Sukkah: A Love Story

As someone who spends the majority of his working hours behind a desk drafting contracts and crunching numbers, there’s a certain alchemy in picking up a hammer or a paintbrush to make art. Creating something that is objectively unnecessary is a reminder that our lives still have room for beauty and imagination and the whimsical. To paraphrase Elizabeth Gilbert, pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting.

I can’t remember at exactly at what age I realized I had two brains — one analytical and one artistic — that would forever challenge and complete one another. But I do remember falling in love with creativity in my grandfather’s sukkah. His was a warm and welcoming structure built with military precision. It is where we would gather to sing, dance and dream. Building a sukkah for his grandchildren was Papa’s act of love.

For the last half-decade, creating a sukkah has become my own act of love. In 2019, I built Bayit from 126 laser-cut panels of wood, each adorned with passages from the Torah relating to the concept of home. In 2021, Mey Chayim was born. Sheltered under the Kabbalistic 72 Names of God, this sukkah was cantilevered over a swimming pool, minting a new mitzvah: lischot ba’sukkah. And this year, Mishkan presents a modern take on the tabernacle. It fuses themes of reflection with an ode to God in the form of the utterly romantic “Lecha Eli, “authored by the medieval poet Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra.

Sky Sukkah, built in 2022, stands — literally — above the rest. At 15 feet tall, its seven sides represent the Talmud’s seven realms of heaven. It is an artwork both created by and about the sky. The 525 square feet of fabric panels that make up the sukkah are produced not with paint, but by exposing a compound of iron-based chemicals to sunlight in a photographic process called cyanotype. Texts from throughout the Bible line the crown and speak to our connections with.shamayim. You can see Sky Sukkah on display through the end of the holiday thanks to the vision of Sephardic Temple, who are giving it a second life this year on their Wilshire Boulevard doorstep.

Of God’s three miracles in the desert — manna to eat, water to drink, and shade to take refuge — only the latter is commemorated by a holiday, Sukkot. Rav Yaakov Kanievsky offered that unlike food, water and  the necessities of survival, the shade was an act of love. Rabbi David Wolpe adds, “Sustenance alone is not enough; love finds its expression in offering more than the beloved needs. Love is lavish … love overspills boundaries.”

If I have any authority on the subject of affection, it’s because I was raised in it. My parents aren’t particularly skilled with a paintbrush, but boy do they know how to love. Their care for us, and for one another, isn’t measured before it’s dispensed. It flows in abundance, without caution. In our home, as it concerns love, there is never good enough, there is only above and beyond.

Sukkot lasts seven days. Why put so much effort into such an ephemeral object? As human beings, we share a fundamental and sobering truth with the sukkah — we, too, are temporary. And so I choose to build my sukkah the way I choose to build my life: Vividly, with delight, content but always thirsting for more. And with every ounce of love I have to give.

Sky Sukkah is open to the public at Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel (10500 Wilshire Blvd.) through the end of the sukkot holiday. Mishkan is available for viewing by request, and will host a variety of programs throughout the month of October.

Jonathan York is an attorney living in Los Angeles. A graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School, he is President and General Counsel of York Enterprises, a privately-held real estate investment firm.