The High Holidays

Sukkot: building it, eating in it, holding the four species

A hut with a roof of branches, a palm frond and a citron, seven nights of guests, and a last day that beats willow branches on the floor. Everything, from the beginning.

What it is, and why a hut

For seven days from the fifteenth of Tishrei, the tradition asks you to move out of your house and live in a temporary one. The Torah gives the reason directly: so that future generations know that the Israelites lived in booths when they were brought out of Egypt. The Talmud preserves two readings of what those booths were — actual huts, or the clouds of glory that surrounded the camp — and, characteristically, keeps both.

Coming five days after Yom Kippur, it is a deliberate whiplash. The most severe day of the year is followed almost immediately by the one the liturgy calls z’man simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing. Whatever the fast was for, this is what it was for.

Building a sukkah

A sukkah is a structure with walls and a roof of loose plant material. The rules are more forgiving than people expect and more specific in a few places than people expect.

The walls

• Three walls minimum, or two complete walls plus a short third piece. An existing house wall or fence can be one of them.
• At least ten handbreadths high — roughly forty inches — and no taller than twenty cubits, which is about thirty feet and not a constraint most back gardens run into.
• Any material at all, including canvas, provided it is secured well enough not to flap loose in a normal wind. This is the single most common problem with a fabric kit: tie it down properly.

The s’chach — the roof

• Must be something that grew from the ground, is now detached from it, and has not been made into a vessel or processed into a manufactured item. Bamboo mats sold for the purpose, cut branches, palm fronds, and unfinished slats all work. Plastic, metal and anything woven into a usable object do not.
• Must go on after the walls are standing. A roof put down first and walls built under it is a real problem, and it is an easy mistake with a pop-up frame — put the frame up, then the mat.
• Must give more shade than sun at midday, and should still be sparse enough that you can see stars through it at night. Those two together are the working test.
• Nothing may overhang it. Not a tree, not a balcony, not the eaves of the house. Look up before you choose the spot; this is the thing people discover after building.

Decorating it is a custom and a good one: children’s drawings, hanging fruit, string lights. Nothing heavy should be suspended from the s’chach itself.

If you would rather not do any of this, that is fine — eat in ours. Details on the Sukkot page. If you want to build one and would like somebody to look at it before the holiday, ask; that is a normal request.

Eating in it

Meals move outside for the week. The blessing leishev basukkah — who has commanded us to dwell in the sukkah — is said when eating a meal there, after the blessing over bread.

The baseline obligation is bread and grain-based meals; there is a definite obligation to eat in the sukkah on the first night specifically. Beyond that, practice varies in how far it extends to snacks and drinks. Chabad custom is strict here: nothing at all is eaten or drunk outside the sukkah for the whole week, water included. Other communities are more lenient about a coffee on the way to work. If you are trying this for the first time, start with the meals.

Rain is the built-in exception. If it is raining hard enough that the food is being ruined — the classic image is porridge spoiling — you are not required to sit there, and the tradition is unusually blunt that staying anyway is not admirable. (First night is treated a little differently. Ask.)

Sleeping in it

Formally, the mitzvah of dwelling covers sleeping as much as eating, and in principle a person should sleep in the sukkah for the week. In practice this is one of the clearest places where communities part ways:

• Sephardi communities generally do sleep in the sukkah, and take it seriously.
• Ashkenazi practice widely does not, on grounds the Rema records — discomfort in cold climates, and the difficulty of a married couple sleeping separately.
• Chabad custom is specifically not to sleep in the sukkah, on a different basis altogether: a teaching of the Alter Rebbe that what rests on a sukkah is too intense a thing to sleep under.

None of that is a licence to be casual about the rest of it, and none of it is a criticism of the neighbours who do it differently.

