Sukkah Blues

Milch, Robert

SUKKAH BLUES ROBERT MILCH "To be a Jew you need the strength of a goy." That's what my grandmother always told me. The first time I heard her say it, she was hauling a carton of Passover dishes up...

...SUKKAH BLUES ROBBT NHCH Erev Sukkot the whole family marched out to the sukkah, all of us dressed in our festive best...
...My day also came, however, when I moved to a house in the suburbs with a half-acre of land to play around with...
...So was my father...
...Interesting," said the rabbi, lifting a finger to his bearded chin...
...He carefully accumulated materials and made plans, and as a final precaution he consulted his rabbi...
...His article "The Home as a Hebrew School" appeared in the June moment...
...It was the sixteenth carton, more or less, and there were at least two dozen to go, so naturally I thought she was talking about muscle power...
...Now that she's gone, and I'm older and wiser, I know she meant an entirely different kind of strength—the stoic fortitude of the Slavic peasant who endures all of nature's vicissitudes without complaining—and I know, too, that the trial she had in mind was not Passover at all, but Sukkot, and in particular the sorrow and suffering that inevitably attend the building of a sukkah for the holiday...
...You'll find everything you need to know...
...And lo and behold, when the day before Sukkot dawned, there stood in our yard a sukkah the likes of which had not been seen since the days of the exodus, and maybe not even then, because the children of Israel surely never had pumpkins for decorations, cornstalks for sechach, and an electric line running into the kitchen for light...
...the result, by now, isn't—and although I always manage to endure, my sukkah doesn't...
...Then, opening a folio volume of the Talmud to the place where Rashi's successors commented on Rashi, he nodded twice and looked up at my father...
...My father was beaming with pride...
...I keep trying, though...
...The Tanach says that pride cometh before the fall...
...The sukkah was devastated...
...He even stayed home from his job one day, the first non-holiday he had been absent in at least twenty years...
...and no matter what I do, something unexpected always seems to happen...
...The janitor at the shul, of course, built a sukkah every year, but he didn't need a Jew to tell him how to do it...
...The Tanach was not only right, it was making a superlative multilingual pun—one that had to do with pride and its consequences, with the season of the year in which Sukkot occurs, and with a certain masochistic annual ritual in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons each year amidst the disarray of a falling sukkah...
...In the small hours of the night, I must confess, the memory of my father's experience occasionally made me pessimistic, but by and large I was sure that anything he could try I could do better, and I got plenty of support from my wife, who as a convert had never experienced sukkahs or sukkah disasters in her childhood, and as a student of anthropology, having specialized in college in.cultures whose primitive denizens lived in huts with thatched roofs, was convinced that if Trobriand Islanders could master the art of building with such materials, so could any ordinary twentieth-century American Jew, not to mention someone as exceptional as me...
...Of course he was an old man by then, and weakened by the fast, and in addition he really didn't know much about woodworking, so he slammed the hammer into his finger...
...One year the whole thing collapsed...
...Between Yom Kippur and Sukkot he worked like a beaver...
...One year—I swear it—the walls came down and the roof stayed up...
...So what is a Jew to do...
...So I bided my time and waited for my opportunity...
...Visiting a neighbor's sukkah is not easy...
...Admiring neighbors were gathered to watch...
...Gevalt, did he yell...
...Personally I don't think my friend is much of an authority on Jewish law, but at Sukkot time it's good to have someone like him...
...Friends and relatives invited to join us were all on the scene...
...My father dreamed of building one, though...
...I followed Rashi to the letter, and then, when I accidentally brushed against a panel, the whole sukkah-caved in...
...Passing through the door his shoulder brushed against a side-panel...
...We moved in April, so he had plenty of time to prepare...
...That's exactly what Tosafot said would happen...
...Very interesting indeed," he intoned...
...And last year, when it looked for a while as if the sukkah would stay up, I fell down, but the sukkah came down too...
...He led us in...
...One year the frame stayed up and the walls blew away...
