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Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber

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Our sukkah is made of people: Chol ha-Mo’ed Sukkot [5786] GKW Serm 7

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Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 11 October 2025

  1. The laws of sukkah construction are incredibly complex and detailed. But one of the most fundamental is that it must have at least two-and-a-bit walls.1 Anything less than that, it’s no longer remotely reminiscent of a dwelling-place, so the symbolism of our ancestors’ booths in the wilderness is gone.
  2. So what does one do if – and I know this is everyone’s worst nightmare – you’re ready to fulfil the mitzvah of eating in the sukkah, only to find that it’s a gazebo-like structure without the minimum number of walls?
  3. One option canvassed by Maimonides, pun fully intended, is to line up some people along the edge of the gazebo, to become a kind of informal wall.2
  4. But… there’s always a but…
  5. This only works legally, we’re told, if the people forming the wall don’t know that that’s what they’re doing. In other words, you can’t say to your friends: please line up here so you render this a kosher sukkah. No. You have to lure them into standing there with some ploy or another which leaves them ignorant of their true purpose. If, at any point, these poor patsies learn that they’re being used as a wall, the spell breaks and the sukkah becomes, at that precise moment, halachically invalid.
  6. Let’s just think about that for a moment. The person-wall we’ve built out of our friends only works so long as they live in ignorance. Rather like those scenes in Tom and Jerry where a cartoon character who runs off the edge of a cliff can keep running until they notice their predicament, and will only begin their fatal plummet once they realise there’s nothing but air beneath them, our person-sukkah functions just fine until the human beings forming its walls realise, at which point, however they feel about it, they no longer ‘work’.
  7. A 17th-century commentator called the Taz had a stab at coming up with a reason for this very strange rule:3 if, he says, the wall-people know that the sukkah relies on their positioning, they’ll be extra-sure to stay in place out of a spirit of helpfulness. The problem is, that would make the sukkah kind of permanent, rather than the temporary structure it’s supposed to be.
  8. In other words, a sukkah needs at least two-and-a-bit walls so that it’s somewhat like a dwelling-place, but it also can’t be too much like a dwelling-place.
  9. This makes the traditional conception of the sukkah something very rare indeed in Judaism: something that is supposed to be liminal. Something that is supposed to fall in-between categories.
  10. Generally speaking, Judaism is very keen on drawing clear, bold lines. Kosher and non-kosher, pure and impure, Jewish and non-Jewish, child and adult, man and woman. Sometimes the lines look a little contrived or arbitrary, but they’re always there. Those phenomena which don’t lend themselves to easy classification were deeply troubling to the rabbis of the Talmud. “Twilight is a period of uncertainty, kind of day and kind of night,” says the Talmud,4 before resolving that it should be treated strictly: the rules of Shabbat are in force throughout twilight on Friday evening and on Saturday evening. A line had to be drawn, and they drew it.
  11. As the writer Brittany Chaffee has said: “Brains crave predictability and liminal moments are like a trapeze. Once you jump off the platform, there is … momentum and no awareness of where you’ll land.” But she then goes on to say: “Although liminal spaces can be tough platforms to spring off of, if we instead think of them as a beautiful auditorium, the entryway of a museum, we can make the moment beautiful.”5
  12. We know that liminality is not something to be legislated out of existence. We’re entirely comfortable with the fact that there are people in the room whose Jewish identity is anything but straightforward. We’re entirely comfortable with the notion that human sexuality is a nuanced spectrum rather than a drop-down menu. BHPS is a constellation of people who don’t neatly into a box, and that’s what makes our shul so marvellous.
  13. And the sukkah, a box we definitely don’t all fit into, is a symbol of that marvel: a fantastical hybrid of the permanent and the temporary, the outdoor and the indoor.
  14. Although Maimonides’s ramblings about the law of a sukkah formed of people seems like one of those classic rabbinic excursuses which had no purpose other than debate for the sake of debate, in fact, we could say that every sukkah is formed of people.
  15. Perhaps not literally – our sukkah is frankly formed out of little more than gaffer tape and hope – but a sukkah without a community of Jews who formed it, tend it, bring it to life, is no sukkah. Maimonides can have as many regulations as he likes, but it’s only the existence of Jews to put them into practice which save his law books from being a dead letter.
  16. What, then, of the requirement of ignorance? If every sukkah is formed of people, am I saying we all need to be ignorant?
  17. Well… sort of, actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Maybe not ignorance exactly, but a lack of knowledge, or a willing suspension of disbelief. Objectively, we know that whatever shelters our ancestors built in the wilderness, they didn’t have Granny Smiths hanging in them and almost certainly no paper chains. Objectively, we know that, however much we wave palm fronds around, it won’t influence the weather.
  18. But we do these things anyway, in a spirit of simple complaisance and respect for tradition and, yes, even fun: just like the notional person who Maimonides lures to become a wall of his sukkah by saying, ‘Would you mind awfully just standing there for a moment?’, and who gamely complies without inquiring too deeply into the matter, we are shaking a lulav simply because that’s what we do at Sukkot.
  19. And by being game ourselves – by faithfully carrying out our rituals, one part of our brain knowing that it’s all a historical and meteorological nonsense, and the other thinking, ‘So what? We’re Jews and we shake the lulav!’, we enter the liminal space ourself. We keep one foot in the present, but also quite willingly set the other in the myths of the past.
  20. This festival, then, is a moment to celebrate everyone who, like the sukkah, is in some way in-between. And ultimately, that is all of us. חג שמח.

Comments are welcome at the bottom of the page. Please note that they are premoderated and anything abusive simply won’t be published.

Remember that all of my sermons, handouts and so on can be found here.

Shavua tov!

