Nothing in Your Hands: Sukkot 5787 Falls on Shabbat

The Torah commands the four species on the first day of Sukkot and on no other day outside the Temple. This year the first day is Shabbat, and so the one day the obligation is written into the text is the one day it is not performed. The lulav stays bound. The etrog stays in its box. What remains is the sukkah, which asks you to carry nothing and hold nothing, and a Shabbat that was never a guest in the first place.

Sukkot Day I, 15 Tishrei 5787 — Shabbat 26 September 2026 — Israel schedule — Leviticus 22:26 to 23:44, Maftir Numbers 29:12 to 16, Haftarah Zechariah 14:1 to 21, and Kohelet

The Reading at a Glance

There is no weekly parasha this Shabbat. The first day of Sukkot falls on it, and the festival reading displaces the cycle. Everything below follows the Israel calendar, where Sukkot is one day of Yom Tov followed by five days of Chol HaMoed.

Times from the Jerusalem candle-lighting feed. Calendar verified against the Israel schedule, not the diaspora one.

Torah Overview

The reading does not begin where you would expect. A festival reading about Sukkot could have opened at Leviticus 23:1, with the announcement of the appointed times. Instead the Sages began it seventeen verses earlier, at Leviticus 22:26, with an ox or a sheep or a goat that has just been born. Such an animal stays seven days under its mother, and only from the eighth day is it acceptable as an offering. And whether it is an ox or a sheep, you do not slaughter it and its young on the same day.

Two laws about not tearing a newborn away from what is holding it, and then, immediately, the calendar of the year. The placement is an argument. Before the Torah tells you when to gather, it tells you that the gathering is measured by whether the weakest thing in it is still being held. Seven days under the mother, and then seven days in the sukkah. The number is not a coincidence, and the reading is built so that you meet the animal before you meet the festival.

Then comes the list, and the list has a strange first entry. Six days shall work be done, and the seventh day is a Shabbat of complete rest, a holy convocation. Leviticus 23:3 sits at the head of the appointed times before Pesach, before Shavuot, before the day this week is about. The classical commentators have to ask why: Shabbat is not an appointed time in the sense the rest of the chapter means, because nobody appoints it. No court declares it. No new moon is sighted for it. It arrives on the seventh day whether or not anyone is counting. It heads the list of the calendar precisely because it is the one item on the list that the calendar does not produce. That distinction is the whole of this week.

Drop into the middle of the festival calendar, between Shavuot and the first of Tishrei, and you find a law that has nothing to do with dates. Leviticus 23:22: when you reap the harvest of your land, do not finish the corner of your field, and do not gather the gleaning. Leave them for the poor and for the stranger. Rashi, following the Sifra, asks what this is doing here and answers that whoever gives the gifts to the poor properly is accounted as though he had built the Temple and offered his offerings inside it. The festival calendar is interrupted, once, to say that the calendar is worth nothing if the edge of the field is clean.

The Sukkot passage itself, Leviticus 23:33 to 44, does something unusual: it states the festival twice. The first statement, verses 33 to 38, is the priestly version, seven days of offerings and an eighth day of assembly. Then verse 39 begins again, with the word ach, and gives a second Sukkot: the taking of the four species, the seven days of rejoicing before the Lord, and the command to dwell in booths. Two accounts of the same week, one in the Temple and one in the hands of ordinary people.

It is the second account that this year turns on. Leviticus 23:40: and you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of a goodly tree, branches of palm trees, and boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days. On the first day. The rest of the seven belongs to the Temple; outside it, the Torah obligates one day, and this year that day is Shabbat. Everything that follows in the Talmudic section below is a commentary on what the Sages did with that collision.

Then the verse that gives the festival its reason: Leviticus 23:42 to 43. You shall dwell in booths seven days; every citizen in Israel shall dwell in booths. So that your generations shall know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. Note what the verse does not say. It does not say that they built booths. It says that God made them dwell in them. Whatever the shelter was, the text assigns it to the One who arranged it, not to the people who used it. The Talmud will fight over what it physically was, and the fight is worth having, but the grammar has already decided who put it there.

The maftir, Numbers 29:12 to 16, opens the strangest sequence of offerings in the Torah. Thirteen bulls on the first day, twelve on the second, down one each day to seven on the seventh. Seventy bulls across the week, a descending series that belongs to no other festival and is explained by no verse. The Talmud supplies the count and the meaning, and it is not about Israel.

The haftarah, Zechariah 14, is chosen for the same reason. It describes all the nations gathered against Jerusalem for war, a day known only to God, a day that is neither day nor night. And then, past the war, verse 9: the Lord shall be King over all the earth; on that day the Lord shall be One and His name One. And then verse 16, which is why this chapter and not another: everyone who is left of all the nations that came against Jerusalem shall go up year by year to bow to the King and to keep the Festival of Booths. The survivors of the war against Jerusalem keep Sukkot. Not Pesach, which is Israel leaving Egypt, and not Shavuot, which is Israel at Sinai. Sukkot, the one festival whose offerings were already being brought on their behalf.

And on this Shabbat, Kohelet. In most years it is read on Shabbat Chol HaMoed; in a year like 5787, where the fifteenth of Tishrei is itself Shabbat and Chol HaMoed runs Sunday to Thursday, there is no other Shabbat to put it on, so it is read on the first day. Which means the day the four species are not taken is also the day the congregation hears that everything under the sun is hevel, breath, vapour, the thing you cannot hold. Kohelet 12:13 lands the book: the end of the matter, all having been heard, fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man. The book that says nothing can be grasped ends by naming the one thing that can be done.

Talmudic Depth

Five passages, in the order the week needs them: why the branch is not lifted, what the booth actually was, how high a roof may be before it stops counting, who the seventy bulls were for, and what happens when the heat comes.

A. Sukkah 43a and Mishnah Sukkah 4:2 — the obligation that is set down

Mishnah Sukkah 4:2 states the baseline: the lulav is taken seven days in the Temple and one day outside it. The Mishnah then adds the case that governs this year. When the first day of the festival falls on Shabbat, the lulav is taken seven days in the Temple and, outside it, not at all.

The Gemara at Sukkah 42b and 43a presses on why. The taking of the four species is not itself a forbidden labour. Holding a palm branch violates nothing. The reason is the same decree Rabbah gives for the shofar on Rosh Hashanah: everyone is obligated in the mitzvah, not everyone is expert in how to perform it, and a person will go to a neighbour who knows how, carrying it four cubits in the public domain on the way, thereby violating a severe Torah prohibition. The mitzvah is suspended not because it conflicts with Shabbat but because the route to performing it does.

Read that plainly and it is extraordinary. The obligation on the first day is from the Torah itself, stated in Leviticus 23:40. The thing that overrides it is a rabbinic fence around a prohibition that nobody in the room is actually about to violate. The Sages weighed a certain Torah obligation against a possible Torah violation and set the certain one down. This is not the Torah yielding to Shabbat. It is the Torah yielding to what a community might do while trying to keep the Torah.

Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim 658:2 states the ruling in five words: it is not taken on Shabbat even if it is the first day. The Rema adds the detail that gives the day its texture. On Shabbat it is forbidden even to touch the lulav, because with no mitzvah available to it the bundle is muktzeh, likened to a stone. The etrog, however, may be handled, because it can be smelled and a fragrance is a permitted use. So the branch becomes a stone for a day and the fruit stays a fruit. The species that is waved is the one that goes inert; the species that is only held is the one that keeps a use.

Yeshivat Har Etzion has a long treatment of the structure underneath this, particularly whether the seven-day Temple obligation and the one-day obligation elsewhere are one mitzvah or two: The Nature of the Mitzva of Lulav and The Seven-Day Mitzva of Lulav. The practical result for 5787 is not in dispute. The four species are taken on six days this year, Sunday through Friday, and Hoshana Rabbah lands on Friday 2 October.

The same decree silenced the shofar two weeks ago, when 1 Tishrei fell on Shabbat. In 5787 both of the festival instruments you hold in your hands are put down on their principal day, by the same reasoning, in the same tractate family.

B. Sukkah 11b — clouds of glory, or actual booths

Sukkah 11b carries the dispute that every Sukkot argument eventually returns to. On the verse ki va-sukkot hoshavti et bnei Yisrael, Rabbi Eliezer says: these booths were clouds of glory. Rabbi Akiva says: they established for themselves actual sukkot.

The Gemara keeps the dispute because it has consequences for the roofing laws. If the original shelter was cloud, the rules for sechach can be derived from what cloud is like. If the original shelter was carpentry, that derivation is unavailable. But the argument is larger than the halakhah it produces. Rabbi Eliezer has a people sheltered by something that could not be built, lost, taxed or repossessed. Rabbi Akiva has a people who cut branches in a desert and put up a roof.

