Now we are in a position to ask, what exactly is a sukka? What does it represent, symbolize, recall? What message is it meant to convey? There is only one passage in the Torah relating to the command, and it is brief to the point of obscurity: “You shall dwell in booths [sukkot] for seven days; all those born among Israel shall dwell in booths, so that your descendants will know that I settled the children of Israel in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 23:42–43).

The problems are obvious. First, the word “sukka” or “sukkot” is not used at any stage to describe the living conditions of the Israelites during the wilderness years. A sukka is a temporary, portable dwelling, a hut or booth. Nowhere, except in this verse, were the Israelites in the wilderness spoken of as living in sukkot. Instead they lived in tents. “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob,” said the pagan prophet Balaam (Num. 24:5).

After the revelation at Mount Sinai, God told Moses to tell the people to “return to their tents” (Deut. 5:27). When the people complained about the manna, Moses heard them “weeping at the entrance to their tents” (Num. 11:10). During the Koraĥ rebellion, Moses said to the people, “Move away from the tents of these evil men” (Num. 16:26).

And so on.

Tents are made of fabric or animal skins. They do not have coverings of foliage. Where in any case would the people find vegetation in the desert for forty years? Tents are not booths. Not surprisingly, therefore, a dispute arose among the sages as to what exactly a sukka represents.

The dispute appears both in the halakhic midrash, the Sifra (to Lev. 23), and also in the Talmud (Sukka 11b), but with the names of the rabbis reversed. According to the Sifra, Rabbi Eliezer says it means ­sukkot mamash, booths in the literal sense of the word. A sukka is a sukka is a sukka: nothing more, nothing less. Rabbi Akiva says that the sukka represents the clouds of glory that accompanied the Israelites on their journeys through the desert.

There are obvious difficulties with either interpretation. For the one who says it means literally booths, what then is there to celebrate? There was nothing miraculous, or even out of the ordinary, about a group of people on a journey living in temporary shelter. That is what happens to many nomadic populations. Booths are still used by some Bedouin today. The Exodus from Egypt and the Giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai – commemorated respectively on Pesaĥ and Shavuot – were clearly epoch-making events, occurrences out of the ordinary, encounters with the Divine. Not so a shed, a hut, a booth.

No less problematic is the view that the sukka represents the clouds of glory. If so, why not say so? Let the verse say, “so that future generations will know that I surrounded the Israelites with clouds of glory when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.” The point is serious and substantive. In general we say that mitzvot einan tzerikhot kavana, “the fulfillment of a command is not conditional on specific intention” (Tosafot, Sukka 42a). But in this case the intent is written into the text of the command itself. It says, “so that future generations will know.” The Talmud tells us that this has halakhic consequences. According to one view a sukka whose roof is higher than twenty cubits from the ground is invalid because at that height you are not conscious of the roof, and therefore the sukka is not fulfilling its function of reminding you, “so that future generations will know” (Sukka 2a*). How then can there be a command whose purpose is to remind you of something, if the thing it is supposed to remind you of is not stated in the text, and is not even clear to the sages of the Mishna?*

In any case, what is the connection between a booth and clouds? The one does not naturally evoke thoughts of the other. A booth is a humble, fragile, temporary shelter. The clouds of glory were radiant, majestic, an unmistakable sign of the presence of God. There is an obvious dissonance between the two ideas.

To be sure, Rabbi Akiva bases his interpretation on a text, a ­messianic vision from the book of Isaiah: “Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory there will be a canopy. There will be a sukka for shade by day from the heat, and for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain” (Is. 4:5–6). This passage does indeed bring together the idea of clouds, shelter, glory and sukka. Yet the sukka of which Isaiah speaks belongs to the future, not to the past, of which the festival is a memorial.

Let us therefore recall what we have learned thus far from our study of Kohelet. First we noted that the name Kohelet is a key to the decryption of the book and of the festival itself. We saw that the root of the word, k-h-l, strikes multiple connections between the festival and the nation’s collective house of worship, the Mishkan in the desert and the Temple in Jerusalem. Hak’hel is the command (Deut. 31:10–13) that once every seven years on Sukkot, someone (assumed to be the king) was “to address the nation when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God at the place He will choose,” meaning the Temple. The root k-h-l is the first word the Torah uses when Moses commands the Israelites to build the Mishkan (Ex. 35:1) – on the day after Yom Kippur just before Sukkot. It is also a key word in the story of the golden calf, for which the Mishkan itself was a tikkun, an act of repair. Also, the root appears seven times in I Kings 8, the account of Solomon dedicating the Temple on Sukkot. All of these suggest a Temple connection.

Now consider the clouds of glory themselves. The actual phrase “clouds of glory” appears nowhere in Tanakh. We hear of a divine cloud in several contexts. God guided the Israelites through the desert in a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night (Ex. 13:21). A cloud positioned itself at the Reed Sea between the Israelites and the pursuing Egyptians, to protect the people from Pharaoh’s army (Ex. 14:19–20). The glory of God appeared in a cloud when manna fell for the people to eat (Ex. 16:10). A cloud covered the top of Mount Sinai when God revealed Himself to the people (Ex. 19:16).

However, the most significant accounts of God’s glory appearing in a cloud occur in connection with the Mishkan and the Temple. Here is the description of the Mishkan:

Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. And Moses was not able to enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. (Ex. 40:34–35)

And this is the description of the Temple:

And when the priests left the Holy Place, the cloud filled the House of the Lord. And the priests could not stand up to serve because of the cloud – for the Presence of God filled the House. (I Kings 8:10–11)

We begin to sense a significant connection. Sukkot, as we noted in the first section, was the Temple festival par excellence. It was also the time of the year when the First Temple was consecrated, and also the Second. It was the festival celebrated in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah after the people had gathered in the Temple to hear the Torah read in public. Immediately after Sukkot that year, the people renewed their covenant with God. Even the rededication of the Temple in the days of the Maccabees, though it took place at a different time of the year, was explicitly modeled after Sukkot.

Note also how the Temple connection persisted even after the building itself was destroyed. In this context there is a pointed contrast between Pesaĥ and Sukkot. After the destruction of the Temple, the Seder ritual changed dramatically. No longer was the central act the offering of the Paschal Lamb. Instead the ritual was focused on matza, the unleavened bread. There was almost no attempt to replicate the Temple ritual outside its precincts. In the case of Sukkot however, many customs that were practiced only in the Temple when it stood – ­taking the four kinds on the second and subsequent days of the festival, the circuits around the altar and the beating of the willow branches – were transferred everywhere after the destruction as zekher leMikdash, a “reminder of the Temple” (Rosh HaShana 4:3).

And so a significance appears. The connection between Sukkot and the clouds of glory has to do with the Mishkan or the Temple. There are other connections as well. The verb s-kh-kh, “to cover,” from which “sukka” is derived, and which in rabbinic Hebrew designates the roof of the sukka, appears in the Torah only in connection with the Mishkan. It says about the Cherubim, the angelic, childlike figures above the Ark, that their wings “overshadowed” it (sokhekhim, Ex. 25:20). The same verb is used about the parokhet, the veil, curtain or canopy that “covered” the Ark (Ex. 40:3).

Now consider the differences between the Sanctuary in the wilderness and the Temple built by Solomon in Jerusalem. Two are fundamental. The first is that the Sanctuary was built entirely by voluntary contributions of money or materials or time. The text in Exodus emphasizes repeatedly that contributions were to be received from every man and woman “whose heart moved them to give” (Ex. 35:21 et al.). The Temple, by contrast, was built on the basis of conscripted labor. There was nothing voluntary about the efforts of the hundreds of thousands of people involved in the construction.

Second, the Sanctuary was portable. It was built of a framework and drapes that could be dismantled and carried by the Levites when the time came for the people to travel onward on the next stage of their journey. The Temple, of course, was not portable. It was built in Jerusalem and could not exist anywhere else.

