Stepping into Peace
Plus: going shopping with Rabbi Shira and Hanna, and a movie recommendation.
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October 10, 2025 // 18 Tishrei, 5785
This week, some words from Rabbi Shira on finding peace.
We find ourselves this shabbat on a rare and beautiful overlap — Shabbat in the middle of Sukkot.
Sukkot, the holiday of impermanence, asks us to build something fragile: a hut with three walls, a roof of branches, and a view of the sky. It is one of the few mitzvot that calls on our entire bodies. (Thanks for this image, Rav Avigayil Halpern.) You can’t wave a lulav from afar and call it a sukkah; you can’t Zoom into a sukkah. You have to enter it. You have to bring your whole self in.
Sukkot says: Step inside.But Shabbat says: Step away.
Together, they invite us to inhabit the moment with our full selves.But what happens when the world outside the sukkah feels like it’s collapsing?
When our shelters — emotional, political, physical — feel impossibly thin?
When “peace” itself feels as temporary as a sukkah roof held together by twigs?Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg taught so beautifully this week, quoting Rav Kook, that Jewish law validates a sukkah even when it is incomplete — even when it has gaping holes, or only two walls, or wide gaps between its boards and roof. Even such a fragile structure still counts as a sukkah. And so too, peace.
“The value of peace,” Rav Kook wrote, “is so great that we pray for it even if it will be like a sukkah — flimsy and temporary, rendered fit only by special laws.”Right now, as a fragile ceasefire takes hold, this teaching lands in the heart.
A sukkah’s shade is uneven. It leaks. It sways in the wind. But we dwell in it anyway.
We eat there, bless there, sing there. We call it holy.Maybe that’s our task this week — to treat even this thin pause in violence as holy space. To protect it. To expand it. To remember that a sukkah — and a ceasefire — are both acts of faith: that what begins in fragility can still shelter life.
And so, what if we approached every Shabbat as we do a sukkah?
What if it didn’t take perfection or permanence — only the willingness to walk through the door?
To believe that the sacred can be as simple as entering, sitting down, breathing, and being held?Our task, this Shabbat and every Shabbat, is just to find the door. Or, to enter the sukkah. To enter the peace — however incomplete — and make it real.
Let’s walk through together.
Listen
This week on the podcast, we went shopping. Not for clothes, but for a synagogue. What should you look for when shul shopping besides “that feeling”? How do you know a synagogue is right for you? And what role should a temple play in our modern lives? As we celebrate Sukkot and Simchat Torah, Rabbi Shira and Hanna offer one congregation consumer their advice.
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We love to hear from you! This week, a listener shares her love for Chutzpod from afar:
Living life on the West Coast of Tasmania, Australia, where I am the only Jew until you hit Launceston, with the possible exception of my two Devon Rex cats who are not sure, but KNOW they are Polish when the Polish Sausage comes out! My Jewish life is lived via podcasts and yours is one of my favourites. Thanks so much.
-Aliyah L
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Before we go
Shira recommends a viewing of Eleanor the Great. The movie follows Eleanor Morgenstein as she loses her best friend and finds solstice in a Holocaust survivors group at her local Jewish community center. Just one catch: Eleanor isn’t a Holocaust survivor.
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Shabbat Shalom Chutzsquad!