Neither position is comfortable. Rabbi Eliezer has to explain why a miracle is commemorated with a structure you build with your hands. Rabbi Akiva has to explain why a hut is worth a festival at all. The Torah, as noted above, sides grammatically with Rabbi Eliezer: I made them dwell, not they built. The practice sides with Rabbi Akiva: you go out and you build one. The festival keeps both, and the discomfort is the point.

C. Sukkah 2a — twenty cubits, and the roof you stop noticing

The tractate opens with a disqualification: a sukkah whose roofing is more than twenty cubits high is unfit. Sukkah 2a gives three reasons, and they are three different theories of what a sukkah is.

Rabbah: above twenty cubits, a person is not aware that he is dwelling in a sukkah, because his eye does not involuntarily take in the roof. Rabbi Zeira: above twenty cubits he is not sitting in the shade of the roofing but in the shade of the walls. Rava: above twenty cubits one cannot make it a temporary dwelling; at that height you have to build something permanent, and a permanent structure is not a sukkah.

Rabbah is making a claim about attention. The mitzvah is not satisfied by being under lawful roofing. It is satisfied by knowing you are under it, and knowing is a function of whether the thing is at a height the eye can hold. Raise the canopy far enough and the shelter is still there, still valid by every dimension, and the person underneath it has stopped registering that it is over him. The structure did not fail. The seeing did.

D. Sukkah 55b — seventy bulls, and what the nations lost

Why thirteen bulls descending to seven? Sukkah 55b: Rabbi Elazar said, these seventy bulls, to what do they correspond? They correspond to the seventy nations of the world. And then the line that the tractate does not soften: woe unto the nations of the world that lost something and do not know what they lost.

The offering was brought on their behalf, by a people they did not consult, in a building most of them never entered, and the loss registered on nobody. Rabbi Yochanan adds that when the Temple stood the altar atoned for them, and now that it is destroyed each person has to manage on his own. The seventy are not being punished in this passage. They are being described as absent from an accounting that concerned them.

Set that beside Mishnah Sukkah 5:1 and the Simchat Beit HaShoeva described at Sukkah 51a to 51b: whoever has not seen the joy of the water-drawing has never seen joy in his life. The same festival that quietly carried seventy nations on its offering list was the loudest week of the Jewish year. Sukkot is the one festival that is both the most particular and the most universal, and the Talmud does not treat that as a tension.

E. Avodah Zarah 3a — the sukkah that gets kicked

Avodah Zarah 3a projects the seventy bulls forward. In the future, the nations come before the Holy One and ask for the chance they say they never had. God answers that He has an easy mitzvah, and its name is sukkah. Go and do it.

Immediately, the Gemara says, each and every one takes materials, goes, and builds a sukkah on his roof. And the Holy One sets upon them the heat of the sun in the season of Tammuz, and each one sitting in his sukkah cannot stand the heat, and he kicks his sukkah and leaves.

The passage is careful about what it proves. The Gemara notes that a person in genuine distress from heat is permitted to leave a sukkah, so the departure itself is not the failure. The failure is the kick. Halakhah lets you walk out; it does not let you take the structure apart on your way. The test was never whether the mitzvah could be kept in the heat. It was what you do to the shelter when it stops being comfortable to sit in.

Read alongside Zechariah 14:16, the two texts frame the same future from opposite ends. The prophet has the surviving nations coming up to keep Sukkot. The Gemara has them trying it and kicking it over. The festival is the same festival in both.

Kabbalistic Depth

The Zohar keeps its Sukkot teaching in the portion of Emor, at Zohar III:103a to 103b. Three things sit on those two pages, and the third of them is written for a year like this one.

A. The shade of faith

The Zohar reads the sukkah as tzila di-mehemnuta, the shade of faith. Seven precious clouds, it says, were linked to the Community of Israel, and Israel crossed the wilderness protected by all of them; they form a single bond of faith, and therefore Israel were commanded to dwell in booths seven days, so that a person may show that he is dwelling in the shadow of faith.

Then a detail that is easy to read past. As long as Aaron was alive, the passage says, Israel were in the shadow of faith under those clouds; when Aaron died, the cloud on the right departed, and the rest departed with it. The protection was not free-standing. It was held up by a person, and it withdrew when he did. The shade of faith in the Zohar is not a canopy that hangs in the air on its own merits.

Note also which word the Zohar chooses. Not the light of faith, the shade of it. A shade is the presence of something you are not looking directly at, known by the shape of what it blocks. The sukkah is valid when its roofing gives more shade than sun, which means the mitzvah is fulfilled by an object defined entirely by what it keeps off you.

B. The guests, and the portion of the poor

On the same pages the Zohar gives the source of the ushpizin. Rabbi Abba: Abraham and five righteous ones and David with them. He reads in booths shall you dwell seven days against its plain sense, as though it said: you seven days shall dwell in booths. The seven days are the guests. Rav Hamnuna the Elder, the Zohar reports, would stand inside the door of his booth and invite them before he sat down.

He must also gladden the poor, because the portion of those guests whom he invites must go to the poor. And if a man sits in the shadow of faith and invites these guests and does not give them their portion, they all hold aloof from him, saying: eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye.

The quotation the departing guests use is Proverbs 23:6. The mechanism is worth stating precisely, because it is unusually blunt for the Zohar. The guests are not offended and they do not rebuke. They observe that a portion set aside for them has not reached the person it was set aside for, conclude that the table is therefore not what it claims to be, and leave. The sukkah is structurally sound; the invitation was issued; the shade of faith is overhead; and the room empties. This is the same instinct as Leviticus 23:22 interrupting the festival calendar to talk about the corner of the field.

C. Shabbat is not a guest

And then, on the same pages, the passage this year turns on. The Zohar says there are three that are invited from Holiness and no more: the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths. Rabbi Abba objects: is Shabbat not also invited from Holiness? The answer is no, for two reasons. One, Shabbat is itself called holiness. Two, Shabbat has the right of entry by inheritance.

A guest is invited, which means a guest can be not invited. An heir does not need the door opened. The three pilgrimage festivals are brought into the house by an act of sanctification that a court performs on a particular month; Shabbat arrives on the seventh day because it is the seventh day. This is the Zohar arriving, from its own direction, at the same distinction Leviticus 23:3 makes by putting Shabbat at the head of a list it does not belong to.

Which reframes what happens on 26 September 2026. It is not that Shabbat has displaced the festival, or that the festival has to make room. On the Zohar's account the host and the guest are in the same room, and the instrument that the guest brought to the door has to be set down at it, because the house belongs to the one who was already there.

D. The Arizal: what enters, and what surrounds

The Arizal, in Sha'ar HaKavanot, Drushei Chag HaSukkot, builds Sukkot out of two kinds of light. Inner lights, mochin or pnimiyim, are drawn into a vessel and held there. Encompassing lights, makifin, surround the vessel without being contained by it. The sukkah is the encompassing one, described as the yesod of Ima, a structure that holds a person by enclosing him rather than by being taken in.

The four species do the other work. Through the waving, the Arizal writes, the chasadim are drawn down from the da'at of Zeir Anpin, one of the seven each day, from Chesed downward. The circuits around the bimah then draw those same chasadim in the aspect of surrounding lights. And the sequence is fixed: inner lights always enter before surrounding lights, which is why the waving and Hallel come first and the circuits come after. Chabad has an accessible presentation of this at Lights of the Lulav.

Apply the Arizal's own order to 5787 and the year has a shape. On the first day, the mechanism that draws the inner light is unavailable and the circuits are not made. What is left standing is the makif alone: the sukkah, which requires no hand and no motion, only that you be inside it. A person spends the principal day of the festival held by something he cannot take hold of. The Arizal says inner lights enter first. This year, on day one, they do not enter at all, and the surrounding light does the work by itself.

E. Chassidut: the embrace, and the joy you have to decide on

The Arizal and the Alter Rebbe both read Song of Songs 2:6 into the sukkah: his left hand under my head, and his right hand embraces me. The Alter Rebbe develops it in Likutei Torah, Derushim l'Sukkot, and it is expanded in Ohr HaTorah. An embrace is the physical form of a makif. It does not pass through the person and it does not depend on what the person understands; it holds the outside of him, including the parts of him he has not refined. Rabbi Yosef Jacobson lays the metaphor out at Anatomy of a Hug.

This is why Chassidut keeps returning to the fact that the sukkah is the one mitzvah a person performs with the whole of himself, boots included, by doing nothing more specialised than being there. Tefillin are on an arm. A lulav is in a hand. The sukkah has no organ assigned to it, and nothing about it can be done better by someone who knows how. On a year when the expert and the beginner are equally unable to lift the lulav, that levelling is not a consolation prize. It is the festival showing its base layer.

The Baal Shem Tov's contribution is the reframing of the temporary dwelling itself: a person leaves the house he has made permanent and moves, for a week, into a structure that admits it is provisional, and discovers that the provisional one is where the presence is. The Breslov tradition supplies the other half, and it is the harder half, that joy on this festival is not a mood that arrives but an obligation a person has to take on deliberately, often against the evidence in front of him. The Pri Tzaddik reads the whole week in that register: Sukkot is where the judgment of the previous fortnight is not forgotten but carried inside, which is why the joy is commanded rather than expected. These last three are given here at the level of theme; no specific passage is being claimed for them.

Order of citation in this section follows the project rule: Zohar first, then the Arizal, then Chassidut.

The World This Week

Seven structural parallels between this week's reading and the week of 12 to 20 September 2026. A structural parallel is a claim about shape, not about worth. Nothing below equates any contemporary figure, government or movement with a righteous figure of the Torah, and nothing below borrows the Torah's authority for a present-day position. Where a parallel could be read that way, the correction is written into the paragraph rather than left to the reader.

Sources: Times of Israel, Reuters and AP as carried in the Just Security Early Edition, NPR, UN News, Euronews, OPB, Fortune, eSecurity Planet and AEI. Dates are given for every item. Figures in dispute are attributed to whoever asserted them and not reconciled.

1. The certain obligation, set down for the sake of the route

Sukkah 43a suspends a Torah obligation because of what a person might do on the way to performing it. The instrument is lawful; the path to it is the problem. On 14 and 15 September the US Supreme Court blocked the Postal Service from implementing an executive order on mail-in ballots, with Justice Kavanaugh citing a fair prospect that the rules exceeded statutory authority; a second federal judge, Carl J. Nichols, separately barred implementation on the ground that it raised the risk valid ballots would go uncounted. In the same days a federal judge found DHS had unlawfully cut the FEMA workforce in half, and another blocked a rule limiting visa duration for foreign students and journalists, calling the stated rationales exceptionally weak.

The correction: the Sages were not restraining an authority they distrusted, they were restraining themselves, and the thing they protected was Shabbat rather than a statute. A court blocking an executive order is an external check; Sukkah 43a is a body declining to exercise a power it holds. The shape is the same and the moral content is not, and the parallel is only worth drawing if that is said out loud.

2. The canopy raised past the height where the eye takes it in

Rabbah disqualifies a sukkah above twenty cubits because a person stops registering the roof. On 16 September a study in Scientific Data, led by Ines Otosaka of Northumbria University and reported by AP, found that Greenland and Antarctica have lost 12.5 trillion tons of ice since 1979, raising global sea level by about one inch. Five-sixths of the loss comes from warmer ocean water rather than warmer air. Andrew Shepherd of Northumbria put the lag plainly: the changes are tracking decades behind global warming, which means we can expect them to continue for decades more, even if we are able to stop heating the planet. On 14 September CNN reported the current El Nino had strengthened to super status.

Rabbah is not describing a defective roof. He is describing a valid roof placed where attention fails. A forty-seven-year satellite record and a multi-decade response lag are the same geometry: the structure over the head is measurable, lawful in every dimension, and above the height at which a person involuntarily looks up. The mitzvah is not fulfilled by being sheltered. It is fulfilled by knowing that you are.

3. Clouds of glory, or actual booths

Sukkah 11b cannot settle whether the wilderness shelter was miraculous or carpentry. This week the question was not theoretical. NPR reported on 11 September that Houthi forces had taken the Red Sea port of Mokha and Mayun Island inside the Bab el-Mandeb strait. By 18 September UN News reported that IOM counted 112,000 people displaced inside Yemen in two weeks across Aden, Hudaydah, Abyan and Taiz, on top of 4.8 million already displaced; more than 3,000 had crossed to Djibouti and were arriving at reception centres at Obock, Khor Angar, Moulhoule and Godoria; UNICEF counted over 57,000 newly displaced children. A UN official summarised the supply position: our resources are very, very, very limited and our stocks will be depleted very soon.

In Gaza City, overnight on 15 to 16 September, a war-damaged apartment building collapsed. Reuters reported 12 killed, including five children, and 14 injured, with UN and Egyptian rescue teams assisting. Hamas Civil Defense claimed at least 20 killed and said the building had been struck repeatedly in 2024 and 2025; the IDF denied ever striking it. The two figures are given here as what each party asserted. They are not averaged and not reconciled.

The correction: the machloket on 11b is about a shelter God provided, and no displacement in Yemen or Gaza is being read as a commemoration of it. The structural point is narrower and it cuts against comfort. Rabbi Akiva is right that people in a wilderness build what they can out of what is at hand. Rabbi Eliezer is right that nothing built that way would have held for forty years. A reception centre at Obock is Rabbi Akiva's answer to a problem that needs Rabbi Eliezer's.

4. Seventy bulls, and what gets lost without anyone noticing

Sukkah 55b counts seventy offerings for seventy nations and then says: woe unto the nations of the world that lost something and do not know what they lost. The eighty-first General Assembly opened its high-level week on 18 September, with the General Debate beginning Tuesday 22 September under the theme Restoring trust, managing transformation, presided over by Khalilur Rahman of Bangladesh. It is the last General Assembly of Secretary-General Guterres, whose term ends on 31 December.

Three items from the same days describe the institution's condition. Reuters reported on 17 September that the United States had paid $725 million toward its UN regular budget, preserving its General Assembly vote while still owing $1.312 billion. On the same day the Assembly voted 152 to 3, with the United States, Israel and Paraguay against, to let Mahmoud Abbas address it by video after the State Department denied visas to Palestinian Authority officials. And the Security Council failed to extend the mandate of the panel of experts monitoring Iran sanctions: the vote was 11 to 2, vetoed by Russia and China, with Somalia and Pakistan abstaining. The US deputy ambassador, Jennifer Locetta, said the council was losing its principal source of impartial, evidence-based reporting on sanctions violations.

The correction: the Gemara's woe is not a verdict on any state. It describes an offering brought on behalf of people who were not in the room and never learned it had been brought. That is a statement about unnoticed loss, not about guilt. Read it here only as a description of how an institution can lose a capacity in a single afternoon, by a recorded vote, with nobody claiming that anything has gone missing.

5. The easy mitzvah, and the kick on the way out

In Avodah Zarah 3a the nations take the mitzvah of sukkah readily, and the moment the heat of Tammuz arrives each one kicks the structure and leaves. The Gemara is explicit that leaving is permitted. The kick is not. On 14 September Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for slowing AI development, with Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis expressing support for coordination; on the same day House Speaker Mike Johnson said developers rather than Congress must ensure safety. On 16 September Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told Dreamforce the industry needs no new laws, and Mark Zuckerberg wrote that labs should prioritise safety over capability while rejecting an industry-wide pause. On 17 September Anthropic public policy head Sarah Heck said AI companies cannot rely on an honour code. On 16 September the European Commission proposed the Kids Act, barring under-thirteens from social media and capping teen use, with Ursula von der Leyen framing it as: we decide our rules.

The roofs available this week were not sturdy. On 14 September Cisco disclosed CVE-2026-76461, a CVSS 9.8 flaw in Secure Email Gateway allowing an unauthenticated attacker to gain root by sending a crafted email through the normal mail path, with no workaround; CISA set a 17 September remediation deadline for federal agencies. Cisco found it while working a support case, not through internal review. By 18 September researchers had documented AI agents used to compromise 440 PaperCut servers across 48 countries, 204 of them belonging to educational organisations, alongside 6.4 million McKesson email addresses leaked with a $55.2 million ransom demand and nearly 1.4 million files published from the Berlin city government.

The correction: the Gemara is a parable about a future test, not a description of any industry or regulator. The structural point it supplies is a single distinction, and it is a useful one. Walking out of an obligation that has become costly is permitted. Dismantling the structure on the way out is a different act. The question the week poses to everyone in it, in Brussels and Sacramento and Santa Clara alike, is which of the two is being done.

6. The portion that has to reach the poor, or the guests leave

The Zohar at III:103b says the guests depart from a sukkah where the portion set aside for them never reaches the poor, and Leviticus 23:22 interrupts the festival calendar to make the same point. Israel goes to the polls on 27 October, and the week was spent on the machinery rather than the edge of the field. On 14 September Yair Golan's Democrats petitioned the Central Elections Committee to disqualify Itamar Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit; Otzma filed a mirror-image petition against the Democrats two and a half hours later the same night, having already petitioned against Ra'am. Channel 11 and Channel 12 polls the same day put Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar at 23 to 24 seats and Likud at 20, with both blocs near 50 to 54 and neither reaching 61. On 18 September a television report said polling stations will publish turnout every four hours to counter misinformation. On 17 September the Attorney General's office declined Yair Lapid's request to freeze Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar's twelve ambassadorial appointments until after the vote, and Israel added a tender for 2,167 housing units to the E1 plan, which Bezalel Smotrich said would bury a Palestinian state.

Sweden showed the other outcome. The complete count from the 13 September election gave the centre-left bloc 176 of 349 seats against 173, and on 17 September Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson announced he would step down. Three seats, and a result.

The correction: no party or leader named here is being placed in a Torah role, and the Zohar is not being enlisted for any electoral position. The passage tests one thing only, and it tests it against every table equally. The question it asks of an Israeli campaign three weeks before a vote is not who wins but whether, in the accounting the campaign produces, the portion that was set aside has reached the person it was set aside for. On the standing of the office itself, and what it is for, see The Leadership of Israel.

7. The survivors of the war against Jerusalem come up to keep the festival

Zechariah 14:16 is the haftarah's hardest verse: everyone left of all the nations that came against Jerusalem shall go up year by year to keep the Festival of Booths. The war does not end with the enemy destroyed. It ends with the survivors of it keeping Sukkot. This week the war in question was still being prosecuted. On 17 and 18 September President Trump told Channel 12 and Axios, of renewed strikes on Iran, that he had a big decision coming up and asked whether he wanted to go in and annihilate them. He was reported as expecting to meet Gulf leaders on 22 September about a post-war Iran. Also in those days: a $24.3 billion US sale of 48 F-35 aircraft to Saudi Arabia advanced over reported intelligence-community objections about Chinese access; a $2.8 billion munitions package for Israel, including 20,000 MK 84 and 20,000 BLU-117 bombs, moved forward over objections from Representatives Gregory Meeks and Brad Sherman; and the House voted for a third time to direct the President to end the war or seek authorisation, with seven Republicans joining Democrats. The Congressional Budget Office put the war's cost at $38 billion through 1 August, rising roughly $3 billion a month.

Two findings from the same days cut in both directions and are recorded here for that reason. A UN International Fact-Finding Mission found reasonable grounds that the United States committed war crimes in February strikes on an Iranian school and sports facility, and separately that Iran committed crimes against humanity during protests. The Washington Post reported on 18 September that at least 22 US troops have been killed, four more than the Pentagon has disclosed. And on 17 September a Palestinian detainee, Moataz al-Atrash, 21, of Hebron, died at Ofer prison after a year in administrative detention; Palestinian Authority agencies put the wartime total of inmates who have died in Israeli custody at 92, a figure attributed here to them.

The correction, and it is the one that matters most in this post. Zechariah is not a prediction about any of the states named above, and no army fighting this year is the army of that chapter. The prophet is describing an end condition in which nations that made war on Jerusalem are alive, present and obligated, which is the opposite of a vision of annihilation. That is the whole structural content of the parallel, and it runs against every party in the week's reporting that measures progress by how completely an adversary can be ended. Read with Sukkah 55b, the position of the Jerusalem Temple was that seventy bulls were being offered for the seventy nations while those nations were in no position to notice. The festival's imagination of its enemies has never been that there will eventually be none of them.

Summary

The week in one line

Every year, Sukkot asks a person to leave the structure he has made permanent and sit for a week inside one that admits it is not. In 5787 the festival asks for something further. On its principal day the branch stays bound and the fruit stays in its box, the circuits are not walked, and what is left is a roof overhead that was put there by someone else, a Shabbat that needed no invitation, and a book that spends twelve chapters proving that nothing can be gripped before telling you the one thing that can be done. The Talmud is not embarrassed by this. It arranged it.

And you shall dwell in booths seven days; every citizen in Israel shall dwell in booths. So that your generations shall know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. — Leviticus 23:42 to 43

May the shade of faith over this house hold, and may the portion that was set aside reach the one it was set aside for. May those whose shelter this week is a reception centre or a damaged building be brought into something that lasts. And may the year that begins under a roof we did not build teach us to look up at the ones we did. Chag Sameach, and Shabbat Shalom.

Sukkot Day I, 15 Tishrei 5787, Shabbat 26 September 2026 — Israel schedule — Morris Legacy