# The Festival of Insecurity

> What exactly is a succah? What is it meant to

By David Raitan · 2026-09-27 · https://torahmeirah.com/en/essays/sukkot-4

What exactly is a succah? What is it meant to represent?

The question matters, because the Torah makes it part of the commandment itself. "You shall dwell in booths for seven days… so that your generations shall know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt." We are not only asked to sit in the succah. We are asked to understand why. Knowing is part of the mitzvah.

Yet the Torah does not tell us what those booths were. On this, two of the great Sages of the Mishnah disagreed.

Rabbi Eliezer taught that the booths were not booths at all. They were the *ananei kavod*, the Clouds of Glory.

Picture the wilderness as the Israelites knew it: burning days and freezing nights, serpents and scorpions, no water, no shade and no road. Humanly speaking, a people of that size could not have survived there for a year, let alone forty. The Sages describe how they did. God surrounded them with clouds — one on each of their four sides, one above to shield them from the sun, one beneath to cushion their feet, and one that went before them, levelling the hills, raising the valleys and clearing the way. An entire nation travelled through the desert enfolded in the presence of God.

That, says Rabbi Eliezer, is what the succah recalls. Rashi and Ramban agree, and Ramban shows how far the idea reaches. The Torah, he teaches, wants every generation to know the wonders God performed for us. And he points to the prophet Isaiah's vision of the end of days, when God will create over Mount Zion "a cloud by day and the glow of a flaming fire by night… and it shall be a *succah*, a shade from the heat." So the succah looks in two directions: back to the protection God gave us in the past, and forward to the protection He has promised for the future. It is both a memory and a hope.

Rabbi Akiva saw it quite differently. *Succot mammash*, he said: the booths were real booths. Not clouds, not a symbol, not a miracle. Huts — simple shelters of branches, made by human hands. Ibn Ezra and Rashbam follow his view.

The plain words of the Torah lend him support. The very first place the Israelites stopped after leaving Egypt had a name: "The children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succot." A place of huts. And long before, when Jacob returned from exile, he "made succot for his cattle; therefore the place was called Succot." In the Torah's own language, a succah is the humblest of structures — the kind of shelter a shepherd puts up for his flock.

Two teachers, two pictures. For Rabbi Eliezer, the Israelites lived surrounded by miracles. For Rabbi Akiva, they lived in huts.

Rabbi Akiva's view, however, raises a difficult question.

Every festival in the Torah recalls something God did. Pesach recalls the plagues and the splitting of the sea. Shavuot recalls the giving of the Torah at Sinai, the only time in history an entire people heard the voice of God. On Rabbi Eliezer's reading, Sukkot belongs in this company: it recalls forty years of miraculous protection. But on Rabbi Akiva's reading, what does it recall? There is nothing miraculous about living in huts while crossing a desert. It is what desert travellers have always done, as the Bedouin still do. Where, then, is the miracle?

The answer lies in a verse from the prophet Jeremiah.

When Tanach looks back on the wilderness years, it usually tells the story one way: God was gracious, and the people were not. They complained about the food and the water. They made a golden calf. They longed to return to Egypt. Jeremiah tells it differently. In God's name he says:

"I remember the loving-kindness of your youth, the love of your bridal days, how you followed Me in the wilderness, through a land not sown." — Yirmiyahu 2:2

This is one of the very few verses in Tanach that praises not God, but the people of Israel. Yes, they complained. Yes, they rebelled. But they followed. Like Abraham and Sarah before them, they left Egypt with no map, no supplies and no idea where they were going, because God had asked them to.

There is a well-known rhyme: "How odd of God to choose the Jews." And the answer: it is not so odd.

The Jews chose God.

Now we can see what Rabbi Akiva saw. If the Israelites were surrounded by the Clouds of Glory, they were perfectly safe. They had **certainty**. And where there is certainty, there is no sacrifice. But if all they had were huts — flimsy shelters, open to the wind and the rain, with enemies all around — then the only thing that kept them going was **faith**. Like a bride who follows her husband to a place she has never seen, and lives in a hut because she trusts his promise that one day they will have a home.

That is the miracle Rabbi Akiva's succah remembers. Not God's miracle, but Israel's.

A beautiful pattern now appears in the three pilgrimage festivals. Pesach is about God's love for His people: He took them out of Egypt when they had done nothing to deserve it. Sukkot is about the people's love for God: they followed Him into the wilderness with nothing but His word. Shavuot is about the love that goes both ways: at Sinai, God and Israel bound themselves to each other in a covenant.

But Sukkot did not stay a memory of the desert. It became the story of Jewish history.

Other nations built palaces and castles, fortresses and monuments — buildings that said: we are strong, and we will last. The Jewish people carried a different story: a story about a hut.

And history made that story come true. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish people was scattered across the world. For almost two thousand years, Jews lived in other people's lands, on other people's terms. They were never truly at home. At any moment, without warning, they could be told to leave. England expelled its Jews in 1290. Over the next two centuries, country after country in Europe did the same. In 1492 Spain expelled its Jews, and in 1497 Portugal followed.

For all those centuries, every Jewish home was a temporary home. Every stop was only a pause on a longer journey.

The only certainty was uncertainty.

In the wilderness, the Jewish people had lived in huts for forty years. In exile, they lived in huts for two thousand. Sukkot became what it truly is: the festival of insecurity.

And through all of it, they did what the bride did in the wilderness. They followed. Every generation could have given up — converted, disappeared, become like everyone else. Instead they kept faith with God — not because they were safe, but because they loved Him. The love Jeremiah praised in the desert kept the Jewish people alive for two thousand years.

Every autumn, in whatever country had not yet expelled them, Jews went outside and built their succot. And they called those seven days *zeman simchatenu*, the season of our joy. That is the wonder at the heart of Jewish history: a people who knew better than anyone how fragile life can be, and who still sat in their huts and rejoiced.

The Zohar calls the succah *tzila di-mehemnuta*, the shade of faith. A shade is not a wall. It does not keep out the wind or the rain. But under it, the Jewish people found the strength to be joyful.

Faith is not certainty. Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty.

That is what the succah teaches, and it has never been more needed than now.

We live in an age of rapid change. Technology, politics, the economy, the way we live and work — everything seems to be shifting under our feet. The world feels less stable than it did a generation ago. And when people feel insecure, they become afraid. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes described what happens when fear takes over a society: a war of everyone against everyone, and a life that is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Fear turns into anger, and anger turns into hatred.

The Jewish people has lived with insecurity longer than anyone. And our answer to it is Sukkot. Once a year we leave the safety of our homes and sit in a hut, open to the sky. And we do not respond with fear. We respond with joy.

The prophet Zechariah said that one day, Sukkot will be celebrated by the whole world. Perhaps this is why. It is the festival that teaches how to live when nothing is certain.

So why is the festival of the hut the season of our joy? Because in that hut we remember a people who followed God into a land not sown, and never stopped following. Each year we go out under the branches and choose Him again. And from that fragile shelter, filled with faith, we can bring a little more light into an uncertain world.