The four species

Leviticus lists four plants to be taken on the festival. Held together, they are one mitzvah. Individually:

• Etrog — a citron. Ridged, fragrant, and yellow when ripe. If it grew with a pitom (the small protrusion at the top), that has to still be intact; many varieties never had one, and those are fine. It should be clean of marks, particularly at the top.
• Lulav — a closed frond from a date palm. The central leaf at the tip must not be split down its length, and the spine should stand at least a handbreadth clear above the myrtle and willow once it is bound.
• Hadassim — three myrtle branches. What is being checked is the leaf pattern: three leaves emerging from the same point on the stem, repeated along most of its length.
• Aravot — two willow branches, with reddish stems and long smooth-edged leaves. These wilt fast, so they are the ones to keep wrapped and cool, and to replace mid-week if they dry out.

The lulav goes in the centre, the three hadassim to its right, the two aravot to its left, held together with rings. The classic reading of the four is that they stand for four kinds of Jew — some with taste, some with fragrance, some with both, one with neither — and that the mitzvah is only done when all four are held as one.

To order a set here, see the lulav and etrog page. Order early; they have to be bound before the holiday starts.

How to hold them

Stand facing east. Take the bound lulav in your right hand with its spine toward you, and say the blessing al netilat lulav — adding shehecheyanu the first time you do it this year. Only then pick up the etrog in your left hand, held upside down. Bring your hands together, turn the etrog the right way up, and the mitzvah is done.

(The reason for the odd sequence: once all four are held correctly the mitzvah is complete, and a blessing is said before an act, not after it. Holding the etrog inverted keeps it incomplete for the two seconds it takes to say the words. Left-handed people reverse the hands.)

Then the waving — na’anuim — three shakes in each of six directions, drawing the bundle back toward the chest each time. The order of the six directions differs between communities. Chabad follows the sequence taught by the Arizal: right, left, forward, up, down, and back. Standard Ashkenazi practice uses a different order. If you learned one from your grandfather, keep doing his; it is correct for you.

Done on each of the seven days, but not on Shabbat, and not by anyone who has not got a set — which is a reason to come to shul, where there is one.

Ushpizin

A kabbalistic custom from the Zohar: each night of Sukkot, one of seven guests is welcomed into the sukkah. In order — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, David. Each is understood to embody a particular quality, and each night’s guest brings the other six with him.

Chassidic communities, Chabad among them, pair these with seven ushpizin chassidi’im: the Baal Shem Tov, the Maggid of Mezritch, and the first five Rebbes of Chabad in sequence.

The practical form this takes is usually simple — a line said at the door, or somebody at the table saying whose night it is and telling one story about them. It is also, plainly, an argument for inviting actual guests, which is the point people tend to draw from it.

Chol hamoed, and the nights

After the first two days come five intermediate days. Most work is permitted, though the tradition asks you to keep the days festive and to avoid work that could have been done before or left until after. People go out, take trips, and eat in the sukkah between things.

In Temple times, the nights of Sukkot were the setting for Simchat Beit HaShoeivah, the water-drawing celebration — of which the Mishnah says that whoever had not seen it had never seen rejoicing in their life. Communities keep it now with music and dancing on the nights of chol hamoed, usually late and usually loud.

Hoshana Rabbah

The seventh day is its own thing. Its name means “the great Hoshana”, after the prayers for salvation said each morning of the festival while circling the bimah with the four species — once on each of the first six days, and seven times on this one.

Then the willows. A separate bundle of five aravot is taken and struck against the ground five times.

The tradition treats the day as the point at which the verdict of Rosh Hashanah, sealed on Yom Kippur, is actually delivered. So the customs sit somewhere between festival and High Holiday: many stay up through the night learning, the morning service borrows melodies from Rosh Hashanah, and the greeting exchanged is a gut kvittl — a good note. Kreplach are eaten, as they are on the other days of the year when something hidden is being marked.

That evening, Sukkot ends and Shmini Atzeret begins — a separate festival with a completely different character, which is where the whole run finishes.

Coming here

There is a sukkah here, meals in it, and services through the week. This year’s arrangements are on the Sukkot page and the community calendar. If you have never eaten in a sukkah, that is the single easiest first thing to do on this list — you sit down and eat, and someone brings you food.

Questions people ask

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