cellio | that was odd

Several years ago, I wrote an article for an SCA newsletter on how to build a yurt (aka ger), the Mongolian round semi-portable structure. I and some friends built one for camping in at Pennsic, so I wrote down what I did and shared it. Every now and then I get random questions and/or thanks from people who've found the article.

The most recent message is from someone who said he does "Roman and Bible reenactment" and had just built a yurt. (Unknown: what a yurt has to do with either.) Its first use was to be for his sukkah. He closed with "Shalom in Jesus".

Um, ok. A Christian? A "Jew for Jesus"? A re-enactor whose re-enactment extends to holidays?

I wrote back to thank him for the message and answer a question. And just to be helpful, I pointed out a couple halachic issues he might consider in using a yurt for Sukkot. I did not translate the Hebrew for terms that a Jew or a scholar would likely know. I didn't really expect to hear from him again.

He wrote back, citing a tertiary (at best) source for alternate interpretations. He also gave a cite for a round, domed sukkah in Amsterdam in 1722. This doesn't match up with anything either of us is trying to recreate, of course, but it sounds interesting. (Not interesting enough to go out and chase, though. It's a curiosity to me, nothing more.) He didn't say what they used for the roof cover or how it was attached.

He also described himself as Jewish, messianic, and a karaite. I didn't know there were still karaites out there. I'm not certain what the combination of messianic and karaite means, but I'm not going to ask him.

Karaites were a "sect", for lack of a better term, that accepted the written law but none of the oral law. They spent Shabbat in the cold and dark because they interpreted "kindle no fire" as "have no fire" rather than "light it in advance". It sounds like it must have been miserable. I thought they all died out several hundred years ago. Maybe this is a "neo-karaite" in the sense that we have "neo-pagans" who aren't tied to the original pagans?

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I am sure that there's a discussion of round sukkahs in the Mishna, because I studied it once. I seem to recall a fun bit of geometry (including the rabbis defining pi as 3). It was a while ago, though, and I don't have the sources any more.

I'm guessing the issues you mentioned had less to do with the roundness of the structure and more to do with the yurtness...

Interesting. I was under the impression that a sukkah is required to have at least 3 walls (one can be small), which would seem to rule out round structures. There's nothing else inherently questionable with a yurt as far as I know, assuming you don't use the canvas roof and don't set it up under a tree. So I questioned roundness and pointed out that the rafters by themselves wouldn't be sufficient for s'chach (insufficient cover). (I wonder how you would get more s'chach to stay in place on a sloped roof. Tied in place, I suppose.)

I tried doing something logical: looking it up. I'm crippled by the fact that I don't have the copy of the Mishnah that I was studying, but I was able to find something that looks like it here. Unfortunately, while I was able to find the mishnah which says you have to have 3 walls, and one which said a conical roof is bad, I wasn't able to find several which I distinctly recall. So now I'm confused.

Oop. I feel foolish. I couldn't find it in the Mishnah, because it wasn't. It was Gemarah[1]. Probably within a few pages of Sukkah 3a. I should have realized that it was Gemarah, because what I remembered was much more verbose than the Mishnah is.

[1] Gemarah is commentary, explanation, digressions, and elaboration of the Mishnah; together they make up the Talmud. On any given page of the Talmud, the Mishnah's the central text (in big type); the Gemarah takes up most of the rest of the page (in smaller type), while other commentators are in smaller type yet in the margins and bottom of the page. Rashi (a french commentator of the middle ages) even gets his own wacky "rashi script", a font which was, as far as I can tell, designed to be confusing.

Thanks for the pointer. I have to stop by the bookstore tonight anyway, so I'll see if they have the correct volume of Talmud and see if I can find this in it.

Sadly, the correct tractate wasn't on the shelves tonight, and as I wasn't planning to buy it I didn't feel it appropriate to ask them to dig one out.

I did get the book that sent me there in the first place, at least.

that was odd

Round Sukkahs...

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