How Can We Be Inside the Sukkah and Still Remain Outside?
How Can We Be Inside the Sukkah and Still Remain Outside?
How Can We Be Inside the Sukkah and Still Remain Outside?
A person can sit with their family for an entire hour without truly being with them. They can take part in the conversation, nod, and even respond, while their mind remains at work. A person can enter the synagogue, open a prayer book, stand with everyone else, and discover at the end that they hardly encountered the prayer at all. A person can also enter the sukkah, be surrounded by its walls, smell the schach, and sleep there all night, yet from a halachic perspective still not truly be beneath the sukkah. The Mishnah opens the second chapter of Tractate Sukkah with a surprising law: one who sleeps beneath a bed in the sukkah has not fulfilled the obligation (Mishnah, Sukkah 2:1). The person is physically inside the sukkah, so what is missing?
The Mishnah tells of Tavi, the servant of Rabban Gamliel, a Torah scholar who slept beneath a bed. Rabban Gamliel explained to the elders that Tavi knew servants were exempt from the mitzvah of sukkah and therefore permitted himself to sleep there. The sages learned from this incident that one who sleeps beneath a bed does not fulfill the obligation (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 20b). Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, explains that this law concerns a bed ten handbreadths high because it creates a significant space of its own, resembling a sukkah within a sukkah (Commentary on the Mishnah, Sukkah 2:1). A person can therefore be surrounded by the sukkah on every side, yet something placed between the person and the schach creates a separate domain.
This becomes even more striking when compared with what the sages require of the sukkah as a whole. The Torah says, “You shall dwell in sukkot for seven days” (Leviticus 23:42), and the sages interpret this to mean that one must dwell there as one ordinarily lives at home. Throughout the seven days, a person makes the sukkah the permanent dwelling and the house temporary, brings fine utensils and bedding into the sukkah, and eats, drinks, and spends time there (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 28b). The Torah does not ask for a brief visit to the sukkah. It asks us to transfer life into it. Maimonides rules that throughout the seven days a person should eat, drink, and reside in the sukkah in the same manner as they live at home during the rest of the year (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 6:5). The sukkah is not scenery surrounding a mitzvah. It is meant to become a place in which the person is genuinely present.
Here, however, a fascinating paradox appears. We can bring the bed, the food, and the body into the sukkah while still creating a private room within it that disconnects us from it. Halachah is, of course, discussing a physical partition and the laws of a shelter. We must not turn the law into a psychological metaphor as though that were its legal meaning. Yet the image it places before us is too powerful to ignore: arriving somewhere does not always mean that we are truly there. Sometimes we carry a private ceiling with us wherever we go, preventing the place we have entered from reaching us.
The prophet Isaiah describes a similar condition in spiritual life: “Because this people draws near with its mouth and honors Me with its lips, while its heart is far from Me” (Isaiah 29:13). The mouth is close, but the heart is distant. King David asks for precisely the opposite: “One thing I have asked of the Lord, that will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life... to behold the pleasantness of the Lord” (Psalms 27:4). He does not ask merely to enter the house of God, but to be able to behold, encounter, and remain present to what is there. The Shema likewise does not suffice with words being spoken. It commands: “These words, which I command you today, shall be upon your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:6). There is a great distance between something that is beside a person and something that enters the person.
Psychology knows this distance well. Research on mind-wandering shows that for a significant portion of our time, consciousness drifts away from the activity in which we are engaged toward other thoughts. A well-known study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that people reported mind-wandering in a large share of everyday-life samples and that, on average, such states were associated with lower levels of happiness. Sophie Leroy studied another phenomenon known as attention residue. When we move from one task to another, part of our attention remains attached to the previous task. The body has moved to the next place, but part of the mind remains where we came from.
This is exactly what often happens in life. A father arrives home at seven in the evening, but the four o’clock meeting is still sitting beside him at the table. A woman goes on vacation with her family, but the office travels with her in her pocket. A spouse listens to a story while already composing a response. A child speaks to parents who are even looking at the child, yet every sound from the phone gains their attention more quickly. The issue is not only how many hours we give the people we love. The question is how much of ourselves arrives with us inside those hours.
Perhaps this is why the Torah does not merely tell us to enter the sukkah, but to dwell in it. Dwelling means presence. A person should not leave the self outside and bring only the body in. The sages said that in the sukkah a person eats, drinks, spends time, and studies, bringing the ordinary pattern of life into it (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 28b). The temporary home teaches that the place where we are now deserves our full presence, even if we will rise and leave it an hour later.
This test does not concern family alone. A person can study a page of Talmud while the next argument is already unfolding in the mind. A person can recite a blessing and discover at the end that its beginning is no longer remembered. Someone can visit an elderly parent while answering ten messages and later say, “I spent an entire hour visiting.” Sometimes we count presence in minutes, while the person facing us experiences it through attention. We can give someone an hour and offer only three minutes of ourselves within it.
The sukkah therefore places an uncomfortable question before us: what is the bed beneath which we are sleeping? What are we inserting between ourselves and the place where we are? For one person it is work that does not end upon leaving the office. For another it is anxiety that runs ten future scenarios through the mind. For a third it is the phone, and for a fourth it may even be a past success in which the person continues to live, unable to meet what is happening now. Not every ceiling is visible, but it can still separate very effectively.
There is also a practical point here that does not require us to become monks of attention. The goal is not to remain focused at every moment of life, which is impossible. The goal is to identify the places we have declared important and ask whether we truly arrive there. If the family evening meal matters, we can create twenty minutes in which the phone is not on the table. If visiting a parent matters, we can decide not to manage the office at the same time. If prayer matters, we can choose one blessing each day in which we do not hurry toward the next sentence before finishing the present one. Presence is not merely a feeling for which we wait. Sometimes we must build the conditions that make it possible.
Perhaps this is one of the surprising lessons Tavi teaches us from within the sukkah. We can be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by everything required, and still insert another layer between ourselves and reality that conceals it. For seven days the Torah asks us to leave the house and sit beneath the schach, but perhaps the greater challenge is to emerge from beneath the ceilings we carry with us everywhere.
When we enter the sukkah this year, the question is not only whether the sukkah is above our heads. We should also ask whether we are truly beneath it. Sometimes a person does not need another hour with the children, another prayer, another lesson, or another evening with a spouse. Sometimes all that is missing is for the person finally to arrive at the place where the body has been for a long time.