet each other now: Nu, when do you think the deal will pass? Are you optimistic?

We imagined what Simchat Torah 2025 would feel like if the hostages were finally home. “It’s like a dream,” he said. Then he sighed. “We need good news. You look around the world and whenever it feels like it can’t get worse — it does. How are we supposed to keep going?”

I feel it too—that bone-deep Jewish exhaustion. I think about my cousins serving as reservists in Gaza, and their families back home. About the brokenhearted across our people — from Manchester to Kikar Hatatufim (Hostages Square).

I think about the fear that shadows us even here. Last week, walking into heavily barricaded Jewish spaces, I couldn’t stop wondering what would happen if our new mayor decided the NYPD had other priorities.

I don’t know what will happen this week. I pray with all my heart that we hear good news.

But I know this: the Jewish calendar is never accidental. And somehow, we find ourselves in the second anniversary of October 7 entering Sukkot — a holiday that asks us to live — and even to rejoice — with the sky exposed above us.

* * *

The sukkah is not a safe space as measured by modern campus culture. When I started grad school, professors often spoke about the need for “safe spaces” — zones meant to be free from harm or offense, coupled with trigger warnings and heightened sensitivity to microaggressions. It was all meant to promote emotional safety.

As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt documented, it didn’t produce emotionally stronger students — the opposite. But that’s not the point here. What fascinates me is that the sukkah is the opposite of a safe space. It’s all about vulnerability.

We’re asked to build temporary huts, covered by a roof that must let in the rain and the light. According to Rabbi Akiva, the sukkah reminds us of our ancestors’ fragile shelters in the wilderness — temporary homes for wanderers who had no permanent protection, only faith.

We are commanded to lift up our bounty — the four species, which my father, Rabbi Yosef Bitton, taught me to see as a symbol of our earnings — and to acknowledge that it all comes from God.

If anything, it is closer to what some on campus tried — somewhat awkwardly — to rebrand as “brave spaces.” The phrase may make us cringe, but the instinct behind it wasn’t wrong: a brave space is one where we stay open even when we feel exposed.

Sukkot is the ultimate brave space. It asks us to feel joy — exuberant, collective joy — precisely at the moment we feel most vulnerable.

That paradox should jolt us. The emotions we have lived with these past two years — the uncertainty, the loss of safety, the feeling that the world is spinning too fast — all of it is captured in the sukkah’s fragility. And yet, the Torah commands us to rejoice. To invite guests. To sing and to feast beneath a roof of leaves.

I’ll admit: I find this hard. I’m someone who loves control and predictability — I color-code my Google calendar and keep a plan A, B, and C ready at all times. Sukkot’s call to embrace fragility and joy at once feels impossible.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: the Hebrew word for joy — simcha — isn’t what we think it is.

Simcha isn’t about happiness as an individual’s state of mind or emotion. Simcha, explained Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory, “means happiness shared. It is a social state, a predicate of ‘we,’ not ‘I.’ There is no such thing as feeling simcha alone.”

Here lies the hidden wisdom of this holiday: our uncertainty becomes bearable when it’s bound up with joy — with being together, with “happiness shared.”

Sukkot doesn’t promise safety; it offers companionship. It reminds us that control is an illusion, but connection is real. We can’t seal out the rain or predict what tomorrow will bring, but we can hold one another close beneath the open sky.

* * *

In the past six months there have been health challenges in my family that reminded me how uncertain it all is. Baruch Hashem, everything is okay, but I realize how much strength I received from friends and loved ones who offered not solutions but simple companionship and solidarity.

It makes all the difference to traverse an unknown road together. We can even do it joyfully.

In these last two years, we Jews have felt this keenly. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring in Israel, what the future of Jews in America and around the world will look like, but we know — we have seen, we have felt — that we have each other. And there’s so much joy in that.

​​The sukkah is not a safe space. But it offers us something better: the strength to be vulnerable together, and the courage to celebrate even when we cannot control what comes next.

This year, as we step into our fragile sukkahs, we step in together — and that makes all the difference.