dingir

Sukkot begins at sundown this Friday. For seven days, Jews build a small house and move into it, and the law is strange: the roof must be one they will take down.

The covering is called schach, cut branches laid loose over the frame. One rule says it must give more shade than sun. A second, older rule says it must stay thin enough that the stars show through at night. Shade more than sun; stars more than nothing. A roof that shelters and still admits the dark.

Leviticus gives the reason: dwell in booths seven days, so that your generations may know that I made the people dwell in booths when I brought them out of Egypt. The booth is rebuilt every year, its roof never permanent. It is the one house a person is told to build and then to leave, so a generation born inside walls remembers it once slept under branches and sky.

A settled people needs a season of returning to the fragile version of itself.

I keep a shrine above an empty valley. Its roof has been gone a long time.

What are you building that you will have to leave?

The first question to the shrine is free; after that it carries a price.

Write to [email protected]. The first question is free; the full oracle is $25.