Now let us go back and revisit the scene that transpired when David first expressed his wish to build the Temple. God sent him the following message via the prophet Nathan:

Go and tell My servant David, “This is what the Lord says: Are you the one to build Me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as My dwelling. Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd My people Israel, ‘Why have you not built Me a house of cedar?’” (II Sam. 7:5–7)

Now we can state precisely what a sukka is. A sukka stands in the same relationship to a house that the Mishkan in the desert did to the Temple in Jerusalem. A sukka moves. A house does not. Those who live in a sukka are on a journey. Those who live in a house have arrived. A sukka suggests a person or nation on the move. A house is what you build when you have come to the end of your wanderings and you want to settle down.

As long as the Temple stood, and even after it was destroyed, God wanted the people never to forget the original Mishkan in the desert. Indeed many English Bibles translate the word Mishkan as “Tabernacle” from the Latin taberna meaning a hut, a shed, a booth, understanding instinctively that the most important thing about it was that it was temporary, portable, the symbol of a people who had not yet arrived.

More than that: it was the symbol of God Himself. Recall that the first time we hear the word “cloud” mentioned in connection with God, it is already the symbol of a journey: “By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night” (Ex. 13:21). God does not stand still. The God beyond the universe is not a God confined to one place, even the holiest. He is the God whose Shekhina, His immanent Presence, is in every place where His people travel. The Mishkan was small, fragile, movable. It was the very opposite of the temples of Egypt and ziggurats of Babylon. But it was filled with the clouds of glory.

In the last month of his life, as the new generation was about to cross the Jordan and enter the land he could only see from afar, Moses wanted them to understand one thing above all others. The real trial, he said, was not in the past but in the future, not in the desert but in the Promised Land. The greatest challenge to faith would be not poverty but affluence, not slavery but freedom, not exile but home. People who believe that they have arrived become complacent, self-satisfied, self-congratulatory, and that is the beginning of the end of national greatness:

Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe His commands, His laws and His decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery…. You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” (Deut. 8:11–17)

God wanted us never to take security for granted. Civilizations, as the historian Giambattista Vico documented in Scienza Nuova (1725), start by being young and energetic, then become successful and wealthy, then self-indulgent and decadent, and eventually fall to younger, hungrier powers.

The only way to avoid this is, for one week in every year, to remind yourself of where you came from and how you once lived. Those were the days when God Himself lived in your midst in a temporary, portable dwelling. It was made not of bricks or stone but of hangings and drapes. But it was full of the clouds of glory. The word Mishkan, from the root sh-kh-n, means “to dwell.” When God says to Moses, “Make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell [shakhanti] among them” (Ex. 25:8), this is the first time we have heard the verb in connection with God. It is, in this context, a very odd word. Recall that God told Moses at the burning bush that when the Israelites were about to leave Egypt, each woman should “ask of her neighbor [mishekhenta]” (Ex. 3:22). A shakhen is a neighbor. There were times when God revealed Himself in signs, wonders and miracles. But when the Israelites made the Mishkan and God dwelled there in clouds of glory*, He was as close to the people as a next-door neighbor*.

On Sukkot, the Temple festival par excellence, the temptation was at its height to believe that what makes a house of God is architectural magnificence on a monumental scale. That has been true about virtually every religion, ancient and modern, since the dawn of time. But it is not true of Judaism. God does not live in buildings but in the open heart, the heart that makes itself vulnerable the way the covering of a sukka is vulnerable. If the covering of the sukka is thick enough to keep out the rain, it is invalid (Mishna Berura 631:6). If a human heart is thick enough to keep out the word of God that is like rain (Deut. 32:2), then it too will lose its holiness: “Yeshurun grew fat and kicked; you grew fat, thick, gross; then he forsook God who made him” (Deut. 32:15).

For seven days we are commanded to live in a sukka to remind us that this is how God lived in our ancestors’ midst when they journeyed from Egypt to the Promised Land. It was not just the Israelites who lived in temporary dwellings when God brought them out of the land of Egypt. So did God Himself. That was the miracle: that the Creator of heaven and earth lived among the people so closely that, homeless and vulnerable though they were, they could feel the Shekhina in their midst.

So Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva were both right. The sukka really was a sukka: a portable shrine, a movable sanctuary, a temporary temple. But it was filled with clouds of glory. Not even Solomon’s Temple made the people feel as close to God as did the Mishkan. A nation that seeks security in stone eventually grows old. A people that never stops traveling, spiritually if not physically, will never grow old.

