I have a sukkah - Haaretz

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Thu., October 11, 2007 ,

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I have a sukkah

By Avner Bernheim

For as long as I can remember, I've hated Sukkot. I don't relate to all the hard work involved in this holiday: stealing lumber from building sites, tearing off branches for the roof, carrying things, not to mention skin-piercing splinters of wood and paper cuts from cutting out paper chains and decorative lampshades. Even Lag Ba'omer is preferable - then at least you can put the fire out by the Scout method at the end, when you can enjoy the human variety. All those Ushpizin [the seven holy visitors tradition says visit the sukkah], who needs them?

"Why should I want to invite all kinds of homeless people who'll try to distill alcohol from my etrog? Leave me alone, I'm not interested," I told my husband, who like every year decided to build a sukkah by himself, and like every year is angry that I'm not willing to help.

"I don't understand how you turned out like that," he fumed. "Your father still does everything by himself in his house. You want to tell me that he didn't teach you how to hammer in a nail?" I recalled one of my father's futile attempts to teach me how to bang a molly bolt into the wall, so the next time I would know how to put up shelves by myself. He stood on a ladder with a hammer in his hand and a red molly bolt in the other, while I was sprawled in the armchair explaining to him that there would always be someone to do it for me. He, or my husband, or a professional, so what was the point?

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"It would be nice if you were a little more masculine in this area," my husband said, trying to spur me into moving my behind, but that only got me angrier. "I'm very masculine," I wailed. "What would it take, for me to know how to drill and talk about soccer? For me to show you that I know that Grant replaced Mourinho at Chelsea? So here, I know, and not only because Chelsea is a gay neighborhood. I really am interested in soccer. But I don't have to talk about it every moment in order to prove my masculinity to anyone. Certainly not to you."

My husband looked at me in despair. "Tell me," I asked, "have they said what Tzofit is going to do now in New York?"

I wasn't the only one in the building who didn't drop in to my husband's sukkah, which was developed with the help of design software from NASA and the Biological Institute in Nes Tziona, and increasingly looked like a wasp fetus that had undergone genetic engineering. To his great surprise, other neighbors refused to show an interest in the sukkah, first and foremost the nine members of the Hagiel family from the fourth floor rear, who in an exceptional move, without receiving permission from the relevant rabbis, decided to challenge the entire holiday.

"Sukkot is not a festival, it's a day of mourning," explained Regba Hagiel, with little Barukhit, named after Goldstein, in her arms. "It celebrates transience and nomadism, just like they uprooted us from Gush Katif and like in the Holocaust. After all, what are we celebrating?" she asked, "the fact that Jews can wander from place to place, be geographically flexible and still rejoice? It's an anti-Semitic holiday invented by sluts who favor transfer and cattle cars," she concluded, as Barukhit undid her orange pigtails.

Nor did the residents of the penthouse express interest in the collective sukkah designed by my husband. Anat and Yossi built a long and narrow sukkah on the roof, which makes it impossible to move one's elbows for the purpose of holding the cutlery and of eating. Anat prepared willow-branch snacks as refreshments, on the assumption that something without taste or smell will not contain calories either, and she removed the etrog from the basket of the Four Species, with the claim that citrus fruits are full of sugar.

In the rear penthouse belonging to the super-model, Amnon, the anthroposophic psychologist who moved there from the second floor front built a round sukkah without corners, with room for a wide bed, because the model is somewhat traditional on holidays and wanted to sleep under the stars. During the day his daughter Anna jumped on the bed as though it were a trampoline, pulled off paper decorations and crushed them, and at night it was Amnon and the model who did the jumping; the model identified in the stars the face of her psychoanalyst, her chosen one.

But my husband's "sukkah of peace" did not remain empty of guests. From Jaffa, Haim Bendel came to visit our strange edifice. Haim is a real estate agent and the cousin of Holocaust survivor Esther Bendel, from first floor rear, and like her, he is a little screwy. Haim tried to crush cockroaches by hitting them with a lulav, and complained about the fact that from year to year Jaffa is becoming too Arab. "I don't understand it," he fumed, "they have Nazareth and Umm al-Fahm and Jenin-Jenin, why do they come to Jaffa of all places?" Of course Ido Arbib, the Mizrahi video artist from third floor front, almost popped a vein in his brain. As a Jewish-Arab, who both visits the sukkah and fasts on Ramadan, he is unwilling to tolerate such racist talk, he thundered in his Mizrahi voice, and his wife Razit trembled in the dining area with a pan of Bedouin maglouba she had prepared according to a recipe of Aharoni's. Haim insisted that it was not a racist remark but a warning about the value of real estate investments, and all this male ushpizin would have developed into a mass brawl that threatened to destroy my husband's masterpiece, had I not intervened in time and asked: "So what do you say about the fact that Grant replaced Mourinho at Chelsea?"

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1.	Extremely sad and ignorant	07:49	\|	Allon	08/10/07

2.	The real dilemma	09:46	\|	James	08/10/07

3.	shame	10:23	\|	chava	08/10/07

4.	chelsea is a gay neighbourhood	11:21	\|	yak	08/10/07

5.	horrible writing	11:24	\|	itai	08/10/07

6.	This shameful "article" is a piece of garbage	12:16	\|	Gershon	08/10/07

7.	This is satirical...but it`s not funny or intelligent	12:25	\|	David	08/10/07

8.	badly written pointless rant	13:28	\|	Susan	08/10/07

9.	English fluency?	17:02	\|	B	08/10/07

10.	exquisite rubbish	17:35	\|	the Shaigetz	08/10/07

11.	B, you`re so right about Haaretz, but tell me	18:51	\|	Nora	08/10/07

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