Built to Come Down

The dog finished his antibiotics this week and the patch on his stomach has cleared up. That’s the news from here.

He’s about eleven and a half, a pit mix, and he has had bad skin his whole life. Allergies. The kind of dog who reacts to something and nobody ever establishes what. A couple of weeks ago the raw patch on his belly turned out to be a genuine infection, off a scratch he picked up somewhere on a walk, and he came home with antibiotics, probiotics, omega-3s, a medicated shampoo, and a conditioner spray. That is a lot of product for one stomach.

Getting the pills into him is its own operation. For years the reliable move was cat food — hide it in cat food and it goes down without comment. Then he got tired of cat food, so that one’s gone. Peanut butter still works. Almond butter does not, and I couldn’t tell you why. He is really persnickety.

We’ve had him since 2018, when the police took him off people who had thrown him off a second-storey balcony. He tolerates a bath. He is, as of this week, done with the course and fine.

This Shabbat is the fifteenth of Tishrei, so it’s the first day of Sukkot and there’s no weekly parsha. We read the festival calendar out of Vayikra instead — one chapter that runs the whole year end to end, Shabbat and Pesach and the Omer and Shavuot and the first of Tishrei and Yom Kippur, most of them handled in a few verses each. Then it gets to this one and slows right down.

בַּסֻּכֹּ֥ת תֵּשְׁב֖וּ שִׁבְעַ֣ת יָמִ֑ים כׇּל־הָֽאֶזְרָח֙ בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל יֵשְׁב֖וּ בַּסֻּכֹּֽת׃

You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths,

— Vayikra 23:42

That one line does a surprising amount of work. Rava reads the whole instruction off it — for seven days, come out of the permanent home you live in all year round and go sit in a temporary one. Which is also where the height limit comes from: build the thing tall enough and sturdy enough to be a real building and it stops counting as a sukkah at all.

And it never says build one. The halacha takes that omission seriously. Rabbi Eliezer held that the sukkah has to be your own, reading prepare for yourself the festival of Sukkot the way it sounds. The Sages disagreed with him, and they did it off this same verse — kol ha’ezrach b’Yisrael, all the homeborn in Israel, which they take to mean the whole Jewish people are fit to sit in one sukkah. So a borrowed booth works. A stolen one doesn’t. Everything between those two is fine.

There will be a sukkah this year and it will most likely be Chabad’s, which is the exact case the Sages had in mind. I have spent no part of this week worrying about whether that counts and a fair part of it worrying about the dog.

Then the verse after it explains what the whole thing is for, and that’s the part that turns around on you.

לְמַ֘עַן֮ יֵדְע֣וּ דֹרֹֽתֵיכֶם֒ כִּ֣י בַסֻּכּ֗וֹת הוֹשַׁ֙בְתִּי֙ אֶת־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל בְּהוֹצִיאִ֥י אוֹתָ֖ם מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם אֲנִ֖י יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt—I the ETERNAL your God.

— Vayikra 23:43

The commemoration points forward. You go and sit outside for a week so that people who have not been born yet will know something, which is a strange thing to be told to do with your evenings.

And there’s an old argument underneath it about what those booths actually were. Rashi says clouds of glory — no huts involved at all, just something God held over them the whole way. In the Gemara it’s a machloket: Rabbi Eliezer says clouds of glory, Rabbi Akiva says they made themselves real booths out in the wilderness, poles and covering, the way anybody would. Underneath that sits a question about whether the thing we commemorate was handed to them or put up by them with their own hands. Nobody settles it. What the halacha does is send you outside to build one either way.

That argument is going to read differently to me this time next year. At some point in the next year or so my husband, my brother-in-law and I are going into houses — building, renovating, one to start with, then two, then however many it turns into. We have got far enough along to be arguing about a name. Achim Batim or Tikkun Achim. Brothers and houses, or repair and brothers. Nobody has conceded.

So I have permanent structures on the brain, and this week’s assignment is the one building job in the calendar that is supposed to come down. Seven days, and the poles go back wherever the poles live. Everything that makes a house good — solid, sealed, built to outlast you — would disqualify it.

Three verses earlier the chapter tells you to be glad in front of GOD for seven days, which is where the name comes from — zman simchateinu, the season of our joy. It arrives on the fifteenth of Tishrei. It doesn’t inquire about your week first.

So: somebody else’s sukkah, a company name nobody has agreed to, and an old dog off his antibiotics and back to refusing things on principle. Set against clouds of glory that isn’t much. But the commandment doesn’t ask what you’re bringing. It fixes the date, tells you to be glad on it for seven days, and leaves you to turn up with whatever the week actually handed you.

Seven days of it, starting at candle-lighting. I’ll take the week.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham