Sukkah 23
“I can’t
keep up,” said Jake, “it seems like every other parent is paying their kids’
graduate tuition, supporting them for years in kollel, buying them a house,
taking them and the grandchildren to Pesach hotels, paying for grandkids’
school fees. When do these kids start fending for themselves? At this rate, I’ll
be working till I’m 95!”
If three
walls of the sukkah are man-made and the fourth is a tree, then it is a kosher
sukkah so long as “if the tree were taken away, it could stand on its own.”
The imagery
here is powerful. The Mishnah is asking
us to picture the uprooting of a tree – an object that may have been there for
many years and is permanently situated in that place – in order to see if the
flimsy, temporary sukkah can stand on its own!
As parents,
we are often scared to remove ourselves from our children’s lives. Today, more than ever, parents support their
children – from helicopter parents who hover over their children’s teachers and
coaches, to parents who feel obligated to bear their kids’ financial burden
through multiple university degrees and kollel.
Many
parents feel that they must help their children buy their first home and if
they’re not yet ready then they must continue to provide room and board for
their adult children through their twenties and thirties.
But the
Mishnah teaches us that sometimes we must be prepared to uproot ourselves to
ascertain whether the sukkah can stand on its own. The solid tree with its deep roots and its
powerful trunk and flowing branches must cease its support for the sukkah and
allow it to test its ability to stand independently.
It is an
awesome responsibility to remove the tree, but without that decision, it is
impossible to tell whether or not the sukkah is kosher. Without stepping back as parents, we are
hindering our children’s ability to thrive as independent human beings.
Today, I
pledge to provide my children with the tools to achieve success. But then I shall take a step back and watch
them develop on their own. Not every
sukkah will stand immediately without the tree’s support, but unless we uproot
the tree, we will never allow any sukkah’le the ability to succeed in life.
