Welcome To Our Sukkah!

These first two days of Sukkot were packed and I want to write about two things that happened. In this post I'll tell about the sukkah hop. I'll use another post for the other thing.

So in our shul there is an annual sukkah hop. It used to consist of hoards of children bombarding one sukkah after another, swooping up candy, and leaders pleading with them to say thank you and try not to break anything. At least, that's what I hear.


Last year we asked if we could get in on the sukkah hop as hosts. The aim was primarily to get shul members visiting our side of town, since most of the community lives in other areas. There were enough of us, though, including the rabbi's house to make it worth their while to visit our section. To make it a little easier, the youth directors wisely broke the children into smaller groups by age. We had 4 and 5 year olds. We wanted to slow them down a little, so I told the kids that when it was time to eat their treat, it would be important to slow down and pay attention to it so they could really feel grateful as they made their brachot. To practice that skill we had them do a scavenger hunt in which ND and I handed out pictures of items that were in the sukkah -- stained glass ornaments and so on -- and asked the children to find or count them.

The event came and went quickly. It was not polished, but it did set the tone for the concept of "programming" at our sukkah. It appears others on the route also had programs including making sukkot out of pretzels and marshmallow fluff or something like that.

So this year we decided to take it up a notch.

All three of us had a ball planning and setting it up. U's idea was chalking "parking spaces" into our driveway for strollers and putting up parking signs. He also put up a sign directing people into the sukkah and fairies into our fairy garden. The video here shows a general introduction and was taken before the chag. Below I'll describe to you what we did to it ON the chag before kids arrived.

When they approached the sukkah the outside was all the same, but when they pulled back the curtain to the tent/sukkah, they would have seen all the furniture had been taken out. The floor was lined with blankets like a Bedouin tent and there were chairs set up only in back where the parents could sit. (Much of this was ND's idea.) I dressed up as Sarah Imeinu but didn't reveal my identity. Instead I beckoned the children in and told them a story. 

Most of the time in schools and other education settings, we teachers talk above them, trying to be loud enough to beat them to any questions or interruptions they might have. We talk fast to keep them with us before their attention drifts. I did the opposite. I sat cross legged on the floor wrapped in a shawl and wearing a long gold skirt and gold tunic. My hair was wrapped completely in an Israeli scarf and I spoke slowly. 

I asked if they knew what chesed was. When they didn't, I asked if they knew what kindness was. I told them I wanted to tell them the story of someone who lived a long time ago who was very kind, and that this person noticed the kindness we were given in this beautiful world. This person realized that with so much kindness and beauty in the world there must be a God that loves us and is kind to us. Just one God, not like the quarreling ones that they believed in in those days.

I told them that I liked this person so much that I married him and that we made our life's work about teaching people to be kind and to know there was one God who was kind to us. 

I told them how sad we were because the best way to teach what you believe is to teach it to your children, and that we didn't have any.

But one night God spoke to my husband and told him to look up at the sky. He said that he would have a child and that that child would have more children and so on until there were as many as there were stars in the sky. 

I told them about the angels that visited us and told us that it was really true, and sure enough that we did have a child who had children and had children and so on.

I told the children that THEY were those children and how happy it made me to see them today and how happy it would make my husband to see them too.

So if they wanted him to see them and be proud of how all these years later they too were being kind and believing in one God that they could invite us to their sukkah through inviting Ushpizin and that last night was my husband Avraham's night, and tonight would be our son Yitzkhak's night.

I told the story in a softspoken way and the children were riveted. At the end ND helped me hand out candy coins "for their long journey" and candy stars to remind them that they were stars. 

I loved it, absolutely loved it and I want to do more of this now. Story telling is different from reading a story and it's different from writing. It's magical and it's calming and I want more children to be exposed to it.