Halachos of Building a Sukkah - Rabbi Shaul Silam shlita

00:02 Speaker 1 You’re listening to the “Lema’an Yishme’u” podcast from Machon Halacha Chabad.

00:09 Speaker 2 The laws of the sukkah. Let’s begin with an introduction to the sukkah’s dimensions—tefachim and amos. As is well known, according to those who follow Rabbi Chaim Naeh, which is the standard Chabad practice and generally the practice among Sephardim as well, an amah is 48 centimeters. A tefach is one-sixth of an amah, so it comes out to eight centimeters. But there’s something very important that may seem extremely nitpicky. We’ll see how it can make a very big difference between an invalid sukkah and a kosher one: the centimeters we need to add to or subtract from that amah. Rabbi Chaim Naeh’s measurement is also brought in Shaar Hatziyun; the Mishnah Berurah cites it and takes into account amos that are slightly more or slightly less than 48 centimeters. In other words, although the average amah is 48 centimeters, we also take into account amos of 47 and 49. So when we add that centimeter to an amah and then convert it to tefachim, each tefach gains one-sixth of a centimeter, or 0.17 centimeters—between one and two millimeters. That seems very, very small, but we’ll see just how important it is. So a tefach that is eight centimeters could be eight point thirteen centimeters, or without the decimal—so a tefach that is eight centimeters could be 8.17 centimeters or 7.83. That may sound like complicated math, but we’ll see how important it is. As for the dimensions of the sukkah, the minimum height is ten tefachim. Here we don’t need to get too deep into the calculations. In any case, everyone builds sukkahs higher than 80 or 82 centimeters, so there’s no concern. The maximum height is 20 amos. Above 20 amos, you would have to make a very,

02:06 Speaker 2 very strong structure, and it would no longer look temporary. Twenty amos is a little less than ten meters—9.40 meters, nine meters and forty centimeters. So that, too, is generally not something we need to worry about. Anywhere between 80 centimeters and ten meters is perfectly fine. As for the sukkah’s floor area, it needs to be at least seven tefachim by seven tefachim. If we make it six tefachim by even twenty tefachim, that won’t be enough. It isn’t just a matter of area: you need to be able to fit a seven-by-seven square, even within a circle. So each dimension must be at least seven tefachim, which comes to 57.2 centimeters. If all we have is a corridor 50 or 55 centimeters wide, even if it stretches for dozens of meters, that won’t help. The minimum really is 57.2 centimeters. That covers the dimensions. We’ll come back later to why it was so important to note that a tefach can be slightly more or slightly less than eight centimeters. For now, let’s move on to the second part: the sukkah’s walls. For the walls, the preferred Chabad practice, as stated in Sefer Haminhagim, is to make complete walls—four walls, four complete walls. Usually they’re made of wood. That gives us a sukkah that meets the preferred standard according to all opinions, beyond what is required in the Shulchan Aruch. According to the Shulchan Aruch, three walls are enough. In fact, without getting into the details here, someone who has very little wood—only enough for two walls and a bit more—can also manage to make a sukkah. That is certainly not the preferred way. Someone who is really stuck can ask a rav, and he’ll explain how to make a sukkah with two walls

04:05 Speaker 2 and another board. But here we’ll discuss the preferred practice of having four walls. All materials are valid for the walls. Unlike the s’chach, which, as we’ll see, has many requirements, the walls can be made from almost any material. You can use wood or metal. The Shulchan Aruch does say that it is not proper to make walls from linen sheets [unclear]. In other words, it isn’t proper to make walls by hanging sheets all around, because those sheets we tie up might come loose without our noticing, and that would invalidate the sukkah. So if someone doesn’t have the necessary wood but does have a metal frame and wants to hang plastic sheets or bedsheets over it, as we often see, that alone is not sufficient according to the Shulchan Aruch. There are opinions that permit it in pressing circumstances if the sheets are pulled very taut, but it is certainly not the preferred practice. So taking a metal frame and stretching plastic sheets or bedsheets around it is certainly not advisable or desirable, and according to some opinions the sukkah is even invalid. What can we do? There’s a way to combine them, and this is very, very important. We’ll spend some time on it because it comes up so often. Someone who doesn’t have wooden boards and wants to make a sukkah with sheets can combine the sheets with strings. Let’s explain. There is a halacha given to Moshe at Sinai called lavud. What is the rule of lavud? We encounter it in the laws of sukkah and also in the laws of eruvin. The rule is that if I have rods, or even strings, stretched with a gap of less than three tefachim—less than 24 centimeters, though we’ll soon see that it’s 23

