At what point do you give in? Is it when the temperature starts to drop and, despite your Ugg boots and woolly hats, you’re shivering into your soup? Is it when the faintest hint of drizzle appears, and you decide you can go in after the challah is cut? Or is your family one of those that stoically stays in the succah, even as the heavens open and the stuffed cabbage becomes totally sodden?
Growing up, we were always the latter — sort of. The Lipman succah — not to embarrass its chief architect, my father— is, to us, a thing of beauty. An old-school, wooden sided, branch covered hut, with a door that never quite shuts and usually a few nails sticking out at worrying angles, rather than one of these newfangled tents punted every autumn on Golders Green Road.
But its main selling point, crucially, is that has a roof (a hinged roof that could be open or closed; it’s still fully kosher). So I can remember more than a few childhood Succots dining not under the stars but under corrugated plastic. Swathed in coats and scarves, broadly protected from the elements but stubbornly still in the succah. My dad had toiled hard to build it; British weather wouldn’t defeat us (although at a push, maybe we could have dessert inside); and my grandmother would command us to stay put. Never mind that our ancestors did this in the desert, or that— as we complained as petulant teenagers — the main mitzvah is only to sit for Kiddush.
We never slept in it (although there was a near miss in my sister’s succah a few years ago, when we managed to get locked out of her house) — we weren’t that ridiculous. Of course, it’s a sliding scale of lunacy; even for a festival that requires you to wave a palm frond around and carry a pseudo-lemon in a special box, the succah stands out as a piece of absurdist theatre.
Over the years, it went from being an exhibition of the fruits of that year’s cheder arts-and-crafts sessions to a walk down memory lane. There’s the stuffed whale that my sister made in nursery, or the plastic rambutan someone chanced upon on holiday. On that side, the lulav and etrog mural I did in order to pad out my GCSE art sketchbook; above us, the spray-painted conkers picked up on walks home from shul.
Like a Christmas tree decorated with family heirlooms, our succah — like most people’s, probably — is a temporary dwelling reinforced by nostalgia and family in-jokes. Likewise, the construction crew changed; my grandfather has hung up his hard-hat while various brothers-in-law have been recruited in the place of uncles happy to hand over.
A new generation is now tasked with making the decorations at school and nursery; spare parts are ordered online, and squeezing in our expanding numbers presents no small challenge.
This year, the succah has been on the move. My sisters and I have all flown the nest and festivals are usually marked between our different homes rather than our childhood one, or from the more seasonally appropriate perch of Tel Aviv. In possession of a garden for the first time, I tentatively suggested we transplant this pride and joy from my parents’ to mine, and so it has been. This Succot, it is a different window from which the roof is suspended; new trees from which we gather the branches, another kitchen from where the apple crumble emerges.
But even as it has swapped underground zones, it will be the same essential structure, with the same faded childhood drawings adorning the slightly creaking walls, the same discussions with my dad about whether he’s put all the walls in the right place, and — although I hope not — quite possibly the same meal-times with the rain beating down, snug under that corrugated plastic roof. Because, while a succah may be a temporary dwelling, this one has a permanent place in my heart.
