Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Human beings have spent thousands of years getting better at building walls.
We began with mud and stone. Then brick, concrete, steel, gates, locks, alarms, and cameras.
We learned how to keep out the weather, strangers, animals, and enemies.
Much of civilization could be understood as one long attempt to put thicker walls between ourselves and everything that might hurt us.
And then, once a year, Judaism tells us to leave the house.
For seven days on Sukkot, which begins Friday evening, we step out of the permanent structure we have spent the rest of the year making comfortable and secure, and we enter something deliberately less permanent.
A sukkah has walls, but it is not sealed off from the world. Wind can move through it. Sounds enter. Light enters. Its roof is made from branches rather than concrete, and through the gaps above us we remain aware of the sky. It is a strange religious ritual when you think about it: We spend our lives trying to make ourselves safer, and Judaism asks us to voluntarily enter a structure that makes us less protected.
Maybe the point is not that walls are bad. Maybe the point is that we need to think much more carefully about the walls we build. Walls are necessary. They protect us. They define where one space ends and another begins. They allow us to preserve things that would otherwise disappear. That is certainly true for the Jewish People.
Jewish survival has always depended, in part, on boundaries. We preserved our Hebrew calendar when the surrounding world followed another one. We preserved our languages, rituals, foods, prayers, and stories when the dominant cultures around us had their own. Jews married Jews, built Jewish communities, taught Jewish children, maintained Jewish law, and created spaces in which Jewish life could reproduce itself from one generation to the next.
A people that preserves nothing eventually has nothing left to preserve.
There is a tendency today to treat boundaries as inherently exclusionary, as though anything that distinguishes one community from another must somehow be morally suspect. But Jewish history tells us otherwise. Distinctiveness is not necessarily hostility. Sometimes it is simply the mechanism by which a civilization survives. A Judaism without boundaries would eventually become indistinguishable from everything around it.
But there is another danger. Walls that protect us can eventually become walls that imprison us, and that is true of communities as much as it is of people. We all build walls, often after being hurt. We decide we will never trust that kind of person again. We protect ourselves from disappointment by lowering expectations, from rejection by never becoming completely vulnerable, and from being wrong by surrounding ourselves with people who think exactly as we do.
The wall usually makes sense when we build it. That is what makes walls so difficult to recognize later. We rarely construct emotional walls because we want to become isolated. We construct them because something happened that convinced us isolation was safer.
Over time, though, the thing that kept danger out can begin keeping life out too. A person becomes so afraid of being hurt that nobody can get close enough to love them. A community becomes so afraid of losing its identity that it forgets how to welcome anyone into it. A political or ideological group becomes so afraid of opposing ideas that disagreement itself starts to feel like betrayal.
Protection slowly becomes confinement.
The sukkah offers a different architecture. It has boundaries. There is still an inside and an outside. Judaism does not ask us to stand exposed in an open field and pretend that boundaries do not matter. But neither does the sukkah allow us to pretend that safety means complete separation from everything outside. The world still enters. You can hear your neighbors. You can feel the wind. You notice whether the night is warm or cold. You look upward and see that your ceiling does not completely separate you from what is above it.
Perhaps that is the kind of boundary human beings actually need: strong enough to protect what matters, but open enough to let life in. It is a dynamic that feels especially important for Jews right now.
The years since October 7th have given many Jews powerful reasons to become more guarded. People discovered hostility in places where we assumed they we accepted. Friendships changed. Institutions disappointed us. Campuses, workplaces, cultural spaces, and political movements that had spoken endlessly about inclusion suddenly seemed unable to extend the same understanding toward Jews.
For many Jews, the natural response has been to turn inward: Spend more time with Jews, support Jewish businesses, join Jewish organizations, date Jewish, travel to Israel, build stronger Jewish communities, and be more careful about whom you trust.
In fact, some of it may be exactly what Jewish life needs. But there is a question worth asking as we build those walls: How do we protect ourselves without allowing the people who hate us to determine what kind of people we become?
There is a version of Jewish survival that becomes so focused on defense that survival itself becomes the entire purpose of Jewish life. We cannot allow that to happen. Judaism cannot become merely a bunker from antisemitism, and Jewish identity cannot be constructed entirely in opposition to the people who dislike Jews. We did not survive thousands of years simply so that we could become exceptionally skilled at surviving.
We survived in order to live — to study, argue, celebrate, build families, make art, tell jokes, eat together, create communities, wrestle with God, wrestle with one another, and to build a sukkah. That may be one of the most beautiful things about this holiday.
The sukkah is not a fortress. It is a place for a meal. We do not enter it preparing for siege. We bring food. We invite guests. We decorate it. We sit with family and friends. We sing. We make kiddush. We turn an intentionally imperfect shelter into a place of joy. That is an extraordinary Jewish instinct: The structure is fragile, but the response is not fear. The response is hospitality.
Perhaps this is why Sukkot comes when it does. Only days earlier, on Yom Kippur, we were inside synagogues examining ourselves. We confessed, reflected, and asked difficult questions about who we had been and who we wanted to become. Then Judaism moves us outside. It does not allow introspection to become permanent withdrawal. It tells us to build something, invite people in, eat, celebrate, and look at the sky.
The movement from Yom Kippur to Sukkot may itself contain a lesson. There is a time to turn inward, but eventually we have to come back out. There is a time to protect ourselves, but eventually someone has to be allowed through the door. There is a time to build walls, but we should periodically examine whether the walls we built years ago are still serving the purpose for which we built them.
Perhaps this is one of the questions Sukkot quietly asks us every year: Which boundaries in my life are protecting something important, and which ones have simply become walls? Which parts of my Jewish identity need strengthening, and which parts have become unnecessarily closed? Which people am I wisely keeping at a distance, and which people am I keeping outside because I am afraid of what might happen if I let them in?
There are no simple answers, nor should there be. Judaism does not tell us to tear down every wall. The Jewish People would not have survived without walls. Human beings cannot live healthy lives without boundaries, and communities cannot preserve themselves without defining what they stand for. The sukkah offers something more difficult than the command to simply open ourselves to everything.
It asks us to construct boundaries without confusing them with fortresses. To preserve without suffocating. To protect without disappearing. To remain distinctly Jewish without losing our curiosity about the world outside. To be strong enough to know who we are and secure enough to leave a door open.
That may be the architecture Sukkot is asking us to practice, because the hardest walls to examine are not the ones made from concrete. They are the ones we stopped noticing we had built. And perhaps once a year, Judaism asks us to leave the permanent house precisely so that we can see them again.
Not every wall needs to come down. Some need to remain. Some need to become stronger. Some simply need a door. And occasionally, we need to remember to leave enough room to see the sky.
And isn't the actual message, will we trust HaShem to take care of us?
Interesting. Great last line.