Sukkah of Peace

A few days ago, our sukkah partially blew over. I noticed it from our kitchen window one morning, getting breakfast ready.  The wooden beams across the roof, the roof itself, and one of the walls collapsed. It happened overnight, when the wind picked up.

By morning, it looked like our Sukkot would have had a sukkah for just the first half.   Our sukkah was reduced to just a tangle of poles and fabric on the ground. But less than an hour later, it was standing again. Actually, Jodi had it standing again. She did all the work. Thank you, Jodi. In our family, she’s the handywoman.  I asked what I could do to get it up, and the answer was a polite version of “it’d be easier if I did it myself.”

The fact that the sukkah fell over, though, didn’t really surprise me.  Because if you’ve ever built a sukkah, you know—it doesn’t take much for it to fall. And yet, we keep building them. We know the wind might come, and still we put it up. We decorate it, we eat in it, we invite friends and neighbors inside.  We probably invite lawsuits by doing that.  Nobody’s going to want to come to our sukkah since I’m tell you this, but we build something temporary and fragile and call it sacred.

When we pray for peace, we ask God to “spread over us a sukkat shalom,” a sukkah of peace. It’s a beautiful phrase—poetic, comforting, and hopeful. But it also raises a hard question: how sturdy is a sukkah? Why can’t we pray for a stronger, more durable peace?

By design and intent, a sukkah isn’t made to last. Its walls are thin, its roof lets the rain in, and its beauty depends on our willingness to see holiness in something that doesn’t provide much shelter. And maybe that’s precisely why our tradition chose that image—not a fortress of peace, not a palace of peace, but a sukkah of peace. Because peace, like the sukkah, is fragile. And yet, fragile things can still be sacred.

Every night, we say those words in the Hashkiveinu prayer: “Spread over us the shelter of Your peace.” Shelter of peace in Hebrew is, Sukkat Shalom, a Sukkah of Peace. It’s not the peace of unshakable certainty or absolute safety. It’s the peace of being held gently, the peace of knowing that even in the night, even when the wind blows, God’s presence surrounds us. Hashkiveinu is not a request for invulnerability—it’s a prayer for protection within vulnerability. That’s what a sukkah is too: a sacred kind of exposure.

This week began a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—one that we pray and hope will see the release of all Israeli hostages.

Still, we are at the very beginning which - even if all goes according to plan - will be a long road ahead.  The war may be stopping, but peace is not yet here.

This is a delicate, fragile moment. And maybe that, too, is Sukkot. Because a sukkah was never built to keep the wind out. It was built to teach us how to live in the wind—to stay human, faithful, and kind even when the world is unsteady.

The Torah commands us: “Ba-sukkot teishvu shivat yamim”—dwell in booths for seven days—and then, “V’samachta b’chagecha”—rejoice in your festival. How do you rejoice when the walls can fall at any time? Sukkot answers: you rejoice not because the walls are strong, but because your spirit is. You rejoice because even when the wind blows—and it always will—you still choose to build, to believe, and to hope.

When our sukkah fell, we didn’t abandon it. We rebuilt it. And maybe that’s what faith really looks like—not certainty, but persistence. Not pretending that everything is stable, but showing up when it isn’t.

So when we pray for a sukkat shalom, we aren’t asking God for an unshakable structure. We’re asking for the courage to rebuild when it falls and to then dwell in it. For the faith to believe that peace—even fragile, complicated peace—is still worth striving for.

And so we pray: May the ceasefire hold. May every hostage return home safely, speedily, and whole. May Israel find the strength to defend its people while achieving peace.  And may all who dwell in that land one day sit together beneath a sukkah of peace.

Because peace is not something that simply arrives when the winds stop blowing. Peace is something we build and rebuild—like a sukkah. It may sway in the wind, it may even fall, but every act of rebuilding brings us closer to the world that Hashkiveinu envisions: a world where we can truly lie down in peace, and rise again to life renewed.

Shabbat shalom and chag sameach.