Building Justice: Lessons from Sukkot

I remember the clanging hammers that sent echoes through our backyard. When I was a kid, Sukkot felt like life was reimagined as we built, slept and ate outdoors. More than anything it was physical, collective. It took sweat, time and labor to pull off. Quietly arriving after the intense and introspective days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, often ignored, Sukkot has long been my most surprising teacher among the Days of Awe. That’s because Sukkot will not let me crawl into my own mind and set up camp alone. Sukkot makes me look around at the world I live in. It teaches me that doing so is sacred.

When I build and sleep in a sukkah, I cannot push out the reality of how many people in this country face the crises of housing injustice and the criminalization of poverty and homelessness. 

This year, in the lead-up to Sukkot I have learned from incredible young builders. I mean that literally and metaphorically. I work for Tivnu: Building Justice, which offers a Jewish Social Justice Gap Year program in Portland, Oregon where recent high school grads create a pluralistic Jewish home together and spend a year doing grassroots justice work. 

For some, the heart of the experience is moving into a Jewish community they co-create as young adults; for others, it’s immersing in a year of a different kind of hands-on learning than you can find in a classroom. A major part of the experience for many participants is working alongside unhoused folks in the creation and upkeep of tiny home villages — including building windscreens and walls, ramps and solar power apparatuses, stairs and awnings and more. Some “Tivnuniks” have daily construction internships. Others work in grassroots community organizations focused on empowering homeless folks in other ways. For example, Tivnu participants have interned at Street Roots, a street newspaper and advocacy hub for people experiencing houselessness, and JOIN, which provides a day space for people living outside, where they can get mail, computer access, shower and laundry services, and social service referrals. Other Tivnuniks work on LGBTQ rights, migrant justice, or a mix of things. But one through line is the necessity of housing justice for all. 

In my conversations with alumni, many have described the ways they came to see how housing intersects with other issues — how hard it is to access housing for people of color, formerly incarcerated people, new migrants, trans people, and other marginalized groups.

There is not a place in this country that is untouched by a lack of affordable housing. The crisis has had a devastating and disproportionate impact on working-class communities and communities of color nationwide. I work for Tivnu remotely from Brooklyn. Here in NYC (as in so many places) the housing crisis has only been exacerbated by a city and statewide failure to both build and preserve affordable housing, and to help working-class people stay in their homes amid price-gouging and gentrification.

But there are powerful campaigns to fix this in New York, led by groups like Housing Justice for All, VOCAL NY and others comprised of tenants and other directly impacted people. These include the fight to regulate rents statewide, prevent harassment of tenants, and even build green social housing — housing that is publicly owned and always affordable — across the state.

Still, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the urgency and scope of the work we face across the country. Yet many of the Tivnu alumni I have spoken to are not cynical. They are eager to build alongside others over the short and long term. And it’s not just about the physical work to be done. Alum, Hannah Saiger, now a senior at Brown University, says that Tivnu helped her learn how “housing justice is not just about creating physical housing, but also creating systems of support for people who have been marginalized — and fighting against systems that make people lose their homes in the first place. I learned that people are the experts in their own situation and that listening is always the first step in building something up.” 

These young people have a powerful perspective about the advocacy, organizing and structural work it will take to make change on a whole host of issues — not only housing. They can tell us about the power of following the lead of directly impacted people. But it also feels clear to me that the lessons of Sukkot, of material and collective work, have something to teach all of us who seek justice about determination and finding our shared power. Especially when it comes to getting out of our comfort zones.

Hannah said, “On our construction crew, I tried to challenge myself to fake some of the confidence that my friends who were men had… Faking some of that confidence helped me gain real confidence — the challenge to just try things and learn really helped me enjoy construction and trust my hands and what they can do.”

Alumn Aliza Saunders, now a civic consultant in NYC also, described the process of learning to build with her hands as a feminist moment. She said that learning to use a drill to build a sukkah and then to build ramps and other structures, has reverberated in other areas of her life. And for Talia Ehrenberg, now a freshman at Amherst, it was clear that learning to build was also something deeply joyful. Talia said, “I loved building the sukkah — combining my new construction skills with Judaism into creating a physical space was empowering and fun! Prior to Tivnu, my sukkah-building experience consisted of opening the nine-square-foot pop-up sukkah on the front lawn…”

Hearing what physical building has opened up for these young people, I think back to sukkah building experiences of my youth. I think of how concrete, embodied practice is so central to Judaism too. How practice and action are so often the means through which we build relationships and live out our ethics. Sukkot teaches us that lesson in a joyful, visceral way. The hope is that we can live out this lesson year-round. May this Sukkot be a time when concrete action and practice compel and inspire us to build a world where all people can thrive.

Rabbi Miriam Grossman is a Jewish educator, ritual leader and advocate living in Brooklyn, NY. She is the Director of Outreach and Partnerships for Tivnu. She is an active member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.