Somewhere in your house tonight, an app is quietly working. Cameras watch the door. A thermostat learns your habits. A password manager guards everything you own. By any technical measure, you will fall asleep more secure than any generation before you. And then Sukkot arrives, and for seven days you trade all of it for a roof with holes in it, all by design. And yet, sitting in that rickety structure open to the sky, many of us feel something the locks and cameras never quite managed: we actually feel safe.
Chazal suggest that this is precisely the point.
The Torah doesn’t just command us to sit in a sukkah; unusually, it also tells us why. “So that your generations will know that I sat the Children of Israel in sukkot when I took them out of Egypt” (Vayikra 23:43). Simple enough, it seems. We sit in a sukkah to remember that we once lived in one. But what exactly are we meant to remember? The Gemara records a debate, not over what happened in the desert, but over what the sukkah symbolizes. Rabbi Akiva says it recalls the literal huts the Israelites built for shelter. Rabbi Eliezer disagrees: the sukkah recalls the ananei hakavod, the clouds of glory that surrounded and protected the nation throughout its wandering (Sukkah 11a).
Rabbi Akiva’s opinion is intuitive. Sit in a hut, remember huts. Rabbi Eliezer’s is harder to follow. What does a structure of wood, canvas, and schach have to do with a cloud of glory? There is no resemblance between the two.
Rabbi Nissim Alpert zt”l explains that nothing we build could ever resemble a cloud. Clouds are formless, fleeting, impossible to grasp. The memory we are meant to access is not of shelter, rather of hashgacha pratit, of total, unearned dependence on G-d. Bricks and mortar can create the illusion of protection, but a cloud cannot. It leaves you exposed, and that exposure is the whole point.
So why does this require leaving the house? Because the house is not neutral. Its walls do exactly what walls always do: manufacture a feeling of self-sufficiency that a cloud never could. Inside, it is easy to forget how much of our safety was never truly ours. The Torah’s solution is to physically strip that illusion away: to walk out from under the roof and sit beneath the sky, with only schach between you and the stars. The instinctive feeling of vulnerability doesn’t last. It gives way, almost without our noticing, to something closer to genuine security. The flimsier structure sharpens what the sturdier one had dulled.
Now consider your own house. We have built our own permanent structures, not of wood but of code. Firewalls, two-factor authentication, encrypted storage. A phone in your pocket gives you more reach, more knowledge, and more control than any previous generation could have imagined. By every reasonable measure, we should be the calmest people in history.
We are not. Anxiety and disconnection are rising right alongside our technological sophistication. Something in that equation doesn’t add up, unless the premise was wrong from the start. Permanent structures, digital or physical, were never built to satisfy the human need for meaning. Constant connectivity produces loneliness more reliably than it produces community. The Gemara in Sukkah 2b puts it simply: for seven days, leave your permanent dwelling and live in a temporary one.
That is what the sukkah is inviting us to do. Step outside the systems that make us feel in control, and rediscover the far less comfortable, far more honest feeling of being carried by something else. The clouds of glory were not an app, a setting, or a security system. They are found where they have always been found: in shul, at a table with people who actually know you, in prayer, in the quiet recognition that none of this was ever fully in your hands. For those fortunate enough to live in Eretz Yisrael, that recognition doesn’t end after seven days. It is the air the country breathes.
That is the sukkah’s real offer. Not a smaller house, but a truer one. May we step out from behind our walls this year – digital and physical alike – and find shelter, once again, in the clouds.
Rabbi Larry Rothwachs, LCSW, is the founding rabbi of Meromei Shemesh, the Director of Professional Rabbinics at RIETS, and the director of StepAhead Counseling.