By: Renée Rockford
President & CEO
I was taking out the trash the other day and witnessed this confrontation between two neighbors whose garages face one another in the alley. One neighbor was pulling out of her garage with her children in the car. She opened the car door and yelled behind her to a man who had parked his car in the driveway. The woman hurriedly said, “When you park your car there, I can’t pull out of my garage to get my kids to school!”
The man apologized and told her he had nowhere else to park; you see, “I am a Hospice nurse,” he said, “caring for the man who lives here. The road construction out front on the street means there is nowhere that I can park.” She was not persuaded and dismissed his claim. She angrily proceeded with a more-than-five-point turn, forward, backward, forward, backward, and forward again to angle her car down the alley.
I wondered how people more learned in the Torah might solve this… should the education of children take priority over a dying man? But then I realized, the Torah would surely teach an altogether different lesson.
As we sit in our sukkot this week — beneath roofs of branches, with walls that shake in the wind — we are reminded just how fragile the world is. The sukkah teaches us that security doesn’t come from brick and stone, but from community, faith, and the presence of others.
That it is not with walls, but with what happens between the walls of our homes, and between the people who live side by side that matters. While each neighbor could have offered to temporarily move his or her car to accommodate the other, the real lesson is not the solution to the parking problem but that how on Sukkot, everyone is invited. And the sukkah becomes the symbol of that inclusiveness. It has no locked door. It is open to the sky — and, ideally, open to neighbors, friends, even strangers.
Sukkot takes us outside — outside our comfort zones, outside our private spaces — and teaches us to look around and notice who’s nearby. To greet. To invite. To connect. To offer help. Even to go out of our way to get out of someone else’s way.
Soon, we’ll take down our sukkot. The walls will come down. The roof will return to normal. But the many values of Torah and the sukkah must remain: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And as Sukkot teaches us: Joy, holiness, and God’s presence live where we make space for others. Let our sukkot not just be physical structures, but spiritual reminders — that every neighbor is a piece of holiness waiting to be seen.
Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom
Please email Renée Rockford at rrockford@jewishcolorado.org with questions or comments.