What the laws of building a sukkah know about building organizations
Miriam Brosseau, CEO, and Angel Alvarez-Mapp, COO
There’s a moment every fall when Jewish neighborhoods fill with the sound of hammering. Yom Kippur ends, the fast is barely out of our systems, and suddenly everyone’s outside with lumber. It’s a helluva collective construction project, and boy do we have specs to follow. There are rules for minimum height and maximum height, for how many walls count as walls, for what can go on the roof (and what can’t), even for what casts the shade and how it got there. And every measurement, every stipulation, is all in service of a hut designed to stand for a week and come down.
Why so much code enforcement for a temporary structure?
Maybe the rules were never really (only) about the hut.
What if the laws of the sukkah are actually a time-tested theory of building structures that truly serve community?
Why not, yeah? Let’s run with that idea.
What follows below are three principles from Hilchot Sukkah (the laws of the sukkah) worth considering for your own communitybuilding work this season. Fair warning: they’re not phases, and it’s not worth thinking of them as such. Consider them more as diagnostics. Play with the principle you’re most drawn to, or more than one at once, and let’s see what we can build.
Dirat Arai: Temporary on Purpose
This is kind of the whole thing, isn’t it? The Talmud calls the sukkah a dirat arai (Sukkah 2a), a temporary residence, and the Peninei Halakhah spells out what that means structurally: a kosher sukkah has to meet two conditions at once: it has to be habitable, and it has to be temporary (Peninei Halakhah, Sukkot 2:1). Miss either one and you’ve missed the point. Too flimsy to sit and eat in? Invalid. But, and this is the part we love, too permanent is equally invalid. Raise your roof past twenty amot (roughly thirty feet), where the covering needs a permanent structure to hold it up, and you can eat every meal of the festival in there without fulfilling a darn thing.
Making a sukkah longstanding simply won’t stand. It’s gotta be really and truly temporary. And the halacha is oddly specific about where the impermanence has to live. The walls? Build them out of brick if you want, totally fine. The impermanence belongs in the s’chach, the overhead covering, which has to stay light. Organic. Open enough to see the stars through.
This is… not how most of us approach Jewish organizational life.
The owned building, the program nobody can touch because it’s always existed, the strategic plan that becomes canon. Permanence too often becomes the point. Meanwhile, what might be considered the actual walls—things like governance, financial systems, fundraising ops—stay wobbly. The sukkah suggests flipping it, making your walls genuinely strong, and keeping the layer between you and the sky deliberately light. Programs, strategies, even the flagship initiative should be built like s’chach: legit enough to give shade, loose enough to let the stars through, and designed from day one to come down when their season ends.
This instinct towards permanence is why the sunset conversation is so hard. Most organizations treat ending a program as a failure, something to announce quietly (if at all) and grieve privately (again, if at all). But that only makes sense if the program was the point. Your end goal has always been to serve a particular community. A community’s needs shift and change over time, so why wouldn’t the programs designed to serve them? The program was shelter you built for the need in front of you, and when the need moves, it’s okay—best, even—to take it down and make room for something new. Nobody looks at a sukkah coming down in Cheshvan and calls it a failure. It’s just a new season.
Consider:
Which parts of your organization are walls, and which are s’chach? Where might you be most prone to confuse the two?
What have you sealed—a program, a format, a role—that was meant to stay open to the sky? What drove that move towards permanence, and what might help you make room for change?
The Tree Problem: You Have to Lay Your Own Roof
Picture this—it’s a scenario straight out of Kitzur Shulchan Arukh (134:7). You build your sukkah under a tree. Your s’chach is excellent and, honestly, it’s doing all the real work, and the branches overhead barely cast any shade at all.
Kosher? Not even close.
The reason is a principle with a pretty cool name: ta’aseh v’lo min he’asui—“it must be made, and not come about on its own”—which the rabbis derive from the Torah’s instruction that you shall make the festival of Sukkot (Deuteronomy 16:13). The canopy over your head has to be yours. Shade you inherited doesn’t count, even when your own materials are doing the heavy lifting.
Okay, so let’s continue the thought experiment. Say you realize your mistake and cut down the tree. Problem solved? Nope! Still invalid. It’s not enough to remove what you were sheltering under. You have to pick up each piece of s’chach and lay it down again, deliberately, for the sake of the sukkah.
So, what does this have to do with Jewish nonprofit organizations? Well, the question we sometimes need to ask ourselves is: who’s providing our roof?
If you’ve spent any time in the Jewish nonprofit world, you know it can be tempting to keep living under someone else’s tree to the detriment of the organization. The fiscal sponsor you keep working through that doesn’t quite fit your needs. The founder’s reputation that’s still doing the heavy lifting in a case for support. The key funder you lean on, preventing you from seeking other sources of revenue.