06:15 Speaker 2 and a half—and I put up several strings, each less than three tefachim from the next, the whole thing is considered one wall, as though the empty space between the strings were filled in. The Magen Avraham, as cited in the Shulchan Aruch, says that making a sukkah with just those strings and no sheets isn’t proper. But everyone agrees that if I put those strings all around—we’ll soon see exactly how to stretch them—and combine them with fabric or plastic sheets, the result is a sukkah that meets the preferred standard and is fully valid. Now, how do I need to stretch the strings? Here we’ll use what we said about the measurements of tefachim. There are two requirements: for a wall to count as a wall, it has to be at least ten tefachim high. And as we said, for the rule of lavud to apply—meaning that the empty space between two strings is treated as filled in, as though it were all continuous—the gap must be less than three tefachim. So I need to keep in mind both the ten-tefach height of the wall and the less-than-three-tefach gap between strings. We’ll also put sheets all around the outside of the strings, but as we said, the sheets only supplement them; they aren’t enough on their own. It’s the strings that actually count as the wall. So I need strings reaching a height of ten tefachim, with less than three tefachim between one string and the next. Now how do I arrange that? If every tefach were exactly eight centimeters, it would be enough to make a wall ten tefachim, or 80 centimeters, high, with less than 24 centimeters between strings—three tefachim being 24 centimeters—and everything would work out. But according to what we said earlier, we need

08:13 Speaker 2 Here we have to take into account both the larger amos and the smaller amos, and the tefachim have to be calculated accordingly. When I need a height of ten tefachim, I have to add, as we said, 0.17 cm for each tefach. For ten tefachim, I have to add 1.7 cm to 80 cm. So my ten tefachim have to be at least 81.7 cm—that is, 82 cm. If I make the fabric panels only 80 cm high, that is a real problem. So let’s remember this number: 82 cm is the minimum height for walls made of strings. We said the distance between one string and the next has to be less than three tefachim, so seemingly less than 24 cm. But if I measure it down to the millimeter—23.6, 23.7, or 23.8 cm—there will be a problem, because we also have to be stringent about the smaller amos, the 47 cm amos. An amah is six tefachim, so three tefachim come out to no more than 23.5 cm. So I’m working with these two numbers. Remember them: 82 cm and 23.5 cm. Eighty-two is the total height of all the strings together. Twenty-three and a half is the maximum distance between two strings. As we said, when I’m talking about a maximum distance, I have to use the smaller tefachim, so three tefachim will be 23.5 cm, not 24. When I say the wall has to reach a height of at least ten tefachim, I have to use the larger tefachim, so it’s 82 cm, not 80. Now, if I stretch a string every 20 cm from the ground, four strings will not

10:15 Speaker 2 be enough. Four strings give me 20, 40—right? The thickness of the string is almost negligible—20, 40, 60, 80. I haven’t reached 82. And if I use 24 cm, that’s too much. Right? We said the maximum is 23.5. So remember: 21, 22, or 23. That means I measure carefully from the ground to the first string: 21, 22, or 23 cm, which is less than 23.5. The same from the first string to the second, from the second to the third, and from the third to the fourth. If I use 21 cm times four, that’s 84 cm, already more than 82, so that’s excellent. Again, I do this on at least three sides, and if I can do it on four, leaving an entrance, that’s better. We said that ideally we make four walls. I do this before putting on the schach, and we’ll explain shortly why it has to be before. The first thing I do after setting up my metal frame is stretch the strings. I tie the first string very, very securely so it won’t move, because we understand that if the distance between strings must be no more than 23.5 cm, movement could cause a problem. So now I’m building my walls. At 22 or 23 cm above the ground, I stretch the first string around all four sides, and then a second string, a third, and a fourth. Over that I put the fabric panel, and now I have actual walls that are excellent according to all opinions. There’s a halachic principle called, in the language of Chazal, “gud asik mechitzta”—extend the wall upward. This principle means that even though I’ve made walls,

