Build a Sukkah for the Soul

Step outside- not just from your home, but from your habits.

Sukkot Sermon By Rabbi Adi Romem-Tel Mond

What if Sukkot wasn’t only about building a fragile hut in your backyard, but about building one in your heart? Once a year, Torah calls us to move outdoors, to feel the wind, the impermanence, and the wonder of life without walls. But maybe this year, it’s also calling us to move inward, to shake loose the walls we’ve built inside ourselves.

There’s a saying by the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky: “When you live too close to the sea, you stop hearing the waves.”, Shklovsky coined a term that changed modern art and literature: defamiliarization, in Hebrew, הזרה , the act of making the familiar strange again, of shaking our senses awake. Art, he said, exists to help us see the world anew, to wake us up from the hypnosis of habit.

I believe Sukkot is Judaism’s greatest act of defamiliarization. Once a year, Torah invites us to step outside, quite literally, from our climate-controlled, predictable, stable homes, and live for a week in a fragile, leaky, temporary hut. Just when you finally find the perfect pillow, when your bed smells of fresh laundry, when the A/C hums at a perfect 21 degrees, a divine voice whispers: “Time to go outside.” Suddenly, the bed, the fridge, even the light switch become miracles again. Sukkot is a yearly reminder that comfort dulls awareness, and that meaning begins the moment we step outside of our comfort zone.

But I want to take this a step further tonight. What if Sukkot is not only about leaving our physical homes, but also about leaving our internal ones? What if we built a Sukkah of the soul?

The Homes We Build Within

We all have our psychological “homes”, ideas we cling to, opinions we never question, beliefs we’ve stopped challenging. We decorate these inner houses with moral furniture: this is who I am, this is what I believe, this is what I can’t do.  And then, like anyone who’s lived too close to the sea, we stop hearing the waves. Sukkot invites us to move out, even if just for a week, from the homes we’ve built in our own minds. To question the truths we’ve grown too comfortable with. To let a little wind blow through our certainties. To risk a draft in the heart- because that’s where growth begins.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz wrote: “In a life that is too fixed, there lies a danger of complacency- of excessive confidence.Individuals and nations who feel too satisfied with their present state may, in fact, be standing at the edge of an abyss. The sukkah shakes the comfort of our stable existence; it draws us out of our solid homes and into the open, planting within us a sense of impermanence.It releases us from the illusion of entitlement, the dangerous feeling that things are mine.This is an essential spiritual shift, a kind of inoculation against forgetfulness and dullness of the soul.In place of rigidity, flexibility.In place of heaviness, lightness.Such is the liberating and joyful spirit with which we are meant to enter the sukkah for this week.”

JUST DO IT

Life Begins at the end of your comfort zone:

There’s a modern midrash, not from the Talmud, but from a Nike ad:

“Too often we are afraid afraid of what we might not be able to do, afraid of what people might think if we try. We say no when we wanted to say yes. We stay silent when we wanted to shout. And shout when we should’ve stayed silent.

Enough. Try something you’ve never tried. Take a risk. Write a letter to the editor. Throw out your old TV. Ride a bike. Learn to surf. Travel to a country whose language you don’t speak. File that patent. Pick up the phone. You have nothing to lose, but everything to gain. JUST DO IT.”

Nike’s theology is simple but deeply Jewish: Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

That’s what Avraham did when he heard Lech Lecha- go forth from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house. That’s what the Israelites did in the desert, leaving behind slavery for the uncertainty of freedom. And that’s what we do each Sukkot, leaving behind security for possibility.

Leaving to Return

When we step out of the house, or the heart, we don’t lose ourselves. We rediscover ourselves. Just like the song says:

“Zalman, that’s not you! You are not your house, not your job, not your land, not your status. You are simply, you.” (© Kobi Oz, 1999).

Sukkot is the holiday that whispers: You are not your comfort. You are not your possessions. You are not your fear. You are the one who dares to step outside.

A Call to Action

So this year, don’t just build a sukkah in your yard, build one in your soul. Make it out of courage, curiosity, and compassion. Let its roof be open to the stars, and let the wind of new ideas blow through.

Take one small risk. Have that conversation you’ve been avoiding. Book that trip you’ve been postponing. Say the words you’ve been too shy to say. Forgive. Try. Begin. Because, my friends, the miracle isn’t that we survive outside the house. The miracle is that, outside, we come alive.

May this Sukkot open our eyes to the beauty of impermanence, our hearts to the courage of change, and our hands to the work of repairing the world, one small act of daring at a time.

Chag Sukkot Sameach, step out, and come back new.