This week, Jews across North America will step outside and build something deliberately temporary. Walls that sway. A roof of cut branches loose enough that the stars remain visible through it. For seven days, we will eat and sing and welcome guests into a structure no building inspector would approve.

And each evening we will pray: ufros aleinu sukkat shlomecha — spread over us Your shelter of peace. Of all the images available to describe divine protection, our liturgy reached for the flimsiest structure we own.  Many interpret this phrase as a statement of faith and God’s protective care.

Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

A sukkah set up outside a synagogue in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, on Oct. 12, 2022.

This year, that prayer lands differently.

Days before Rosh Hashanah, Jewish Federations of North America released an extraordinary number: American Jewish institutions spent more than $1 billion on security last year. The figure is shocking, but not surprising. Synagogues, day schools, JCCs, camps and social service agencies are responding responsibly to a rising tide of antisemitism. No Jewish leader wants armed guards at the door, though all of us understand why they are there.

That number names one kind of fragility: the vulnerability of Jews in the world, which is not of our making and not ours alone to solve. But it also exposes a second fragility, quieter and far less discussed, which has less to do with our enemies and more to do with ourselves: the fragility of the structures we have built to gather in. Security spending does not reflect the number of Jews we serve. It reflects the number of doors we maintain.

A sukkah must stand in an ordinary wind

On this, the halacha is instructive and refreshingly unsentimental. A sukkah is a dirat arai, a temporary dwelling. Yet the tradition is emphatic that temporary is not the same as flimsy. A sukkah whose walls cannot stand up to a ruach metzuyah — an ordinary wind — is not a valid sukkah at all.

Consider the precision of that standard. Not a hurricane. An ordinary wind. Judaism does not ask our shelters to be permanent. It insists they be sound enough to survive the weather that actually arrives. A structure that stands only in still air has not fulfilled the mitzvah. It has merely resembled one.

We say ufros aleinu sukkat shlomecha, and we mean every word. But no generation of Jews has ever understood that prayer to mean that God will hold up walls we neglected to brace. Faith is what we carry into the sukkah. Sound construction is what we owe it.

So the question before us this Sukkot is whether our communal shelters can stand in an ordinary wind. And these winds are ordinary by any honest measure: rising security costs, aging buildings, deferred maintenance, demographic change and in some cases the slow arithmetic of fewer members sustaining more square footage. None of it is a hurricane. Much of it was foreseeable. That is precisely why it belongs to us.

First, a word of sympathy

I write this having served as a congregational rabbi for more than four decades. I have sat through budget meetings where devoted leaders wrestled with impossible choices and watched boards struggle to keep institutions welcoming, vibrant, financially sustainable, physically sound and secure. The work has never been easy, but in recent years it has become considerably harder.

Not one sentence here is intended as criticism of the people approving these expenditures. Every dollar is being authorized by leaders who would rather spend it on teachers, scholarships, social services and Jewish learning. No executive director wanted a line item for armed personnel. No congregation aspired to greet worshippers with a security desk. The guards are there because the times demand it — and the sad reality is that many Jews today will not enter a Jewish space unless they see them at the entrance.

Precisely because these leaders carry so much, we owe them an honest conversation about the nature of the challenge before us.

Security is a per-door expense

Guards, cameras, hardened entrances, security directors and emergency systems are costs attached to buildings, not to people. Functionally speaking, much of the community’s $1 billion security bill is a building expense — and our building inventory was not designed for this moment.

Much of the Jewish institutional landscape was built between 1945 and 1975 by a generation that possessed extraordinary confidence in the future of American Jewish life. They built sanctuaries, schools, camps, JCCs and community centers to accommodate a growing Jewish population and an expanding institutional culture. They were not wrong to do so.

The buildings they created represent acts of faith and generosity. They contain generations of weddings and funerals, b’nai mitzvah celebrations, classrooms, Shabbat and holiday observance, and memories that are sacred. People do not experience these properties as real estate assets. They experience them as chapters of their lives. It is precisely because they matter so much that we must examine them honestly.

The challenge is that many of these facilities were built for demographic realities that no longer exist. Institutions now maintain more square footage than their missions require, and more buildings than their budgets comfortably support. Every additional door carries an ongoing cost. Today that cost includes security, which may push some Jewish spaces past the financial tipping point.