12:16 Speaker 2 my walls are the strings. They are not the fabric I added around them, which only helps. Yes, the strings are the walls. So I’ve put strings up to a height of 82 cm, but my sukkah is actually three meters high. So what happens to the walls? They’re only 82 cm high, with an empty space between the last string and the roof. That’s where the principle of gud asik mechitzta applies: extend the wall upward. Once the wall is a valid wall of ten tefachim, it is considered to extend all the way to the roof. Yes, it doesn’t actually extend that far, but that is how it is regarded. There is something else I have to take into account, though: what is called lavud from the side. I’ll demonstrate it with my hands. Here is my wall. It reaches at least ten tefachim, and up here is the schach. When I treat the wall as extending upward, the horizontal distance between that wall and the schach has to be less than three tefachim. In other words, here is my wall, and I apply the principle Chazal teach us: the wall is considered to extend upward until it reaches the height of the schach. I have to measure the distance from that vertical line to the schach. If the schach is more than three tefachim away, I have a problem. But if the horizontal distance between the schach and that vertical line is less than three tefachim, I can apply lavud from the side. As we said, with lavud, a gap of less than three tefachim is treated as though it were filled in. Here too, that gap is treated as filled in, and I have a valid sukkah. But we have to be very, very careful about when this matters,

14:05 Speaker 2 and when the horizontal distance might be greater than three tefachim. We said that even though the wall is only ten tefachim high, it is considered to reach the schach. But I have to pay attention to something else: the horizontal distance between the schach and the wall. When I treat the wall as extending up to the height of the schach, if the schach is more than three tefachim away horizontally, I have a problem: there’s no continuity. But if it’s less than three tefachim, I can apply the law of lavud here too, as though the gap were filled in. It’s as though I extend the schach across the gap until it reaches the vertical line above the fabric panel, and then the sukkah is fully valid. This is called lavud from the side. There is also the law of taaseh velo min heasuy: it must be made, rather than come into being on its own. Parshas Re’eh says, “You shall make the festival of Sukkos for yourself for seven days.” From this we understand that a sukkah is defined by its schach, and “you shall make” means that we make the sukkah by putting on the schach. So there is an order to building the sukkah. The schach has to be the finishing step: first we make valid walls, and then we put on the schach, thereby making the sukkah. If we do it in the opposite order, we haven’t fulfilled that instruction. There are cases where we might think we’re doing things in the right order when we’ve actually missed something. Let’s take two cases. The first is based on what we said about the walls. We said the walls are not the fabric panels. The panels supplement the walls, but for someone making walls with strings and fabric panels, the actual walls are those strings we stretch. And when we stretch them to a height of ten tefachim, as we,

16:07 Speaker 2 As we explained. Now let’s say someone has a sukkah frame, a metal frame, and he drapes a sheet or covering over it but forgets to stretch the strings across. Then he puts on the s’chach, and someone says to him, “You know, there are strings you need to put up,” so he stretches them across. In that case, he completes the sukkah by stretching the strings, not by putting on the s’chach, and that creates a problem. So anyone making walls like these should remember to stretch the strings before putting on the s’chach, with less than three tefachim between them up to a height of ten tefachim, as we explained. A second case where we might make this mistake regarding ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy—the requirement to make the sukkah rather than use one already made—is based on a halachic concept called dofen akumah, a “bent wall.” We’ll encounter it again later, but it’s worth introducing here. There’s a case where I have something that I might think is s’chach, but it’s actually part of the wall. Say I have a wall, perhaps the wall of a building, and the building has an awning. I place the s’chach right next to the awning. At first glance, I have a problem: if the building’s wall is the sukkah wall, then, as we said, the horizontal distance between the wall and the s’chach must be less than three tefachim. But the awning might be a meter wide, for example. So how does that work? The answer is that the awning isn’t considered s’chach; it’s considered an extension of the wall. I have the wall and then the awning. That’s what’s called dofen akumah. I put the s’chach right next to the awning, and there’s no problem. Now, what problem could arise in such a case? Say the awning fell off. I have a plastic awning, and there’s the building, with some

