Build Something Beautiful
An essay connecting the ritual of constructing a sukkah after Yom Kippur to how Jewish tradition invites personal creativity, hospitality, and joy.
Useful takeaways from this story.
Hiddur mitzvah, the value of beautifying mitzvot, encourages personal expression when decorating the sukkah—making the inherited tradition a place you want to inhabit.
Sukkot centers hospitality and rejoicing: families eat, gather, and sometimes sleep in the sukkah while performing rituals like waving the lulav and etrog.
Rabbinic texts imagine wildly varied sukkot, showing a long-standing openness to inventive applications of the basic form.
The useful part
Preparations for Sukkot began this past Monday night, at what might seem like a strange moment. We had just completed the great work of the Yamim Noraim, or the Days of Awe. Then, with the final blast of the shofar still resonating in our bodies and echoing in our ears, tradition instructed us to go home and...
How it works
- Its roof must provide shade while allowing light to filter through, the breeze to touch our faces and starlight to glitter overhead.
- Yet, for a tradition often so precise in how we are meant to observe, an astonishing amount is left open to our own creative vision.
- One-time Monthly Choose an amount to donate $72 $180 $360 $500 $ Support Us The rabbis of the Talmud themselves seem to delight in discovering just how far the form can stretch.
- We hang garlands and tapestries, fruits and paper chains, lights and artwork.
- We follow what delights our senses, what feels good in our hands, what evokes meaningful memories, what brings joy into the space.
What to take from it
There is pleasure in lining up colors that please us, hanging something whimsical simply because it makes us smile, noticing what we want to be surrounded by and giving ourselves permission to create it. On the heels of our holiest day, we begin creating a temporary structure that, beginning later in the week, will serve as a home of sorts. We eat there, gather there, and perhaps, for those intrepid among us, even sleep there.
Example or evidence
- Like the sukkah, Judaism is at once something we inherit and something we must, in part, build.
- May we build with what we've inherited, create with what is ours and make something beautiful enough to live inside.
- The rabbis even consider whether an elephant might serve as one of the walls.
- In this way, the sukkah offers a way of thinking about the Jewish tradition itself.
Details worth keeping
Hammer and nail, post to post, bamboo and leaves. Look at it one way: A sukkah is a flimsy hut in the yard. It is our dwelling place for the duration of the holiday.
Related coverage
- Nytimes: We look at President Trump's building spree in Washington.
- Rooferscoffeeshop: build-stronger-communities-with-habitat-for-humanity
- Kveller: Editor's note: We originally published this in 2025.
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The Story of Our Sukkah — And How You Can Build One, Too
Editor’s note: We originally published this in 2025. We’re republishing in 2026, because these sukkah instructions are still excellent, and maybe you’d like to build your own sukkah this year. When he was two, my son dressed up as a construction worker for Halloween: “Bob the Builder” hard hat on his little head, toolb
Learning To Love My Family’s Homemade Sukkah
Growing up in a mostly Orthodox neighborhood in Queens in the 1980s, I watched as my neighbors’ backyards and front porches filled with the same prefabricated sukkot each autumn. The bottom half was yellow fabric; the top was blue. A bamboo mat provided the roof — or schach, as my Hebrew school teachers called it. […]
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