How Much Protection Do We Need to Feel Safe, and When Does Protection Begin to Suffocate?

How Much Protection Do We Need to Feel Safe, and When Does Protection Begin to Suffocate?

Some parents walk an eight-year-old child to school in order to protect them. Some parents accompany even an eighteen-year-old through every decision, every conversation, and every difficulty for exactly the same reason. They call the teacher before the child has had a chance to speak, intervene in an argument before the girl has tried to handle it, and solve the problem before the son even knew there was a problem. It all comes from love. They do not want the child to fall, be disappointed, fail, or be hurt. But one day they may discover something surprising: they succeeded in keeping many difficulties away from the child, and at the same time they also kept away many opportunities for the child to discover that they were capable of dealing with them.

This happens not only in education. A person builds a life in which nothing is allowed to surprise him. He has insurance for everything, a backup plan for every plan, savings set aside, a precise schedule, repeated checks before every decision. Much of this is healthy responsibility. But at some point he discovers that he is not calmer. Quite the opposite. The more openings he tries to close, the more aware he becomes of another opening that is still not closed.

Then Sukkot arrives and asks a person to do something almost opposite to that instinct.

To build a roof that is not really a roof.

The Mishnah says: “If it is dense like a house, even though the stars cannot be seen through it, it is valid” (Mishnah, Sukkah 2:2). In other words, even schach so dense that the stars cannot be seen through it does not invalidate the sukkah after the fact. But the very wording teaches that the preferred form is different. Thus the Shulchan Aruch rules: “The normal manner of covering is for it to be light, so that the large stars can be seen through it” (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 631:3).

It is a beautiful halachah.

We leave the house for the sukkah, but we are not commanded to rebuild there the same roof from which we came out.

There are walls.

There is schach.

There is shade.

But openings remain.

We can see the sky.

Why is the sukkah not supposed to become a sealed house?

Rashi explains the phrase “dense like a house” as meaning “that the stars cannot be seen through it” (Rashi, Sukkah 22b). The schach can be so thick that the sukkah begins to resemble a house. Although it remains valid, the Mishnah clearly distinguishes between the natural form of a sukkah and a structure that has come too close to a permanent home.

Maimonides formulates the guidance this way: “The normal manner of covering is for it to be light, so that the large stars can be seen through it” (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 5:21). Notice the phrase “the normal manner.” This is not only a technical question of valid or invalid. There is an appropriate form to the mitzvah. The sukkah is not supposed to eliminate the outside completely.

Rabbenu Manoach, in his commentary on Maimonides, explains the visibility of the stars as part of the proper form of schach, which is not made like the sealed roofing of a house. The schach is meant to create shade and shelter, but it remains schach rather than a permanent ceiling (Rabbenu Manoach, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 5:21).

The Aruch HaShulchan likewise emphasizes that the proper manner is not to pile on so much schach that the sukkah takes on the form of a complete house, but to preserve the special character of the sukkah (Aruch HaShulchan, Orach Chaim 631).

Beneath the details of the halachah lies an image that is hard to ignore.

The Torah commands us to enter a protected place, but not a place protected absolutely.

There is shade, but through it we can see the sky.

There are walls, but they are not the walls of the house.

There is a place to live, but it does not give a person the illusion that the world outside has been sealed away.

The laws of schach were not, of course, stated as a theory of child development or anxiety treatment. They are halachic laws with their own definitions. Yet after learning them, it is hard not to hear the question they allow us to ask about life: is the purpose of protection to remove every possibility of harm, or to provide enough shelter for a person to live in a world that cannot be sealed shut?

The Torah itself places both sides next to one another.

On the one hand, it says: “You shall greatly guard your souls” (Deuteronomy 4:15), and the sages and halachic authorities derive in various contexts the obligation to take precautions against danger. Judaism is not an ideology of recklessness. A person must build a parapet around a roof: “You shall make a parapet for your roof, and you shall not place blood in your house” (Deuteronomy 22:8). We do not tell a person: just have faith and everything will be fine.

But the same person who builds a parapet is not commanded to build a wall around every part of life.

That is the great distinction.

Responsibility seeks to reduce reasonable danger. Anxiety seeks to eliminate the very possibility that something may remain outside its control.

Only after this foundation is in place can we turn to the research literature.

In the psychology of anxiety there is a well-known phenomenon called safety behaviors. These are actions a person takes to prevent what they fear or to make sure they will be able to cope if it occurs. Some of them can be entirely sensible. The problem arises when they become excessive and constant, because then the person may never learn that the situation is less dangerous than imagined, or that they themselves are able to cope even without all the protective mechanisms.

For example, someone is afraid of public speaking and therefore reads every word from a page. The lecture goes well. What does the person learn?

Not necessarily: “I am capable of speaking in front of people.”

The person may learn: “I survived only because I never lifted my eyes from the page.”

Next time the page becomes even more necessary.

The tool that was meant to create security gradually becomes evidence that the person cannot manage without it.

Exposure-based research and treatments for anxiety address exactly this question: how can a person gradually encounter a feared situation without always relying on the same behaviors that prevent them from learning something new about the danger and about their own ability to cope?

This phenomenon becomes especially fascinating in raising children.

Suppose a twelve-year-old girl comes home and says that two friends did not invite her to a gathering.

Her mother hurts for her.

Within a minute the mother wants to call one of the other mothers.

She can.

Perhaps she can even arrange an invitation.

But what did the girl learn?

That her mother knows how to solve social problems.

What has she still not learned?

What she herself does when she is not invited.

How she calms herself.

How she checks whether there was a misunderstanding.

How she talks with a friend.