18:12 Speaker 2 metal rods here that supported the awning. So I put up the sukkah. What do I mean by “put up the sukkah”? That wall is part of the sukkah, but I build the other walls and put on the s’chach so that it starts, say, a meter away. After all, dofen akumah can extend up to four amos, a little less than two meters. Here we’re talking about one meter. So I start the s’chach a meter from the wall, because the rods that hold the awning limit where I can put it. After finishing everything, I say, “I need to put that plastic awning back so the s’chach will be next to the awning, which serves as the dofen akumah.” But if I do it in that order, the plastic awning isn’t part of the s’chach; it’s part of the wall. So I didn’t finish my sukkah with the s’chach—I finished it with the wall. That’s another problem of ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy. I should have put up the awning first and then put on the s’chach. Okay, since we’ve mentioned these two cases, what do we actually do if things were done in the wrong order? It’s important to know that a sukkah invalid because of ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy can be made valid by lifting the s’chach a little. Again, I have a sukkah now, but I didn’t do things in the right order. I did what I described in the first case, for example, where I finished the sukkah by putting up the strings—meaning that I finished the walls, rather than finishing the sukkah with the s’chach. So what do I do after I’ve supposedly finished the sukkah? I need to finish it by putting on the s’chach. It’s enough to take a chair, climb up and lift all the s’chach one tefach. Not necessarily all at once. I need to lift all of it,

20:09 Speaker 2 but I can work my way across gradually. I climb onto a chair, lift a section one tefach, move the chair another tefach, and do that across the entire width and length of the sukkah. That counts as putting on the s’chach after making the wall, and it fixes the problem of ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy. What happens after the fact if I didn’t do that? Yom Tov arrives, and someone teaches me the law of ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy. Someone asks you, “Oh, is that a thing? No, I didn’t do it in that order. I put up the strings last.” And now you’ve been invited to that person’s sukkah. What happens? Here you should know that there’s an extensive dispute among the later halachic authorities. The Magen Avraham, citing the Bach, and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef rule that it is valid after the fact. But many poskim, including the Levush, the Taz and the Ben Ish Chai in Rav Pe’alim, rule that it is invalid even after the fact. So this really is a question to ask a rav. It isn’t a minor issue. But let’s say I’m invited right now and I don’t have a rav to ask. What I’m about to say is very much my own view, but one has to handle things wisely. In Chabad, we have the custom not to eat or drink anything outside a sukkah. The Shulchan Aruch also says this is proper, but it isn’t obligatory. Strictly speaking, foods that are neither mezonos nor bread requiring Hamotzi may be eaten outside a sukkah. Now I’m invited to someone’s home, and I know he didn’t make his sukkah in the right order, so there’s a possible problem of ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy. Some people would be stringent and not even drink anything. That may work well if I’m close to the person. But if the person might be hurt

21:58 Speaker 2 because I don’t eat there—and I don’t actually know what order he built it in—then, again, I’m only offering a possibility. Someone may disagree with me. It depends on the particular case, but generally speaking, allowing yourself to eat fruit and other things that are neither bread requiring Hamotzi nor mezonos could be a good compromise, so as not to hurt the person. Now what if I made the sukkah according to all the rules? Again, we’re talking about a sukkah whose walls use those strings, and children came and moved the strings. I made the walls before putting on the s’chach, stretching all the strings properly so the walls were valid. Only then did I put on the s’chach. Everything was done by the book. So far, so good—but then children moved the strings, and I suddenly see a gap of about a quarter of a meter between two of them, more than twenty-three and a half centimeters. That means my walls are invalid. Now it’s Erev Sukkos. If I fix the strings, I’ll be fixing the walls after the s’chach is already in place. Could that be a problem of ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy? There are two approaches among the poskim. Some say that once the sukkah was valid, there’s no longer any issue of ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy. If the walls fall, I can put them back, and there’s no problem. Once the festival has begun, that is certainly true: my sukkah was a sukkah in every sense. Not only did it have the physical structure of a sukkah; the arrival of Sukkos made it an actual Sukkos sukkah as well. So if, for example, the walls then fall during Chol Hamoed, or the strings move farther apart,

