A Sukkah with Gaps: What Imperfect Walls Teach Us

Every fall, during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, we build a temporary outdoor structure called a sukkah. If you’ve never seen one, imagine a little hut with walls and a roof made of branches, bamboo, or other natural material. For one week, we eat there, gather there, invite people in, and some people even sleep there.

It is meant to be a little flimsy, and that’s part of the point. You build it knowing the wind may come through. You decorate it knowing things may fall down. You sit under a roof that is not completely closed.

And I love that, because most of us spend so much of our lives trying to make things solid. We want certainty. We want to know where we stand. We want our relationships to feel safe. We want the people we love to behave in ways that make sense to us. We want to know we won’t be hurt.

And of course we do. But relationships don’t really work like that.

We build all kinds of emotional walls to protect ourselves. Some of us withdraw. Some of us get critical. Some of us take control. Some of us become incredibly accommodating and stop saying what we actually want. Some of us become self-sufficient and convince ourselves we don’t need very much.

These strategies usually make sense. We learned them somewhere, and they often helped us survive something. But what once protected us can eventually keep us lonely. A wall keeps pain out, but it can also keep love out.

That is what I keep thinking about when I sit in a sukkah. A sukkah is not a fortress. The wind gets in. Sometimes the rain gets in. You hear the people outside. You are protected, but not sealed off. There is room for the world to enter.

That feels a lot like the work of relationship. Real intimacy asks us to be open without disappearing, to have boundaries without becoming unreachable, to say what we need without attacking, and to listen without giving up ourselves. It asks us to let someone matter to us even though that means they have the capacity to hurt us.

That is vulnerable, and there is no way around that.

Sometimes we think we can wait until we feel completely safe before we open. But often the opening is what creates the safety. “I miss you.” “That hurt me.” “I got scared.” “I need you.” “I was wrong.” “I don’t know what to do.”

Those are simple sentences, but they can also be incredibly hard to say. And they are often the place where connection begins again.

Sukkot is also very much about community. We invite people into the sukkah: family, friends, neighbors, guests. And something happens when people gather in a space that is a little too small, around a table that is a little too crowded. We are reminded that we were never meant to do life alone.

We grow in relationship. We learn ourselves in relationship. And unfortunately, we also get hurt in relationship.

Community is beautiful, but it is not neat. People disappoint us. They misunderstand us. They don’t show up the way we hoped they would. They get defensive. They miss things. We miss things. We hurt people we love. And often we turn away from each other.

Terry Real, creator of Relational Life Therapy (RLT), teaches how to stay connected and protected at the same time.

"Can I tell you what happened for me without making you the enemy?"

Can I listen to your experience without immediately proving why mine is right? Can I apologize without collapsing into shame? Can I stay connected to myself and also stay connected to you? Can we repair?

That, to me, is the real work.

One of my favorite things about the sukkah is the roof. It gives you shelter, but it is intentionally incomplete.

There is something humbling about that. We build, plan, do our best. And then we remember that we are not actually in control of everything. That is true in life, and it is definitely true in love.

We cannot guarantee that the people we love will never disappoint us. We cannot guarantee that our children will make the choices we want them to make. We cannot guarantee that our friendships will stay exactly the same. We cannot guarantee that life will unfold according to our plans.

But we can build something strong enough to hold us and open enough to let love in.

Maybe that is the invitation of the sukkah: not to become less vulnerable, but to become strong enough to tolerate vulnerability. Not to build higher walls, but wiser ones. Not to avoid needing people, but to learn how to need people without losing ourselves.

A sukkah is strong enough to stand and open enough to let the world in. I think that is what we are trying to become too.

So maybe the questions for this season are these: What am I building? What am I protecting? Which of my defenses still serve me, and which ones are keeping people out? Where could I soften? Who am I inviting in? And what kind of relational home am I creating for the people I love?