How she copes with the painful fact that sometimes not everyone will choose her.

How she discovers that even after an evening spent at home, life continues.

Does this mean an adult should never intervene? Certainly not. There can be bullying, violence, and situations in which an adult must enter the picture. The question is different: am I protecting the child from danger, or am I protecting the child from the very experience of difficulty?

Those are not the same thing.

A good parent wants to be a roof.

But there is a difference between a roof and a sealed sky.

A child needs to know that there is a home to return to. The child needs to know that if there is a real fall, someone will catch them. The child needs to know that there are things their parents will not allow anyone to do to them.

But the child also needs some openings in the schach.

A place to meet a small disappointment.

A place to solve a problem independently.

A place to receive a grade they did not like without a parent immediately calling the teacher.

A place to argue with a friend and have to find words.

A place to forget something and carry the consequence.

A place to discover one of the most important discoveries a child can make:

This is hard for me, and I am still capable.

That insight cannot be given to a child in a lecture.

We can say a thousand times, “I believe in you,” and still not give the child what one difficult experience successfully navigated can provide.

The deepest confidence does not come from never having fallen.

It comes from the memory that I have fallen before and got back up.

The same thing happens to adults.

Some people cannot make a decision without consulting five others. They read, investigate, ask, and ask again. Advice is important, but at a certain point something interesting happens: each additional opinion no longer increases confidence. It reduces it.

Why?

Because the person is not only gathering information.

They are trying to reach a moment in which there will be no possibility of error left.

That moment never comes.

Another person repeatedly checks whether the door is locked. The first time, the person checks the door. By the fifth time, the person is no longer checking the door. The person is trying to obtain an absolute feeling of certainty.

That is something entirely different.

The world can give us information.

It almost never gives us absolute certainty.

Marriage can also be given a roof that is too dense.

A person fears losing a spouse and therefore wants to know at all times where the spouse is, whom they spoke with, why they did not answer, and exactly what they meant by a particular sentence. The person calls this love.

But love that cannot leave even a little space gradually becomes surveillance.

Some relationships break down not because there was no love, but because there was no air left.

The same is true of how we relate to ourselves.

We want to protect ourselves from disappointment, so we stop trying.

We do not propose an idea so that it cannot be rejected.

We do not start a business so that we cannot lose money.

We do not ask forgiveness so that we cannot be turned away.

We do not begin a relationship so that we cannot be disappointed.

We do not write a book so that it cannot be criticized.

Then something paradoxical happens.

We succeeded in protecting ourselves from failure.

But to do so, we also had to give up the possibility of success.

Some protections prevent us from being hurt, and some protections prevent us from living.

This requires us to distinguish between two concepts.

There is risk, and there is discomfort.

Not everything unpleasant is dangerous.

A child who hears “no” from a friend experiences discomfort.

A child who crosses a road without looking is in danger.

An employee who presents an idea and finds that the manager is not enthusiastic experiences discomfort.

An employee in an abusive environment may be in a harmful situation.

A person who has a difficult conversation with a spouse experiences discomfort.

A person who is subjected to violence needs protection.

Wisdom does not mean stopping protection.

Wisdom means protecting where there is danger without turning every discomfort into danger.

Here the sukkah becomes an especially powerful image.

If there is no schach, it is not a sukkah.

We need shade.

We need protection.

We need boundaries.

But if a person says, “I want to be truly safe, so I will add more and more and more until I build a concrete ceiling above me,” perhaps the person will end up with an excellent roof.

But the sukkah will be gone.

Some things become less good precisely when we add too much of them.

That is true of protection.

It is true of help.

It is true of supervision.

It is true of advice.

It is true even of love when love does not know how to leave room for another person to exist as a person in their own right.

We can take a very practical question from this for every parent: what ability is my child not developing because I am doing it for them?

For every manager: what decision are my employees not learning to make because every decision must pass through me?

For every spouse: do I allow the person beside me room to be different from me without interpreting that difference as a threat?

And for every person in relation to themselves: what am I not doing because I am waiting for a level of security that no one in the world can promise me?

But there is another level here, perhaps the deepest one.

Why does it matter that the stars be visible through the schach?

Halachically, as noted, the sukkah remains valid even when the schach is so dense that the stars cannot be seen, provided the other conditions of validity are met. Nevertheless, the proper manner is to leave the possibility of seeing them.

Perhaps that image says something subtle about a person of faith.

Faith is not life without a roof.

But neither is it an attempt to build a roof so sealed that we will never again have to lift our eyes.

A person builds a parapet.

Goes to a doctor.

Saves money.

Seeks advice.

Locks the door.

Teaches children to be careful.

Does everything that responsibility requires.

And after all of that, there are still openings in the schach.

There are things we do not know.

There are things we do not control.

There are children for whom we will choose the best school and who will still go through difficulty.

There are decisions we will make after serious investigation that will still turn out to be wrong.

There are people we will love and whose pain we will not be able to prevent.

There are prayers we will pray without receiving the answer we wanted.

The question is not whether we will succeed in closing every opening.

We will not.

The question is what we see through them.

We can look through the opening and see only the threat.

Or we can raise our eyes and see the stars as well.

Sukkot does not teach a person to live without protection. It teaches the proper measure of protection: enough schach to create shade, enough openings to remember that the sky is still there.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts we can give both our children and ourselves. Not a world in which nothing bad will ever happen, because we cannot promise such a world, but a home in which a person knows that even when something bad happens, there are roots, people, faith, and inner resources with which to face it.

In the end, true security is not knowing that there will never be a storm.

True security is knowing that I have shelter, and still not needing to close off the sky in order to feel protected.