23:55 Speaker 2 there’s no problem. The sukkah was fully valid, and everyone agrees that I can now fix the strings without any issue, or put a fallen wall back in place. But if Sukkos hasn’t begun yet and the wall has already become invalid, the Ben Ish Chai holds that there is indeed a problem of ta’aseh velo min ha’asuy. We would have to fix it as we said, by lifting the s’chach a tefach at a time. That concludes the main laws of sukkah walls. S’chach has to meet three conditions. First, it must grow from the ground. Second, it must be detached. In other words, you can’t make a sukkah under a tree, for example. Although the tree certainly grows from the ground, it isn’t detached, so it invalidates the sukkah. Third, the material must not be susceptible to ritual impurity. So various pieces of furniture, even though they’re made of wood, were once parts of utensils, and utensils are susceptible to ritual impurity. Even if they have now been cut up, or even flattened, they are invalid as s’chach. The material must grow from the ground, be detached, and not be susceptible to ritual impurity. There’s something very interesting we find in the Gemara. As you know, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Akiva disagree about the sukkos the Jewish people had in the desert. According to Rabbi Akiva, they were actual huts, like the sukkos we have; according to Rabbi Eliezer, they were the Clouds of Glory. The Gemara discusses this: if the sukkos were the Clouds of Glory, clouds don’t grow from the ground. The answer is that they do: clouds are formed from water vapor, and the Torah says in Bereishis, “A mist rose from the earth.” So the mist rose from the earth. Those clouds

25:53 Speaker 2 They are considered things that grow from the ground. Of course, we’re not going to make a sukkah out of clouds, but it’s a nice enough point in its own right to mention. Another halachah about the s’chach is that the sukkah must have more shade than sunlight. When I’m talking about the s’chach, I don’t mean the sun when it’s already near the horizon and shines in through the walls. I mean when the sun is overhead in the middle of the day, and I look through the s’chach. If there’s more shade than sunlight, everything is fine. If there are more gaps, so that there’s more sunlight than shade inside the sukkah, then I don’t have enough s’chach. I need to add s’chach to meet this requirement. Another point is the decree of the Sages concerning boards four tefachim wide. Seemingly, if I take boards that were never part of a utensil—say, I cut down trees and make something like shelves from the wood, but they were never used as shelves; I made them just for the sukkah—then they grow from the ground, they’re detached, and they’re not susceptible to tumah because they were never utensils. So seemingly, I could use such boards for s’chach. But the Sages made a decree: in the time of Chazal, boards like these were sometimes used in the ceilings of houses. They were concerned that people would say, “Well, what’s the difference between this s’chach and the ceiling inside the house? There are boards like these in the ceiling at home too, so I can eat inside the house.” To prevent that, the Sages ruled that boards four tefachim wide or wider may not be used for s’chach. As the generations passed, by the time of the Rishonim, it became customary to roof houses with even thinner, narrower boards. So the poskim write that using boards for s’chach, even if

28:03 Speaker 2 they’re less than four tefachim wide, is also forbidden. The decree concerning boards as stated in the Gemara specifically applies to boards four tefachim wide or wider. But the ruling ultimately given in the Shulchan Aruch and by the poskim is that even narrower boards may not be used for s’chach. There is, of course, some minimum size. When the boards are very short, then they really can be used for s’chach. Based on all this, we’ll move on to another subject: using what’s called s’chach lanetzach, reusable s’chach. It’s made like a mat, with very, very thin wooden slats or reeds joined together. There’s a lot of discussion about this among the poskim, and we’ll look at the concerns they raised and how, seemingly, those concerns are addressed. This s’chach is really excellent in every respect. Of course, one should look for s’chach with a hechsher, but let’s examine the issue. Some wanted to disqualify it because of what’s called the decree concerning mats. Seemingly, some wanted to disqualify this s’chach on those grounds. After all, you can’t use something susceptible to tumah, and a mat made for lying on is susceptible to tumah. If a zav lies on a mat, he renders it tamei. But here, the poskim today say that you can see the s’chach we buy would fall apart if someone lay on it. It isn’t that strong; it wasn’t made for lying on, so there really is no concern on that account. As for the decree concerning boards, we said that even boards less than four tefachim wide are disqualified. The poskim say that the later authorities already explained that while it’s true we disqualify boards even if they’re less than four

