Every year, between Yom Kippur and Sukkot, I wonder what someone unfamiliar with Judaism would think if they watched us prepare for the holiday. A few years ago I found out. An old friend, a professor at a local university, asked what I would be doing that week, and I began describing Sukkot.
“We buy a lulav, a palm branch bound with myrtle and willow. We take an etrog, a citron that looks like an oversized lemon but costs far more than anyone thinks a piece of fruit should. We carry them into the synagogue each morning and wave them in every direction. And then we build a sukkah. It has walls, but its roof is intentionally incomplete. We leave our homes and eat every meal there for a week.”
He looked at me for a moment. “So let me understand this. You purchase expensive fruit, wave branches around in synagogue, and then spend a week eating in an unfinished hut, all to demonstrate that G-d protects the Jewish people?” I smiled. “Exactly.” I decided not to mention the hoshanot, or our annual battle with the bees in the sukkah.
Beneath the humor lies a serious question. Few Jewish holidays are as rich in symbolism as Sukkot, and few are as difficult to explain. Why these four species? Why celebrate in autumn rather than spring, when we actually left Egypt? Are the sukkot, as Rabbi Eliezer maintained, a remembrance of the Clouds of Glory, or, as Rabbi Akiva argued, the actual booths our ancestors lived in? Our tradition offers many answers, but on one point there is remarkable agreement.
The sukkah is the enduring symbol of G-d’s protection. “So that your generations shall know that I caused the Children of Israel to dwell in sukkot when I brought them out of Egypt. I am Hashem your G-d” (Vayikra 23:43). Throughout Tanach and Chazal, the sukkah is more than a historical memory. It becomes a metaphor for Divine shelter. David HaMelech prays that G-d conceal him from those who seek to harm him, and the Gemara uses the sukkah the same way.
Yet that only deepens the mystery. A sukkah requires little more than two full walls and part of a third. Its roof is porous, it is exposed to wind and rain, and it hardly resembles the fortress one associates with protection. Why not a castle, a wall or a mighty city? I have always been drawn to two answers.
The first comes from Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook zt”l who noticed that the Torah concludes the mitzvah of sukkah with the seemingly unnecessary words “I am Hashem your G-d.” A sukkah by itself offers little protection. What transforms it into a fortress is not the strength of its walls but the strength of the faith of those who dwell within it. Rav Kook called the sukkah a mivtzar hagana, a fortress of protection, not for its construction but because it reminds us that the security of the Jewish people rests upon our covenant with G-d.
That lesson resonates for a generation privileged to witness the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in Israel. Religious Zionism has never believed that military and spiritual strength stand in opposition. We need both. We build a formidable army, and we build impressive batei midrash. We cultivate technological innovation, and we cultivate Torah. We recognize the courage of those who defend Israel while remembering that our resilience depends on something deeper than iron and concrete. The sukkah teaches that even the strongest nation must never forget the source of its strength.
The second insight begins with why the Torah describes the sukkot as those in which the Jewish people lived when G-d brought them out of Egypt. Why emphasize the journey? Perhaps because Judaism has never been defined only by destinations. The desert was where a nation of former slaves became a covenantal people, where we learned dependence upon G-d, responsibility for one another, and devotion to Torah. The fragile sukkah reminds us not merely where we ended up, but how we became who we are.
This explains why the sukkah is one of our most beloved mitzvot. Its walls are temporary, its roof incomplete, its structure fragile. Yet generation after generation, it is where families gather, where traditions pass down, where children absorb memories that become their own, and where faith quietly takes root.
Perhaps that is what I should have told my professor friend. Rather than explaining the holiday, I should simply have invited him into our sukkah. He would have seen parents and children hanging decorations, heard stories told across the table and songs carried late into the evening, and learned about Jews who built a sukkah in defiance of the law, and soldiers who built one under fire.
He would have discovered what every Jew eventually learns. The strength of the sukkah has never been in its walls. It is in the people who build it, the Torah they carry into it, and the G-d Whose presence they invite to dwell within it.
Rabbi Dr. Leonard A. Matanky, Ph.D. is Rabbi of Congregation K.I.N.S. of West Rogers Park and Dean of Ida Crown Jewish Academy in Chicago. A longtime leader of the Religious Zionists of America, he has also served as President of the Rabbinical Council of America and the Chicago Rabbinical Council.