Erica Frankel, Executive Director, Assembly
So many Jewish professionals are expected to just know how to build community. But we’re rarely taught the practical strategies, the tactical skills, and the proven techniques that allow us to find our people, hold them close, and do it all with Jewish depth.
That’s what Assembly was uniquely created to do. The Tiny Windows team is honored to help the smart, menschy folks at Assembly tell their story, and we’re excited to share this very personal window into what Jewish community-building means to their kind and seemingly indefatigable Executive Director, Erica Frankel. She presents a deeply held point of view that is especially applicable at Sukkot, but should resonate with all of us as we seek to build lasting Jewish communities all year long.
Just over a decade ago, my then-boyfriend Dimitry and I welcomed 30 sopping-wet guests—some friends and some strangers—into our Harlem 1-bedroom apartment.
It was not supposed to be this way. It was the Friday night of Sukkot, and we had just finished reciting Shabbat Kiddush with everyone in our backyard sukkah when the rain began to fall. At first, Dimitry and I exchanged a glance and decided to stay put. After all, the sukkah’s roof is purposefully porous. We’re supposed to feel a little rain fall, to experience the chill of the night air, and to see some starlight.
But when the rain became a downpour, we quickly ushered everyone into the living room, where they peeled off damp socks and shoes while we schlepped the folding chairs inside.
The evening became memorable for another reason. After a big shared meal, singing, and laughter, Dimitry proposed to me in front of those friends and strangers. Over the last decade of marriage, we’ve often thought of the sukkah as the ultimate emblem of both the home we’re building together and the community we have tended around it, even though—on the night that chapter began—the sukkah sheltered us for only a few minutes.
Looking back, what stays with me is that the sukkah failed at the most basic task we usually assign to a home: it did not keep the weather out. The shelter failed, but the gathering held. We squeezed thirty people into a one-bedroom apartment and kept going.
These days, I spend my professional life helping others build community, and I return often to that rainy night. We like to imagine that building community means constructing something stable: a program that runs smoothly, an institution built to last, or a gathering protected from surprise. But community is not a fortress. A community at its best is more like a sukkah: sturdy enough to enter, porous enough to remain in relationship with the world around it, and—yes—vulnerable to forces no leader can control. Its strength does not come from keeping everything out. A community’s strength comes from what the people inside it learn to do together.
Maybe that is why the sukkah became such a powerful emblem of home for us: it does not resolve the question of what makes a home. It deepens it.
“A time to break down, and a time to build up.”
Is home where you keep your stuff? Where the most important people in your life live? Is it—as the saying goes—where the heart is? Is it a fixed place we return to over and over again, or do we carry it with us wherever we go?
Once a year, Jewish communities all over the world head outdoors to build temporary booths: structures that are not quite houses, but rather the implication of a house — the faintest outline of a shelter. Unlike most construction projects, the rabbinic blueprint for a sukkah does not yield a structure impermeable to wind, rain, and chill. In fact, the architectural rules of sukkah-building emphatically do the opposite, requiring our exposure to nature and legislating our vulnerability to the elements.
This is exemplified in the laws related to the sukkah’s roof, which is made of s’chach — composed of natural materials such as leaves, branches, and twigs. Our tradition teaches that we should be able to perceive the starlight through the s’chach and remain conscious of the weather beyond it. So important is it that we be aware of our exposure that the Talmudic sage Rabbah stipulates a maximum height for the sukkah: “Up until 20 amot (approximately 30 feet) a person is aware that he is dwelling in a sukkah. Higher than 20 amot, a person is not aware he is in a sukkah, because his eyes do not notice the s’chach.”
It seems that we must not only construct a temporary home during Sukkot; with each gesture, at each moment, we must remind ourselves that this home is frail, permeable, and vulnerable. Moreover, we are encouraged to spend all of our time in this state over the seven days of the holiday. The Mishnah instructs us that during Sukkot, “All seven days, one must make one’s sukkah permanent and one’s home impermanent.” The Talmud picks up on this idea and describes those who would bring their nice dishes and glassware into the sukkah, and even those who would sleep inside it.
That instruction—carry your finest things into a structure you know will not last!—feels to me like a blueprint for community-building. We create spaces whose future we can neither predict nor fully guarantee. We invite real human people to bring their real human questions, needs, gifts, and contradictions into community. If we are doing our jobs right, their presence changes what we are building.
Community becomes a kind of home-base not because it protects us from change, but the opposite: because it gives us somewhere to practice changing. Community is where we try out new capacities in public, like learning to lead, to listen, to ask for help, to repair after rupture, to compromise, to be generous, to forgive, to be present, to be caring, and to become responsible for people beyond ourselves. A healthy community does not—and should not—eliminate vulnerability. Instead, it makes vulnerability more bearable, because we are not carrying it alone.
This is part of what makes community-building such a vulnerable act. We can set the table, make the plan, print the handouts, and carefully arrange the chairs. But once people enter, the gathering belongs partly to them. They may bring needs we did not anticipate, offer gifts we did not know to request, or move the community in a direction we could not have planned. To build community is, paradoxically, to relinquish some control over what the thing we are building will become.
Every year, Sukkot delivers some version of the same tough love: nothing we build is impervious. A storm may come. A plan may fail. The roof may blow off. People may leave. Communities, too, are temporary forms, dependent on attention, trust, and the willingness of human beings to keep showing up.
And yet Sukkot does not ask us to stop building because our structures are vulnerable. It commands us to build from precisely that understanding: to step into the unfinished shelter, carry in our most beautiful things, and act as though this fragile place might become a home. The most meaningful communities embrace that posture. They become sturdy enough for people to change inside them without becoming rigid themselves.
That rainy night a decade ago, though we left the sukkah, we did not leave one another. The chairs moved. The meal continued. By the end of the night, strangers had become witnesses to a promise.
The sukkah did not keep the rain from falling. But community was never the roof or the walls. It was the way we made home together when the weather came.