30:17 Speaker 2 tefachim wide, if the boards are very short, as we said in discussing the wording of the Gemara, there’s no problem. And with s’chach lanetzach, the slats really are short, so the decree concerning boards is not a problem. The third concern mentioned is that the s’chach must allow rainwater to pass into the sukkah. Here, too, there really is no problem, because the small slats aren’t completely joined to one another. There’s a little gap between them. Water can pass through these mats, through the s’chach lanetzach, even if only with difficulty, so that isn’t a problem either. Some wanted to disqualify the kind made from thinner slats rather than reeds, because if you put up only one mat, one layer of s’chach lanetzach, you can see that when the sun shines in the middle of the day, the sukkah looks full of sunlight. Seemingly, it looks as though there’s more sunlight than shade. There’s a responsum by Rabbi Auerbach that addresses this and makes a very interesting point. He says there’s no required degree of darkness. There is shade, and no prescribed measure of how dark that shade must be. So although it looks very bright—very bright—there is shade. And since there is shade over most of the sukkah, it’s still considered to have more shade than sunlight, and there’s no problem. Another objection raised was that it uses something susceptible to tumah as a support for the s’chach. We’ll address that too. But first we need to explain what a support is. We’ll go through the subject of supports and see why s’chach lanetzach really doesn’t present a problem in that regard. So now the subject is supports. What is the issue with a support?

32:28 Speaker 2 In addition to everything else Chazal instituted, we said that s’chach has to meet three conditions: it must grow from the ground, be detached, and not be susceptible to tumah. There’s also the decree against using boards for s’chach. The thing the s’chach rests on—what’s called its support, what holds the s’chach up—also has requirements. We’ll now discuss the law of supports. Here we learn of another decree of our Sages: beyond all the conditions we’ve mentioned for the s’chach itself, the thing it rests on must also not be susceptible to tumah. So not only can the s’chach itself obviously not be made of metal; the thing I place it on can’t be metal either, for example. Now, what do I do if I have a sukkah with a metal frame? I’ve already put up the fabric walls, taking into account everything we’ve discussed, and now I want to put on the s’chach. If I take metal rods and put the s’chach on them, I understand that I’m supporting it with something susceptible to tumah, so that’s invalid. Instead, I’ll put wooden slats across the sukkah frame and place the s’chach on those slats. But what happens around the edges? When I put the s’chach over the slats, it will hang down somewhere at the sides—on the right, on the left, here or there—and touch the metal. So we need to understand that this law isn’t about contact. The s’chach touching something is not the issue. People often mistakenly think you need to cover the metal with leaves so the s’chach won’t

34:42 Speaker 2 touch something susceptible to tumah. There’s no problem with that contact. The issue isn’t contact; it’s what supports the s’chach. So suppose I have several sections of s’chach lanetzach—a first section, then a second, a third, and a fourth. When I put down the first section, if I’ve placed three wooden slats across the middle but want to use the two edges of the frame to support the s’chach, I have a problem on both sides: the metal is supporting it, and that’s a problem at the outset. What I need to do is add another wooden slat at each edge. Then the s’chach is considered to be resting specifically on the wooden slats, not on the metal, and there’s no problem. But if someone tries to get around the problem by covering the metal with leaves, for example, that doesn’t help at all. As we said, this works both ways: just as some contact between the s’chach and metal doesn’t disqualify it, preventing that contact doesn’t help if the s’chach is actually supported by the metal. So if I don’t put two wooden slats here to support the s’chach, but merely cover the two sides with some leaves and put the s’chach there, the leaves are completely subordinate to the metal. The s’chach is considered to be using a support susceptible to tumah, which is a problem at the outset. So it’s important to understand exactly what the issue is. Again, it isn’t contact; it’s support. One very important thing to understand is that this whole issue of supporting s’chach with something susceptible to tumah applies only at the outset; it doesn’t invalidate the sukkah after the fact. And when I say “after the fact”

