Rationale

Hi. I'm your ordinary overachieving Jewish doctor sukkah constructor. With one important difference. I'm 3/4 of the way to building a geodesic dome sukkah. This is my story.

Sukkot is the Jewish holiday of communing with nature. It's one of the harvest festivals, and in this holiday, Jews are commanded to essentially live in a hut outdoors. The only rules about building such a hut are that it should have an open roof, it should have at least three walls, and that it should not be permanent. It should also be big enough to sleep in. Notice that there's no reason that the hut, called a Sukkah, could't be a geodesic dome.

We have this meeting with other young Jewish families every few months called "Living a Jewish Life." In the meeting, we sit around in a circle, and everyone describes the rituals they partook growing up, while learning from the rabbi new and interesting facts about the Jewish holidays. He encourages us to develop new rituals for our families. So at our latest meeting, in the closing minutes, he asked, "I need four families to commit to building a sukkah this year. Who's up for it?" He eyed the circle worriedly. Two hands went up.

My neighbor said from across the circle, "Mike, you do it. I'll help you." Now he and I usually have a good time together, and what better excuse to hang out with the guys and drink beer could there be than to build a sukkah?

I have to admit, leading up to this, that I do not have what would be called a "strong" belief in God, or even organized religion, for that matter. I would justify those beliefs with the Problem of Evil, aka theodicy, and the horrible things happening around the world in the name of religion or God. Many things have been written about these issues, and I am not interested in discussing those here. Suffice to say that a strong religiousity isn't what drove me to build a sukkah. Mainly, it seemed like a cool thing to do at the time.

So then one goes on the internet and looks at sukkah.com (send us money and we'll send you a kit). So then one asks some of the other Jewish doctors at the hospital, "Have you ever built a sukkah?" Many had, but not for years. Suggestions included PVC pipe, 2x4s. Would one need a power saw to cut the 2x4s? Hell no! Use a regular saw!

Well, I could see where this was going. A crummy-looking, small sukkah that would take me hours of sweaty aggravation. I even have a history working with PVC, having built my own lawn irrigation system during residency (turned out pretty lousy, but it did have a backflow-prevention device where it hooked onto the hose bib on the side of the house). I thought a PVC sukkah would be pretty disappointing; here are some plans I found: http://www.traditionsrenewed.com/holidays/sukkahplan.html

I think a PVC sukkah would be pretty cheap to build, not take too long, and not require excessive physical labor or power tools.

But then I started thinking about domes. A dome would be much cooler-looking than an ordinary sukkah. There was one tantalizing report on the web of one person, a guy in Palo Alto, who built a dome sukkah and apparently got his rabbi to confirm it was kosher (a conservative rabbi, no less).

Searching the halacha on the internet, it seems like the main rules are these (as above):
Make it big enough to sleep in.
Make it have at least three walls.
Leave the roof more open than closed, and don't put anything that doesn't grow in the ground over the top of the roof.

I didn't ask my rabbis locally what they thought, out of fear that they would laugh or discourage me.

So if bamboo could be used as schach, why not a geodesic dome sukkah? Why not also demonstrate that the Jewish faith is resilient enough to encompass new ideas in architecture? And why stop at architecture? Ilan Ramon, who I named my son after, took Shabbat to a new height when he went into orbit, assummarized in this post hosted by Chabad, published originally in 2003. Of course, redefining our faith in a modern era is short step away from assimilating, but wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to embrace the precepts of science and mathematics, and still make a meaningful observation of a Jewish holiday? Somehow, a dome sukkah made out of bamboo seems more in keeping with the original concepts of the holiday than a PVC pipe hut.

I wonder what the dome will sound like when the wind blows through it. Every afternoon, around 3PM, the winds pick up. I notice the trees moving from the exam room window, as I'm usually with patients at that hour. Sometimes, the hot winds come down from Santa Ana, and then there's a dry wind all day. The Santa Ana winds bring fire with them; bamboo is flammable, so there will be no smoking allowed in the bamboo dome sukkah! Apparently, there is a way to fireproof bamboo, but that probably won't be necessary in this case. I should warn neighbors to be aware that the dome is at risk if falling embers engulf the neighborhood.

I purposely didn't ask the Homeowners' Association if the dome is o.k. It's temporary, not visible from the street, and part of a religious celebration. I doubt anyone would have a major problem, especially since everyone's Jewish on this block.

I would like to get some publicity for the dome sukkah idea. If anyone knows a newspaper person, I think it would make a "feelgood" story for the religious section how there's a slightly nutty doctor who built a geodesic dome in his backyard for sukkah. This is, as far as I know, the first 5/8 3V bamboo geodesic dome sukkah anywhere in the world!