Missing That Sukkah

By: Larry Gordon

The walls had a real wood look that is so coveted by today’s designers. The walls were thick, and only one large panel had a window that looked out to the street. When the sun shone through that window, it brightened things up considerably.

That was my childhood sukkah and I don’t know where my parents bought it or found it. All I know is that for all those years during Tishrei, we had to deal with it. Sukkah is an important mitzvah, and one of the only ones you can fulfill with your entire body. That is, if you sit inside the sukkah, that is the performance of this great mitzvah.

But if you ever dealt with my parents’ sukkah, it was also the heaviest sukkah you ever had to deal with. Today’s sukkahs are made are light, breezy, and pretty simple to assemble.

Since I met the Litton brothers about a decade ago, we’ve proudly been displaying their beautiful sukkahsin the front of our house whereas in the past we used to have our sukkah in the backyard. And my parents, interestingly enough, went through the same dilemma of “where to build the sukkah” each year.

In Brooklyn during the 60s and 70s, our sukkah was on a grassy patch behind the house. But as the years advanced and the neighborhood situation changed (that’s a nice way of putting it), we had to evacuate the back of the house for our front porch, which is where we ended up putting the sukkah.

Once we were set up on the front porch right outside our front door, we were at a loss to understand why we had never done it in the past. The other day on our weekly podcast, we discussed how once upon a time, we used to transport food from our houses to our sukkahs considering that, in most communities, there was no such thing as an eruv.

And then there were the people who lived in apartment buildings, an experience I never had. But it was fascinating to hear about the eruv that was constructed around those buildings so food and other items could be lowered down from the fifth or sixth floors in buckets so they could be used in the sukkah.

As long as our sukkah was in the back of our house in Brooklyn, we had an eruv around the backyard so we could walk out the back door with food to bring inside the sukkah.

At other times, we handed the food through a back window. The only issue with that was that all our windows had bars. In that case, we used one window that had a set of bars that could be swung open after the lock was taken off.

The locks on those bars potentially posed a serious problem in case of fire and you needed to exit the house quickly. So, my parents decided to leave the lock off that window just in case. That happened to be my bedroom window, and it wasn’t long afterward that I woke up one Friday night after hearing a noise and seeing a pair of hands reaching through the window in an attempt to open it so they could climb inside.

I remember that situation vividly because it was the closest that we ever came to getting robbed. It’s even more frightening when you digest the fact that the element that robs houses has your home under surveillance and knows when window bars can and cannot be opened.

I think that was one of the experiences that convinced us to move our sukkah to the front porch.

The porch sukkah years were nice. I think one of the reasons that it took so long to move our sukkah to the front porch was the possibility that someone carrying food through the dining room or living room could drop or spill something that could cause considerable damage to the carpet or even the furniture.

But in the end, it was the best and most natural place for the sukkah, and we enjoyed it immensely. Our entire family—both the men and women—sat around the table and we had great simchas yom tov.

Like I said up top and in the past, the only problem was building this behemoth of a sukkah that simply could not be built easily. It was heavy and the walls were unyielding. We always needed hired help, unlike today’s sukkahs that can be snapped together in minutes. I mean, not by me, but by someone else for sure.

We sold that house a short time after my mom passed away nine years ago. That old sukkah, which had not been used for more than two decades after my dad was niftar, probably disintegrated into nothing or was just thrown away. While I never checked on it, I live with the knowledge and understanding that those four walls and schach once comprised a very holy place where we sat together as a family, made kiddush, ate, and sang in fulfillment of the great mitzvah of sukkah.

We now have a new sukkah, but I sure do miss that old one. n

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