36:41 Speaker 2 That applies if I made such a sukkah, or if I’m visiting a friend whose sukkah has s’chach that I can see is supported by something that can contract ritual impurity. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no problem eating there even lechatchilah. The sukkah has already been built, so we’re dealing with a case of bedi’eved. I can therefore eat there without any concern; there’s no need to be stringent. This is quite different from what we discussed earlier about the rule of “make it, and not from something already made.” There was a disagreement among later authorities about whether, if someone violated that rule, they could eat in the sukkah bedi’eved. Here, when the s’chach was supported by something that can contract ritual impurity, everyone agrees that it does not invalidate the sukkah bedi’eved. What’s more, some Sephardic halachic authorities hold that this restriction doesn’t apply even lechatchilah; they disagree with the whole concern. So there’s no reason for us to worry about it. The Chazon Ish does discuss a rule about “the support of the support,” but no one is concerned about that except those who follow the Chazon Ish. So in Chabad, and among Sephardim and Ashkenazim who don’t follow the Chazon Ish, there’s no problem with placing the slats that hold the s’chach on a metal frame. The metal frame supports the support, and it’s no problem for that to be something that can contract ritual impurity. Likewise, if instead of one wooden slat under the s’chach I have two shorter ones that need to be joined with nails, there’s no problem—even if the s’chach touches the nails. Sometimes people think they need to cover the nails with tape or something. Again, contact is no problem. And what’s more,

38:28 Speaker 2 those nails don’t directly support the s’chach. They support the slats, which are themselves the supports. So the nails count as the support of a support, which, as we said, presents no problem. You can join the slats with nails lechatchilah, without any concern. The halachic authorities also discuss something that appears, at first glance, to be a problem, though it isn’t really much of one. What’s the case? My s’chach is resting securely on the sukkah, but I’m worried a wind might blow it away in the middle of the night. So, in addition to resting on its supports and staying in place under its own weight, I want to tie its edges to the sukkah’s metal frame. If I use linen cords, most halachic authorities see no problem. But if I use plastic cable ties, it would seem that the ties count as supports, and lechatchilah we don’t use something that can contract ritual impurity to support the s’chach. Whether or not plastic can contract ritual impurity, it certainly isn’t plant material, and so it cannot serve as a support. The answer is this: If my s’chach is on a slope—if the sukkah roof is angled so that the s’chach would slide off without the cable ties—then yes, the ties are supporting it. But if I put them on only in case a wind might blow the s’chach away, there’s no problem. The ties aren’t supporting anything now; they’re only there in case a very

40:38 Speaker 2 strong wind comes along. At that moment, they would indeed hold the s’chach in place. So there’s no problem; you may use them. Of course, if you have linen cord, that’s preferable to any other solution. But there’s nothing preventing you from tying down the s’chach with plastic cable ties if it stands securely on its own. If a wind does come while I’m eating, and I want to be stringent and stop eating at that moment because the cable ties are now holding the s’chach in place, I can do that. But even that isn’t necessary, because, as we said, this rule applies only lechatchilah, not bedi’eved. So if you don’t have linen cord, you can tie down the s’chach with plastic cable ties without concern. Returning to S’chach Netzach, we said there was another possible issue involving its supports. What is it? There’s a type of s’chach whose thin slats are joined with metal wire instead of linen cord. It wasn’t necessarily made for use as s’chach—but something doesn’t have to have been made for s’chach to be kosher. If it was made for lying on, there is a problem. But if non-Jews made it to serve as a partition, it can be used. The issue is that they joined the slats with iron wire, which holds the slats together, so at first glance it can’t be used lechatchilah. Rabbi Auerbach offers a solution: place the s’chach on the sukkah, then put heavy beams on top of it. With those beams in place, it is not the iron wire that holds the s’chach down. Even without the wire, if the thin slats were laid side by side with the heavy beams above them, they would stay in place. So we can consider the beams, rather than the iron wire, to be what holds the S’chach Netzach in place. That, too, is a solution.

42:38 Speaker 2 So we’ve examined S’chach Netzach from every angle and found that it has no problem involving the decree concerning mats, no problem involving the decree concerning boards, and no concern that rain cannot pass through, because rain can pass through it. Nor is there a problem of more sunlight than shade, because, as we said, sunlight has no thickness. And there’s no problem involving the supports, even if it contains iron wire, provided you follow the solution we just described.