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Notes

  1. h.Shofar, Sukkah v’Lulav 4:2 ↩︎
  2. h.Shofar, Sukkah v’Lulav 4:16 ↩︎
  3. The Taz, Orach Chayyim 630:16, has a stab at coming up with a reason for this rule: ↩︎
  4. b.Shabbat 34b (adapted from Steinsaltz translation) ↩︎
  5. Brittany Chaffee, “How to cope with the liminal spaces in our lives“, Wit & Delight (13 May 2022). ↩︎

Where were you when you heard the news?: Ha’azinu [5786] GKW Serm 6

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Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 4 October 2025

  1. ‘Where were you when you heard the news?’ – it’s what we always ask each other after learning of something particularly momentous. Where were you when you heard about the Queen’s death, where were you when you heard about 7/7, where were you when you heard about 9/11?
  2. But the news of the Manchester attacks was different for British Jews. We were all in the same place when we heard the news. We were here. Or at the Reform shul. Or at New Church Road shul. Or in any of the hundreds of other synagogues across the country. We were all together when we heard the news – and the news was about people doing precisely the same thing we were doing.
  3. We all rely on synagogues as safe spaces. Throughout human history, places of worship have been places of sanctuary, of insulation from the horrors of the outside world. They should be oases in the desert of a difficult society.
  4. Even leaving aside the horrific murder of two of their members, the sense of desecration from which the congregation at Heaton Park must be reeling, is impossible for us to comprehend. That building, the one where generations of the same families have prayed together, laughed together, wept together – marked bar mitzvahs and marriages, births and funerals – has, in a period of just minutes, become forever contaminated.
  5. For non-Jews following the press coverage on Thursday, I suspect the most bizarre part of the story will have been that the shul continued its Yom Kippur services. 9:31am, terrorist arrives. 9:38am, terrorist shot. 10:30am, turn to page 212 for the Torah reading.
  6. For us, though, I think this makes perfect sense and feels utterly natural. When I heard the news here at BHPS – when one of our trustees passed me her ’phone to show me the emergency alert she’d received from the Community Security Trust – it never even crossed my mind that we should call off the rest of the day. If anything, the fact that such ghastly news came at the start of a day we had all pre-planned to spend here, together, was a blessing. Because what do Jews do in times of crisis, in times of trauma? We gather and we turn to our ancient rituals, the same rituals that sustained our ancestors.
  7. And the same spirit of ‘keep calm and carry on’ which steadied the nerves of our sisters and brothers in Manchester, must continue to animate us here in Brighton. Our synagogue will be a safe space. Our synagogue is a safe space. We are absolutely not scattering. Covid made us stay at home, but no pesky terrorist can terrorise us. We’re stronger than that and better than that. We were here on Thursday. We were here last night. We’re here this morning. And we’ll be here on Monday and Tuesday for Sukkot.
  8. Of course, this morning we aren’t on our own. We are so grateful to be joined by friends from across the city, in particular Councillor Sankey, leader of the council; Sabri Ben Ameur, the chair of the Muslim Forum; and Stuart Diamond from Brighton and Hove Faith in Action. Last night we were joined by the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University and the vicar of St Nicholas’s church. The police have been frequent visitors since Thursday. Our email accounts and our physical letterbox have been overflowing with notes from well-wishers, both partners we’ve worked with before, and neighbours and other ‘random’ Brightonians who felt moved to offer us support at this time.
  9. Ultimately, that is the way through a crisis like this. Togetherness as a Jewish community got us through Yom Kippur. Togetherness as a wider local community will get us through the coming days, weeks and months.
  10. This morning, we read from the Torah about how Moses sang his final song באזני העם, into the ears of the people.1 He didn’t just sing it: he sang it into their ears. Ayelet ha-Shachar, a modern Torah commentary,2 explains that this is a reference to just how forcefully he sang: he pressed the words into their ears, he made sure that the words penetrated. There was no danger of anyone failing to hear, and internalise, what Moses had to say.
  11. That is our task now. That’s the way we have to be. We must pray for peace not only in muttered Hebrew in this room but express our determination that there will be peace loudly, באזני העם, into the ears of everyone who we can impel to listen. We must express our love of the other, of the stranger, of our migrant and asylum seeker and Muslim neighbours, ever more loudly and ever more confidently, not merely quietly and casually amongst our personal acquaintances. As Dame Sarah Mullally, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, has said: “[D]oing what is right is not always earth shattering. Doing what is right is often doing little things with kindness, courtesy, generosity and gentleness […W]e need to keep working for the good of all, but especially for the person who is right in front of us.”3
  12. So, when one of your friends or colleagues inevitably asks you where you were when you heard the news, you tell them: together. We were together. We are together. Young and old, religious and secular, Jew and non-Jew.
  13. We pray for healing for the injured. We pray for solace for the families of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, z”l. We pray that those who witnessed such traumatic events will find comfort.
  14. But, actually, we know that these prayers aren’t necessary. We don’t need God to swoop down and fix everything like some sort of deus ex machina. We can do this. We’ve got this. So long as we each go overboard in our efforts to impress a message of tolerance and togetherness into the ears of all who we encounter, באזני העם, our prayers will come true. כן יהי רצון, may this be God’s will.

Comments are welcome at the bottom of the page. Please note that they are premoderated and anything abusive simply won’t be published.

Remember that all of my sermons, handouts and so on can be found here.

Shavua tov!

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to you by email:

Notes

  1. Deuteronomy 32:44 ↩︎
  2. Ad loc. ↩︎
  3. Rt Revd and Rt Hon Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, “Sermon preached at the OBE service of dedication“, St Paul’s Cathedral (17 May 2024). ↩︎