I feel like as much as men grumble about having to build a sukkah, we do enjoy the part where we get to figure out new improvements to make to our sukkahs every year, and when they don’t work out, we get to figure out how to do it differently for next year. It’s a never-ending mitzvah!
Guys are always thinking about how to improve their sukkah. If you ever see a man stop learning and stare into space for several moments before coming back down to earth, he just had a thought about how to improve his sukkah.
I actually made a major improvement to my sukkah last year, in a way that makes it 100% more Mehadrin than ever. In that I finally got Mehadrin straps.
When you’re not very handy, your improvements are a lot less impressive.
Okay, it occurs to me that people who have sukkahs with solid walls that don’t move when a butterfly sneezes might not know what Mehadrin straps are.
Mehadrin straps are for when you have a sukkah that’s really not Mehadrin in any way, so the straps make the walls better halachically but also raise a lot of questions in the minds of your guests that lead to good but repetitive conversation fodder for the seudos.
Basically, it’s 3-4 straps that go around the lower half of a canvas sukkah. It uses the halacha of lavud to create a second layer of wall that although it looks less protective than the walls you already have that are swaying in the wind, it is actually halachically superior and you can technically maybe just use those and not the wall that is swaying in the wind, except that no one will eat in your sukkah.
Nobody asks why your house has two layers of wall.
It’s weird that my sukkah didn’t come with those, right?
Not for the price I paid.
I bought my sukkah a bunch of years ago, when it didn’t look like we were going away for Sukkos one year because we were expecting.
It was an impulse purchase.
We got it for $25 at a moving sale. Turns out that the cheapest way to buy a sukkah is to find someone who’s moving to another country, such as England, and is not in the mood of figuring out how to transport an entire portable house with them. We got what some retailers call an E-Z Sukkah, in that it’s so E-Z to own that you don’t even have to write out the whole word. In America, anyway. I think in England, it would be pronounced “E-Zed Sukkah,” which makes no sense. Could be that’s why they sold it.
And actually, I use the term “sukkah” very loosely, because somebody else had already purchased the schach. But for $25, we said, “Sure!” especially since we already had schach.
This wasn’t our first sukkah. A number of years earlier, shortly after we’d moved into our house, we were expecting Sukkos time (half our kids were born Sukkos time, because apparently we enjoy the last-minute panic of “Where will we eat?”), and my in-laws, out of the goodness of their hearts, had decided to drive in for a two-day yom tov right after we’d just had the baby. So we needed a sukkah. So we decided that, seeing as our backyard had come with a shed we didn’t use (because it also came with a garage) we could just pop the roof off the shed, buy a schach mat, and be done. And by “we” we meant “I”, and by “pop” we didn’t actually mean “pop”, because roofs are heavy.
And then after Sukkos, I discovered that it’s a lot harder to put a roof back on by yourself than it is to take it off by yourself, because Hashem (and gravity) only assists you when you’re doing the mitzvah, not when you’re undoing the mitzvah. So I decided to wait until my wife could help me. And sure enough, after about a year, the floor of the shed rotted through. We found this out when we saw a groundhog disappear into our sukkah.
So when it was time to have another Sukkos baby -- which ended up coming on Friday Erev Sukkos -- and my in-laws, out of the goodness of their hearts, decided to show up for an entire nine-day yom tov that I was not prepared to make for them, and I had to cook for yom tov with guests and finish the sukkah and put together a last-minute sholom zachor and manage the other kids all in one day whilst my wife lounged around in the hospital for two days of yom tov with a nice quiet baby, at least I had a sukkah.
And we were very excited to get it, because
- It was bigger than our previous sukkah.
- It’s not like the idea of a flimsier sukkah really bothered us, because we’d had a solid heavy wood sukkah and that lasted one year because it was solid and heavy. Light was what we were looking for, especially since
- This was our second Sukkos at home, and it was beginning to look like my wife would never help me put our sukkahs together, no matter what they were made of.
So there I was -- my wife had had a baby that morning, I was exhausted because by “morning” I mean way before the time I normally consider morning, and I’d had a crazy day, and that said, I don’t remember much about the sholom zachor, but I do remember that it kept raining on and off. I remember this because yes, the halacha is that once it starts raining and you go inside, you can finish eating in there, but if you have a sholom zachor for which people keep showing up one at a time, and every time someone shows up it’s because the rain had let up, everyone has to move outside again.
So I was sitting there, in a daze, waiting to run inside with the food yet again so I could immediately run back outside with it, and I think I heard some of the guys making conversation about how the walls of my sukkah were flapping back and forth in the wind, and wondering whether that was a shaylah or not.
The walls were definitely flappier than they should have been. When I put the sukkah together, I’d discovered that the tarps that it came with were not originally manufactured as part of the sukkah. They were just tarps. Of different colors and sizes. Some taller than the sukkah and some shorter. And there was a shower curtain too, for some reason. That was supposed to go over the doorway, I think. And if you think a tarp blows back and forth when it’s tied from above and below – particular the tarps that are taller than the sukkah – a shower curtain is not tied below even a little bit. It just blows 7 feet straight into your sukkah.
Anyway, I figured that some kind of lavud strap system had to exist, because there were narrow slots on the poles for something to run through, but all of the local Sukkah stores are closed on Sukkos, apparently. So as soon as Chol Hamoed hit, I went out to Home Depot and presented our shaylah to the salespeople.
No, I’m just kidding. I bought a rope that was 150 feet long, and with the help of my father-in-law, I ran it around the sukkah several times and tied it down.
And ever since then, we’d been living with the rope. Every year, it takes about a half hour to put up our walls, and then three hours to take this 150-foot string, get out all the knots that it makes in itself over the course of the year, and then thread all 150 feet through every single narrow strap slot, one at a time, fighting the constant snagging, the rope creating new knots in itself, and every person who tries to help us always somehow standing on the rope.
We did make improvements over the years. For example, one thing we did was buy official nylon walls from our local sukkah outlet. This came with a zipper on the door instead of a billowing shower curtain, and some fake windows we could close if we wanted to keep bugs out, and it has Kiddush printed on the wall in case I want to make Kiddush facing away from my family. And on the opposite wall, it has Ushpizin in the wrong nusach, because I did not think to ask. But hopefully, this new set of walls would not blow as much.
I’m not sure it helped.
So finally this year, we buckled and bought straps. Which is when we found out that they’re officially called “Mehadrin straps.” Mehadrin is an adjective that can mean pretty much anything, apparently. The Mehadrin of it is that until now, 90% of our time dealing with our E-Z Sukkah was fighting with the string. But now, we can spend 90% of it figuring out how to fold a 44-foot nylon with brachos on it.
Anyway, the point is that I’ve made a new improvement to my sukkah, so I feel more like a man. Me and my nylon. People love calling each other into their sukkahs and saying, “You see the changes I made this year?” and I can too. Though mine are such small scale that it’s the equivalent of a wife calling her husband in and asking if he notices anything different. And he panics.
“See the straps? They used to be ropes!”
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
