Where I live, unfortunately, building a sukkah simply isn’t possible. But I came to understand, later than I would have liked, that this impossibility doesn’t mean I can never step beneath that fragile roof, because certain houses can be entered through thought alone. The place I first grasped this, oddly enough, was in the sukkah’s own shape, because that shape, it turns out, already belonged to a far older letter.

This same second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Bet, is built from three strokes, standing before you like a square left open on one side. A kosher sukkah is bound to that same geometry, required to have three walls, yet also required to leave a single gap open, toward the sky, toward the outside, toward whatever unexpected guest might arrive. At this letter’s root sits bayit, house, and the Torah’s very first word, Bereshit, opens, not by accident, with this exact letter. The sages find, in the letter’s three strokes, the three pillars the world is said to stand on, Torah, prayer, and good deeds, so that a person who fulfills all three is considered to have built a house for God. Perhaps this is exactly why, even without setting foot beneath a roof woven from branches, I can always step, without obstruction, into the open side the letter itself leaves behind.

I think, with the same patience, about the four plants meant to be held inside a sukkah, one by one, a citron, a palm frond, a few myrtle sprigs, a few willow branches, none of them carrying much to say on its own. According to an old teaching, each corresponds to a........

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