...He could discourse on it like an expert, but everyone we knew also lived in apartment houses, so no one wanted his advice...
...If they were easy to build~and stayed up without trouble, he says, there wouldn't be much merit in building one each year...
...I have used materials and methods of every kind—wood panels, cast-iron pipes, aluminum tubing, heavy wooden beams, cinder-block foundations— you name it...
...Every year we visited the communal sukkah at the local synagogue, or maybe were lucky enough to be invited to a sukkah in someone's postage-stamp backyard...
...A son should always do better than his parents, and I knew for a fact that I could—not just in sukkah-building but in everything else as well...
...We have to remember, he told me, that being a Jew isn't supposed to be easy, but in America we usually forget—and that is why the mitzvah of building a sukkah has come down to us...
...He even learned a book on carpentry, sitting over it in the evenings at the dining-room table with his head resting on his hands, swaying gently back and forth and chanting the words quietly to himself in the niggun used for Talmud study: "First," he hummed, "you take a hammer, and then a piece of wood...
...Well, that was the end of my father's sukkah-building endeavors, and also the incident that dried up his spirit while he was still in the prime of his years...
...There was a gentle murmur, a sensation of movement that could be felt rather than seen or heard—and then, in an instant so brief that it couldn't have been measured, the entire sukkah collapsed...
...Let's see—there have been rainstorms, there have been windstorms, there have been hail storms, there have been snowstorms, there has even been the hyperactive anti-Semitic two-year-old daughter of my next-door neighbor...
...In due course we were able to move to our own house, and my father's day, so it seemed, had finally come...
...A very religious person I know tells me that sukkahs are supposed to fall down...
...The real merit of the mitzvah is in trying hard when there's no likelihood of success...
...Robert Milch is consulting editor for K'tav Publishing House...
...He learned everything else that Jewish thinkers knew about sukkahs...
...The first time I heard her say it, she was hauling a carton of Passover dishes up the cellar stairs...
...Another time he borrowed my slide rule so that he could convert cubits to feet and inches on the piece of graph paper he was using to chart his floorplan...
...But this year, I think, I won't need my friend, because I have a plan like you never saw: first you take twelve steel girders...
...The sukkahs we saw were always faits-accompli, and we never shared in the mitzvah of building one...
...And besides, who has the strength to watch his own sukkah collapse and then submit to the smug, complacent air of superiority of someone whose sukkah is still standing...
...First of all, a hundred miles from New York City, how many neighbors have sukkahs...
...Right after the blowing of the shofar on Yom Kippur night, my father rushed home...
...Read the Rashi on tractate Sukkah," the rabbi told him, referring to the classic commentary on the tal-mudic discussion of the subject...
...He learned Rashi...
...Every one of these, diverse as they are in origin and destructive force, has knocked my sukkah down...
...The next day at shul, when services ended, he rushed up to the rabbi and grabbed him by the lapels...
...To be exact, the cause is unexpected...
...All those years of living in three rooms, and what did he want—not money, not position, not a fancy vacation, not even four rooms, but to build a sukkah...
...As a child I lived in a Brooklyn apartment house, so I knew very little at first hand about building sukkahs...
...One year the roof came down but the walls stayed up...
...The Greeks call it hubris...
...And to this end, for years, he studied the subject...
...But it didn't stop me...
...As for a congregational sukkah—to feel welcome in it you have to be able to pay a thousand dollars a year in dues, and if you had that, you could call someone in to build you a sukkah that would last till the coming of the Mashiach...
...The materials were all laid out, and just as the tradition says, he hammered in the first nail, so as to proceed, in accordance with the dictum in Shulhan Aruch, directly from one mitzvah to another...
...During the early part of my married life I too lived in a city apartment...
...I did just as you said," he wailed...
...So my father did...
...It was an omen, and it should have stopped him, but it didn't...
...One night, from my bed, I heard him asking out loud, "By a hammer does he mean a ball peen or a sledge or maybe one with a claw...
...Both were right...

Vol. 4 • October 1979 • No. 9


 
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