What does the sukkah teach us about our children?
We work for them, save for them, buy for them, drive them and try to give them what we did not have. Yet sometimes, inside everything we give our children, they are missing the one thing that cannot be ordered online: us.
In the sukkah the family moves into a smaller space. The table is close, the chairs are close, everyone sits under the same s’chach. “Dwell as you live” (Sukkah 28b). The mitzvah brings life into the sukkah.
That is an opportunity to ask what kind of life our children encounter when they encounter us. Do they know mainly our back facing the computer, the hand holding the phone, the sentence “in a minute”? Children do not remember only what we bought them. They build themselves from the experience of whether they had a place in our attention.
In twenty years a child may not remember which decoration hung in the sukkah. He may remember very clearly whether, when he spoke at the table, his father or mother lifted their eyes, put down the phone and listened as though, for that moment, nothing in the world mattered more.