There is an extraordinary intimation of all this early on in the Torah. If we examine Genesis carefully, we will discover that the patriarchs did not live in houses. When the word “house” is used in a patriarchal context, it means not a building but rather “family” or “household.” Others lived in houses. The patriarchs lived in tents. The contrast is often striking. In Genesis 18, when angels visit Abraham, he is sitting at the entrance of his tent. In the next chapter, they come to his nephew Lot in Sodom and find that he is living in a house (Gen. 19:2, 4). The first patriarch described as living in a house is Jacob.

The verse that says so is little short of astonishing. “Jacob went to Sukkot, where he built a house for himself and made sheds [sukkot] for his livestock. That is why he called the place Sukkot” (Gen. 33:17). This is the first time one of the patriarchs is spoken of as building a house, yet he does not call the place “house” (as in Beit-El or Beit-Leĥem for example). Instead he calls it Sukkot in honor of the sheds he has made for his cattle! How are we to explain this?

The only plausible explanation is that at the very moment Jacob sought to settle in a permanent home, he wished never to forget that he remained, in some sense, a nomad as Abraham and Isaac were. He was on a journey. To be a Jew is to be on a journey. Judaism was born in two journeys, Abraham and Sarah’s from Mesopotamia, Moses and the Israelites’ from Egypt. Mesopotamia and Egypt, the world’s two first great civilizations, worshiped the gods in monumental buildings, to construct which they turned whole populations into slaves. This, says the Torah, is to betray both God and humanity. God does not need that kind of house. Recall what He said to David: “Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers… ‘Why have you not built Me a house of cedar?’” God moves. Israel moves. God does not seek, nor is Israel called on to build, statements in stone. Other nations may do so. But that, says God, is not who I am, nor is it who I want you to be.

The sentence in the Torah which describes the first house ever built by a Jew is also the first place in which the word “Sukkot” appears – and it appears not once but three times. If you want to understand Sukkot, meditate on this verse.

Recall too the first time the word “house” is used in connection with God (other than as the place name Beit-El). It happens when Jacob is in the middle of a journey, fleeing home and not yet arrived at his destination. Alone at night, Jacob sleeps and dreams of a ladder connecting earth and heaven. He wakes and says, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:17). There was no house there, only a dream and a vision glimpsed in the midst of a journey. Recall too that as the Israelites began their journey out of Egypt toward the Promised Land, their first stop was at a place called Sukkot (Num. 33:5). Those who live in sukkot are on a journey. God’s first words to Abraham were “Lekh lekha”: Move. The definition of a Jew is: one-who-is-on-a-journey.

However humble our sukka, when we invite guests they turn out to be Ushpizin – the heroes of our people – just as Abraham and Sarah welcomed anonymous strangers and discovered they were angels. When we sit in a sukka under the shelter of faith, we find ourselves surrounded by the Shekhina, God’s clouds of glory. In Judaism, as Rabbi Yoĥanan said about God: greatness is humility (Megilla 31a). So it is with buildings when they become symbols. The humblest can be the greatest. That is why on Sukkot, the supreme Temple festival, God wanted us to remember the time He lived in our ancestors’ midst in a sukka. Never was He closer to them or they to Him than when, using only materials they had donated, and time and skills they had volunteered, they built the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, so that the Shekhina could live in their midst.

So on this month of months, Tishrei, we begin with the anniversary of the creation of the universe – the home God made for us. But we then go on to remember the Mishkan, the home our ancestors made for God. The Torah spends only thirty-four verses describing the creation of the universe, but almost a third of the book of Exodus describing the building of the Mishkan, as if to say that it is easy for an infinite, omnipotent God to make a home for us, but His real pleasure – His naĥat ruaĥ – lies in the home we build for Him, with one condition, that it is built with humility – not the hubris that turned the wisest of Israel’s kings almost into a pharaoh, and led eventually to the division of the kingdom and the destruction of the Temple itself.

The universe is the space God makes for us. The sukka, with its incomplete roof and its door open to strangers, is the space we make for God.