Parashat Sukkot: Building a Place for Everyone
Every year, when we build the Sukkah, we repeat a gesture that seems almost contradictory. For a few days, we leave behind the solidity of our homes—their sturdy walls, their secure roofs—and enter a fragile, temporary structure: a few walls, some branches, and a roof through which we can see the stars.
Why do we do this? Why celebrate by deliberately exposing ourselves to the elements?
Sukkot invites us to recognize something that, for the rest of the year, we prefer to forget: absolute security does not exist.
We have lived through years in which the word “security” has ceased to be an abstraction. We have seen how, in an instant, seemingly unshakable structures can collapse; walls we believed were solid, bonds that appeared unbreakable, systems of security that seemed infallible. We have experienced what it means to be exposed to the elements in ways that no text needs to explain to us.
The walls of our homes can protect us, but they cannot guarantee that life will always remain under our control. Entering the Sukkah means accepting our vulnerability, letting go—if only for a moment—of the illusion that everything depends on us, and remembering that we, too, need to be held and sustained.
But our tradition offers us another reading, one that does not contradict the first, but completes it.
The sages debated what the Sukkot in which Israel lived during its journey through the wilderness actually were. Were they physical huts built by the people, or did they refer to the ananei hakavod, the Clouds of Glory that accompanied and protected Israel?
If the Sukkah represents those clouds, then the image changes. The Sukkah is fragile and, at the same time, it is a refuge. It reminds us that we can be exposed and still feel protected; that acknowledging our vulnerability does not mean that we have been abandoned.
That is why, throughout the year, we pray: Ufros aleinu sucat shlomecha—“Spread over us Your Sukkah of peace.”
What a powerful image: asking for protection beneath a Sukkah, precisely a structure that seems incapable of protecting us from everything. Perhaps the prayer teaches us that true protection does not always mean building higher walls. Sometimes it means discovering what sustains us when our own walls are no longer enough.
This is ona of the reasons why Sukkot comes immediately after the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe.
We have just spent Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur looking inward, acknowledging our mistakes, seeking forgiveness, and trying to begin again. And then our tradition tells us: Now go outside. Build a Sukkah. Invite others. Share. Eat together. And be joyful.
It is almost as if, after spending these days working on ourselves, life is telling us that it is time to look outward once again.
And this is where one of the deepest teachings of the Ushpizim, the guests we invite each day to our Sukkot, emerges.
The mystical tradition, especially the Zohar, imagines that on each day of Sukkot we welcome into our Sukkah one of the great figures of our history: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David. They are called roim neemaním, the faithful shepherds of Israel. Each one also represents a quality that we are called to bring into our own lives: kindness, strength, compassion, leadership, humility, perseverance, and sovereignty.
But there is something even deeper about this choice.
When we look at their stories, we discover that none of them was a stranger to displacement.
Abraham had to leave his father's home. Jacob had to flee from his brother. Joseph was torn away from his family and taken to Egypt. Moses knew exile and flight. David spent long periods hiding and searching for a safe place. Even the story of Israel begins with a people learning how to live before they had a permanent home of their own.
That is why these are the people who enter our Sukkah.
We are not simply inviting our great heroes. We are inviting people who knew what it meant not to know where they would put down roots. People who learned that a home is more than a building, and that belonging does not necessarily mean having found a permanent place.
And then the Zohar introduces a remarkable condition: the Ushpizim do not remain in a Sukkah where there is no room for someone who is hungry, for someone in need, for someone who has nothing to give us in return.
The holiness of our Sukkah, then, depends not only on whom we invite, but on whom we are willing to let in.
We can have a beautiful table, a magnificent Sukkah, and recite the names of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David. But if someone remains outside because we have decided that they do not belong, then something essential about Sukkot has been lost.
The same teaching appears in another of the central symbols of the festival: the Four Species.
The Midrash compares the etrog, lulav, hadas, and aravah to different kinds of people within the Jewish people. Some possess Torah and good deeds; others possess one but not the other; and the aravah seems to possess neither.
And yet Sukkot commands us to take all four and bring them together.
Why do we need the aravah?
Perhaps because the answer is not to decide who deserves a place in our community. The message is precisely the opposite: unity does not mean that we are all the same. It means recognizing that none of us is complete on our own.
Jewish tradition returns to this idea again and again. The incense offered in the Temple was made from different ingredients, among them chelbenah, galbanum, whose smell was unpleasant. And yet it was still part of the incense.
So too, the tzibur, the community, is inherently diverse. A community is made up of different kinds of people: those who know a great deal and those who know very little; those who participate intensely and those who are only beginning to find their way back; those who are full of certainty and those who arrive carrying questions.
A community does not become holier by eliminating its differences. It becomes more human when it learns how to make room for them.
This is why there is something profoundly transformative about the Sukkah.
It is a home with no real claim to permanence. Its walls are not entirely solid, and its roof does not separate us from the sky. And yet, precisely because of this, it can become a place of encounter.
There we sit around the same table. There we remember that we are all guests in this life. There our ancestors enter, along with our friends, our neighbors, and even those we have not yet met.
And there we come to understand something that we so easily forget during the rest of the year: we, too, are guests.
We are not absolute owners of our lives, our communities, or our world. We have been entrusted with something that we are called to care for and pass on. The Sukkah reminds us that everything we build is, in some measure, temporary. And precisely because of that, what matters is what we do with the time we have been given and with the space that has been entrusted to us.
This year, when we enter our Sukkah, we can remember the two truths it holds at the same time: we are vulnerable, and we need protection; we do not control everything, and yet we can build places of refuge.
And one of the most important refuges we can build has no walls at all: a community where every person can find a place.
Is that the true joy of Sukkot—the joy that we are almost commanded to feel?
Not the naïve joy of someone who believes that everything is fine, but a deeper joy: the joy of someone who knows how fragile life can be and, nevertheless, sets the table, turns on the lights, opens the door, and says:
There is a place for you here.
No one can force another person to be happy. But the mitzvah of simchat Sukkot, the commandment to rejoice during Sukkot, perhaps asks us to stop for a moment and recognize all the good that we do have in our lives.
Because the Sukkah is not only the place where we invite our Ushpizim.
It is the place that reminds us that all of us, at some point in our lives, have needed someone to open the door for us.
Shabbat Shalom Umevorach ve Chag Sameach.
Rabbi Gustavo Geier
