Abstract

This chapter discusses the meaning of the Jewish Sukkah as it has continually transformed in history: a temporary booth erected during the week long holiday of Sukkoth. For a week every year, it is argued, the Sukkah - booth - expresses an understanding of Jerusalem as religious center as much as it represents the temporary huts of the scriptural Israelite wanderers in the desert. This dialectic of the Sukkah destabilizes and unsettles the clear-cut Jewish concept of the territorial centrality of Jerusalem in the religious cosmology, producing changing constellations in different historical situations, to the present. Religious language and habitus associated with the Sukkah have historically carried an inner transformation of mobility and stability that deconstructs the very idea of an earthly place as center.

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