24 Sep Three Hours Without Shelter – A Dvar Torah for Erev Sukkot
ב״ה
The U.S. Army Survival Manual opens with a fact that stops most readers cold: a healthy adult can survive three weeks without food, three days without water, and only three hours without shelter. Of everything the body needs to keep going, shelter is the most urgent, even though it’s the one we tend to take most for granted.
I learned this the hard way, long before I ever opened a survival manual. On a 6th grade science trip to Caumsett State Park on Long Island, our guides gave us a task. Build a lean-to, and do it fast. A group of thoroughly indoor, thoroughly sheltered 12-year-old boys went to work with sticks and a tarp and not much else, and within the hour it was obvious we were failing badly. The guides didn’t sugarcoat it. Somewhat roughly, in fact, memorably roughly, they told us that if this had been real, we would not have made it through the night. It’s stayed with me since that shelter isn’t an amenity; it’s the baseline.
Which brings us, on the cusp of Sukkot, to one of the more curious of the Torah’s 613 mitzvot. Sukkah is not simply a commandment to build a structure, but it’s also a commandment to live in one. The Shulchan Aruch is explicit that you should eat in it, sleep in it, learn in it, read in it, and walk around in it. For seven days, the sukkah is meant to become, as much as possible, our actual home. So it’s worth asking what this mitzvah is actually for? What is it meant to do?
The Gemara in Sukkah (13a) locates the question precisely, in a machloket between Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva. The Torah tells us we dwell in sukkot “so that your generations will know that I settled the children of Israel in sukkot when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (למען ידעו דורותיכם כי בסוכות הושבתי). The dispute is whether those original sukkot were actual physical booths (sukkot mamash, in the language of the Gemara) or were they the Clouds of Glory, the ananei ha-kavod, that surrounded and protected the Israelites in the wilderness?
It sounds like a technical question about ancient architecture, but it isn’t. Each position presents a different truth about what carried us through the desert, and each still lives inside the mitzvah we perform today. Rabbi Akiva’s sukkot mamash insists we remember something almost hard to admit – our ancestors, newly freed, were a fragile and makeshift people, living in flimsy, improvised structures in an unforgiving wilderness. There is no glossing over how precarious that existence was. Rabbi Eliezer’s ananei ha-kavod insists on the other half of the story, which is that this fragile people survived anyway. They survived not through their own engineering, but because they were held, guided, and protected by a Presence well beyond their own resources.
That tension isn’t incidental to where Sukkot falls on the calendar. We arrive at Sukkot having just spent the Aseret Yemei Teshuva and Yom Kippur confronting our own smallness. Afar ani b’chayai, “I am dust in my life,” is not a throwaway line in the machzor. It’s the same recognition of precariousness that Rabbi Eliezer locates in the desert generation, and we carry it with us into the chag. The ananei ha-kavod we recall in the sukkah are our way of naming that protection and governance beyond ourselves that we leaned on then, and lean on still.
But Sukkot doesn’t let us stop at fragility, and this is where Rabbi Akiva’s half of the machloket comes back into the picture. The durability, survival, and thriving of Am Yisrael happened through hishtadlut- effort, striving, building- of a kind our people have made a hallmark of. So we don’t just stop on the precariousness after Yom Kippur, but we get up immediately and build. We construct actual sukkot, sukkot mamash, with our own hands, days after the holiest day of the year. That partnership between human and Hashem is not one side or the other; it is the mitzvah.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard that balance captured better than in a Yiddish song my Bobby and Zaidy used to sing. It’s a Yiddish classic called “A Sukkaleh a Kleine” – a little sukkah. It’s a tender, almost lullaby-like song, and it holds both halves of the machloket in the same breath. There’s the sweetness and warmth of the little sukkah, and, right alongside it, its fragility in boards that shake, a roof that can’t really keep out the wind and rain. It is beloved precisely because it is precarious.
That’s the sukkah we’re asked to sit in this week: sturdy enough to trust, fragile enough to be honest about, ours to build and God’s to shelter. Wishing our whole BCHA community a chag sameach and a Sukkot filled with warmth, gratitude, and the kind of shelter, both human and divine, that actually holds.