The Heart of the Sukkah

I remember very clearly building my first Sukkah because it came at such a sad time in my life. It was 15 years ago, the fall after I'd lost a child not long after he was born. My daughter was 5, and she came home from Sunday school full of enthusiasm about Sukkot. That's the holiday where you build a wooden harvest hut, a Sukkah. She asked me if we were going to have a Sukkah. I said yes.

We were living in Baton Rouge at the time, and Southern Sukkah-building had its own hazards. I remember the mosquitoes nipping at my ankles. While clearing the bamboo and brush in my backyard, I was bitten on the lip by a bee, and it swelled up to large proportions.

Nature in Louisiana is fierce--hot sun, strong winds, mammoth clouds, giant mosquitoes--but the skhakh (roof of the Sukkah) was glorious: I used droopy rich green banana leaves, stiff palmetto fans all set on top of hand-cut bamboo poles, which I tied with vines to the rickety Sukkah frame.

I am far from being a carpenter and had no clue how to build a sturdy Sukkah. The only instruction I had was The First Jewish Catalog, which mentioned that a Sukkah could be in the shape of any of the three Hebrew letters that make up the word "Sukkah": a samech, a Kof, or a heh, that is, a square, a three-sided structure, or a two-and-a-half-walled hut. (I love the intense "lettrism" of Jewish thinking!) A building shaped like one of the letters that spells its name is a mysterious kind of writing: using wood, nails, vines, and the natural overgrowth of my backyard to make a statement of joy.

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