The halacha’s verdict is uncomfortable, but it’s real. There are times when the structure is compromised because the canopy is inherited rather than made. And here’s the kicker: cutting ties isn’t the fix. You have to actively re-lay the cover. Restate the mission in your own words. Rebuild the board for this purpose rather than carry it over. Re-earn the funder relationships in your own name. Every branch needs to be picked up and set down again, on purpose.
Consider:
Whose tree are you under? What did you inherit—a program, a donor base, a story—that you’ve never actively re-chosen?
If the canopy above you vanished tomorrow, which parts of your cover would you have to pick up and re-lay by hand?
What might it take for your organization to build its own roof?
Mitzvah Goreret Mitzvah: What the Work Makes You
Ben Azzai taught: be quick in performing a minor commandment as in the case of a major one, and flee from transgression. For one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah, and one transgression leads to another transgression. And the reward for performing a mitzvah is a mitzvah. And the reward for committing a transgression is a transgression (Pirkei Avot 4:2).
S’khar mitzvah, mitzvah. The reward for doing a mitzvah? Another mitzvah!
But be warned: this isn’t about sequencing. It’s not “do the next thing while you have energy.” It’s a claim about what good work does to whoever does it. The reward for a mitzvah is not recognition, or funding, or a better strategic position heading into the next year. The reward is becoming an organization capable of doing the next thing. Work done well changes you.
Which means the question to ask after finishing a program isn’t “how do we keep the machine running?” It’s, what did we become by doing this well?
“All seven days, one must make one’s sukkah permanent and one’s home temporary.”
That momentum runs in both directions. Just as the reward for a mitzvah is another mitzvah, so too, s’khar aveirah, aveirah: the reward for a transgression is a transgression. The organization that burns out its people chasing a launch doesn’t just have one bad quarter. It trains itself to burn people out. The organization that softens a tough reality in a grant application doesn’t just tell one half-truth—it becomes an organization that tells half-truths.
Organizational character is always compounding. The only question is in which direction.
Notice, too, where Ben Azzai starts. “A minor commandment.” Not with flagship initiatives, but with minor mitzvot. Be quick to do the small commandment as well as the large. Because it turns out organizational character is mostly formed in those unglamorous moments: how you handle the junior staff member’s idea, whether you have the honest funder conversation you’ve been deferring, what actually happens in the board meeting when someone says the hard thing. Organizations that save their best selves for the big moments and drag through the small ones are getting the compounding wrong from the start.
And this is where the rabbinic rubber hits the road for Sukkot. The Rema rules that the most meticulous builders begin constructing their sukkah on the very night Yom Kippur ends, “in order to go from one mitzvah to another mitzvah” (Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim 624:5). Nobody has eaten a real meal in twenty-five hours. Nobody is rested. And that’s exactly when you drive the first stake.
We’re gonna say this loud and clear, this is not a productivity instruction;it is not about encouraging hustle culture. We’re asking you to read it differently. Yom Kippur just changed you. Twenty-five hours of fasting and return and cheshbon hanefesh, you’re different now than you were yesterday morning. The instruction is to begin the next thing while you’re still that changed person. Plant the first post while that version of you is present. Then stop. Feed your people. Rest. Build the rest of the sukkah at a pace that lets everyone do their best work, as the best version of themselves.
Consider:
Think about your last significant initiative. What did your organization become by doing it? Did you name that, or hurry on to the next thing?
Where is your organization compounding in the wrong direction? What small compromises are in danger of becoming policy?
When your team finishes something well, how do you mark it before moving on? What might it mean to drive one stake, and then actually stop?
Where We Sit (Because We Always Ask)
Maybe the deepest instruction in the laws of the sukkah is the one never stated as law. You are commanded to build rigorously and to code, a thing that is meant to come down. And then to sit inside it during the one festival our liturgy calls z’man simchateinu, the season of our joy. Not joy despite the impermanence, but joy in it.
Build well. Sit joyfully. Take it down on time. (But keep the tools.)
Sources
Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 2a—Talmudic source for dirat arai, the sukkah as a temporary dwelling.
Peninei Halakhah, Sukkot 2:1 (Rabbi Eliezer Melamed)—The two conditions of a kosher sukkah: habitable and temporary. Source for the dirat arai discussion and the twenty-amot height restriction.Deuteronomy 16:13—“You shall make the festival of Sukkot”—the Torah’s prooftext for ta’aseh v’lo min he’asui.
Kitzur Shulchan Arukh 134:7 (Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried)—The case of a sukkah built under a tree; the rule that inherited shade does not count and that sekhakh must be re-laid deliberately.
Pirkei Avot 4:2—Ben Azzai’s teaching: run to a minor mitzvah as to a major one; mitzvah goreret mitzvah; aveirah goreret aveirah; s’khar mitzvah, mitzvah.
Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim 624:5 (gloss of Rema)—The ruling to begin building the sukkah at the close of Yom Kippur, “in order to go from mitzvah to mitzvah.”