Come Sukkot, Turi Adams and husband Scott will become “palm pirates.” Or “palm nappers,” if you prefer.
That’s what they like to call themselves as they scour their North Oakland neighborhood, gardening shears in hand, searching for palm fronds to adorn the roof of their homemade sukkah.
They performed the palm-pruning ritual for the first time last year, gathering a copious amount of sekhakh, the greenery that tops the structure. This year, their second erecting a sukkah, they’ll do it again.
“We’ve spent the year scouting out where palm fronds are growing in inconvenient places and where we are sure they will not be missed,” Turi Adams says. “We plan to donate our time to the community as impromptu gardeners.”
Sukkot, the festival of the booths, begins at sunset Sunday and lasts seven days to eight days, depending on one’s tradition.
During the harvest festival, Jews construct temporary structures to commemorate the special protection given the Israelites during their 40 years of wandering in the desert. Sukkahs also recall the boothlike structures in which peasants dwelled during the harvest in ancient Israel.
Just after Yom Kippur every year, families around the Bay Area get out their hammers, 2-by-4s, pencils and measuring tape in preparation for the holiday. Many say building a sukkah is a chance to merge ancient tradition with a modern sense of community.
“Hospitality is a big part of it,” Turi Adams says. “We don’t have any children yet so we like to have other people’s children come.”
Not far from the Adamses, in Berkeley, Ken Cohen and wife Julie Tsivia Cohen will this year erect a sukkah from a prefabricated kit they use each year. Julie is nothing short of a sukkah maven. A carpenter by trade, she has taught sukkah-building workshops for years.
“All the people need is an electric drill, which I always offer to loan,” she says.
At the workshops, where “klutzes are especially welcome,” Cohen says, people are often surprised to find themselves assembling sukkahs in less than three hours.
“One of the most moving parts for people who build one is that you’re doing this ritual that people have been doing for centuries,” she says.
That element always strikes her husband, a Jewish educator who teaches classes through the Berkeley-based Lehrhaus Judaica. “A sukkah sort of makes you feel a connection to biblical versions of the religion,” he says. “It’s really a rolling back of time.”
For that reason, “one of the things I like to do when we get the sukkah up is read Bible in it,” he adds. “It sort of flashes you back in that period.”
During Sukkot, the Cohens eat most dinners in the sukkah. Depending on the weather, they like to drag their mattresses and blankets into the structure and slumber under the stars for at least one night.
“I know some people really love it when it’s blowing and raining and that kind of stuff,” Ken Cohen says. “I’m not much into the discomfort of the sukkah, I have to admit.”
Nonetheless, he finds a night or two in the sukkah refreshing. “You wake up sore but it’s sort of nice to wake up like that.”
Down in Palo Alto, an unrelated Cohen family takes literally the injunction to live in the sukkah. Barring rain, Mark Cohen, wife Jane Jacobson and sons Benjamin and Gabriel try to sleep in their structure every night of the holiday.
Their temporary home, however, is shaped differently from the average cube-shaped sukkah. It’s a geodesic dome that is about 13 feet in diameter and at its highest point stands 10 feet off the ground.
“I’m an architect and I’ve always been interested in geodesics,” says Marc Cohen, who designed the wood-and-metal structure 13 years ago. “It’s quite solid once you have it assembled.”
In designing the dwelling, Cohen studied the guidelines for making a ritually correct sukkah.
Among them: It should have three walls and a roof covered with enough plant life to provide shade during the day but allow stars to be seen at night. Organic materials should be utilized, but modern practice allows screws and nails to be used on areas other than the roof.
In going the geodesic route, Cohen faced a challenge.
“There’s a halachic question as to whether a sukkah can have a top that is not simply flat; the top of mine is somewhat domelike,” he says.
So he consulted his rabbi, Sheldon Lewis of Conservative Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto. “He didn’t see any problem with it so long as the sekhakh was the proper density,” Cohen says.
Sukkahs, it turns out, can have uses beyond what one might expect. For example, when construction in the Adams’ bathroom left their shower and bathtub unusable, they washed up outside — under the palm fronds.
“We would heat up pots of water and bring them out under the cover of darkness,” Turi Adams recalls. “Under the sukkah, we would stand on the deck and pour hot water over each other and shower up.”
“It was our sukkah-dining room-shower stall.”
Even though their sukkah won’t be used as a shower this year, the Adamses expect their structure to have its own unique character. Scott Adams, who grows vegetables as a hobby, likes to hang home-grown delicacies from the roof and sides.
But friends’ children do most of the decorating. At Sukkah decorating parties, it’s open season for the creative young ones, except for a couple of rules. As a safety measure, for example, the kids can’t string the hot red peppers, whose oils could sting their mouth and eyes.
“Let them string cranberries and popcorn,” Adams suggests. “Also, if you live in a neighborhood with rodent problems, skip the popcorn.”
Tina Dinitz of Palo Alto has her own advice for sukkah decorators: “Everything should be laminated.”
That makes sense for the Dinitzes, who like to hang an array of posters on the structure’s walls. Among them are a poster that enumerates what makes a sukkah kosher. Another displays a prayer for the ushpizin, the seven guests from history traditionally welcomed into the sukkah.
Plastic fruits and vegetables add pizazz to the sukkah roof and walls fashioned from king size sheets.
“All year, I keep half an eye open in craft-type stores for things that can be in the rain,” Dinitz says.
But nothing, she says, decorates the sukkah more than the constant stream of guests who visit the dwelling for simple dinners of lentil soup, tuna fish, bread, cheese and salad.
“We eat all our meals out there and we have a great time with it,” says Dinitz, adding that for the friends who have no sukkah of their own, the Dinitz home has become “Sukkah Central.”
For some Jews, building and inhabiting the sukkah is one of the most tangible mitzvot they perform. “It’s a sort of physical way of experiencing being Jewish that gives us deep satisfaction,” Marc Cohen says.
Dinitz has a similar view.
“I really like the idea of being surrounded by it,” she says. “It looks very fragile, but there’s a lot of strength to it.”