It’s Sukkoth this week and, at the urging of my six-year-old son, I’ve finally fulfilled the mitzvah of building a sukkah.
Statistically speaking, 98 percent of you have no clue what I’m talking about. Briefly: Sukkoth is a Jewish harvest holiday. It generally happens in October-ish[*] and lasts about a week. To celebrate Sukkoth you build a sukkah (basically a little shanty) outside your house. This is because the ancient Hebrews lived in towns, with their fields held communally elsewhere. During harvest they’d build little shanty encampments out in the fields, rather than schlepping back and forth every evening. Building a sukkah is a reminder that this is how folks lived before CSAs and office jobs; eating dinner and chilling out in the sukkah is de rigueur (and likewise a “mitzvah,” a word many folks erroneously translate as “good deed.” Mitzvot are, literally, “commandments.” Just let that sink in. The Lord said unto us “Listen, I need you to build some shanties, and to drink beer and stuff in them. Amen.”)
The qualifications for a sukkah are pretty loose: It needs to be big enough for at least one person to sit in it comfortably (technically the minimum size is seven “handbreadths” deep by seven wide by 10 tall, or roughly 2.5″x2.5″x3″ [!!!]), it needs to be open on one side, it needs to have walls that can “withstand the wind,” and it needs to have a roof that is 1) made of natural materials and 2) blocks half the sunlight in daytime, yet still makes it possible to see the stars at night.
Inspired by several picture books, his religious school, and a local sukkah contest, my son got very hyped on building a sukkah. So, we headed down to the lumber yard, got a dozen six-footers (actually, for supply and cost reasons, we got six 12-footers and had the yard cut them in half, but you get the picture), and then went home and built this slightly modified cube (you’ll note that we transposed one 2×4 from the threshold, instead using it to stabilize the roof). The walls are scrap lumber that was left in our garage by the previous owners (when we moved in a decade ago) and leftover canvas from the PVC Teepee project in Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred. The roof is a base of jute twin piled high with wildflowers harvested from the yard of the abandoned house next door.
All told, it took us a couple hours spread over two days to erect this, and a very limited assortment of hand tools (a saw, power drill, hammer, a rag-tag fistful of mismatched nails, some decking screws, and a stapler). Cost: about $20.
This is certainly a project that requires a little care–you can rip up a finger with a power drill, and even a janky little stick-frame shanty can give you a good clunk if it keels over–but it’s one that basically any first-grader can assist on. Two lessons naturally arise in the process:
Finally, my wife–who is not Jewish–*loves* the way the roof changes as the sky changes, and insisted I include at least one picture of this. So, here’s a shot from this morning. The Michigan sky is a featureless grey mat, and the roof itself had taken a beating in an early-morning rainstorm:
[*] The Jewish calendar is lunar, composed of twelve 28-day months, with a leap-month jacked in every couple-three years in order to get this janky mess back in line with the popular solar calendars of the secular world–all of which is to say that our holidays drift around on the calendar, loosely moored to positions you’re familiar with. This is why Chanukah sometimes seems to come almost at Thanksgiving, and at other times sits right atop Christmas. Or maybe you’ve never noticed this, which would be totally OK. I honestly have no idea when Ramadan is this year, for basically the same reasons. Anyway, Sukkoth generally comes sometime between the third week of the public school year and Halloween, right around Columbus Day.