The harder question

Even if every dollar of security spending were reimbursed tomorrow, the central issue would remain. A building can be affordable and still be the wrong building for the future.

Across North America, younger Jews are creating community in different ways — Shabbat tables, learning circles, social justice initiatives, independent minyanim and informal networks — and they often prefer spaces that are flexible, intimate and adaptable.

That does not make traditional institutions obsolete. Many Jews continue to seek exactly what synagogues, schools and JCCs have historically provided: continuity, ritual, permanence and belonging. They value the sanctuary, the familiar siddur, the fixed seat and the enduring institution. Those needs are real and deserve respect. The mistake is not the large sanctuary. The mistake is assuming it carries the same meaning for every person who enters.

A healthy Jewish ecosystem requires both the grand room and the living room, both established institutions and emerging forms of community. The question is whether our physical footprint reflects that reality. The issue before us can be distilled into two questions: What can we afford to protect? And what Jewish spaces will people want to enter?

A building that fails both tests is the easy case. The more difficult case is the building that passes the first but fails the second: secure, solvent and increasingly empty.

Who is holding the map?

The deeper problem is not simply that the Jewish community owns a great deal of real estate. It is that no one is responsible for looking at it all at once.

In too many communities, synagogues plan for synagogues. JCCs plan for JCCs. Schools plan for schools. Federations, agencies and senior living providers each plan within their own domains. Each may act rationally. Collectively, the result is often irrational: one community sustains several underutilized facilities while lacking affordable senior housing; another supports buildings operating well below capacity while nearby organizations lease additional space elsewhere. No single institution can solve this, because no single institution can see the entire picture.

What American Jewish life lacks is something akin to city planning: a process that begins not with individual buildings, but with the long-term needs of the population those buildings are intended to serve. A neighborhood of sukkot, each braced separately, each hoping the wind spares it, is not a plan. It is a collection of hopes.

What would that require? Not a grand new theory, but four practical steps:

First, our communities deserve a comprehensive inventory of communal assets, including square footage, condition, debt, deferred maintenance, utilization rates and market value — gathered across denominational and institutional lines.

Second, we need regional planning tables where synagogues, schools, JCCs, federations and agencies can evaluate needs together rather than separately.

Third, we are long overdue in treating Jewish real estate as communal capital rather than institutional possession. That may mean shared campuses, co-location, repurposing, sale-leasebacks or other creative arrangements. In some cases, it may mean closing facilities that have faithfully served their communities for generations. Such decisions should never be made lightly. But neither should we assume that an institution must continue forever in its current form because closing its doors would be judged a failure. Many congregations in this country have fulfilled their sacred missions for a century or more. A legacy can endure even when a footprint changes.

Fourth, security must become a core component of capital planning. Any discussion of expansion, renovation or construction should include realistic projections of long-term security costs alongside maintenance, staffing and operations. The economics of Jewish space have changed. The way that we plan must change as well.

Raising the fallen sukkah

The prophet Amos offers a striking image of restoration: ba-yom ha-hu akim et sukkat David ha-nofelet — on that day I will raise up the fallen sukkah of David. Not a fortress. Not a palace. A sukkah, fallen, to be set upright again. Even in the prophetic imagination, the shelter of the Jewish people is a structure that requires rebuilding.

That is the discipline Sukkot teaches. We take the sukkah down at the end of the festival fully expecting to build it again — and to build it, if we are wise, a little better than last year. It is a sukkah because it is temporary, and because we return to the work of raising it.

The billion-dollar security bill did not create the challenge facing Jewish institutions. It revealed it, exposing questions about buildings, demographics, utilization and communal planning that have been accumulating for decades. We can continue treating those questions institution by institution and crisis by crisis. Or we can begin asking together what kind of Jewish spaces the next generation will inhabit, and how we might raise them.

The generations that built our institutions did so with courage, sacrifice and imagination. Honoring them does not require preserving every decision they made. It requires bringing those same qualities to the decisions before us.

Ufros aleinu sukkat shlomecha. May God spread over us a shelter of peace — and may we have the wisdom, and the humility to work together, to build one sound enough to stand in an ordinary wind, and open enough that the next generation wants to come inside.

Rabbi Michael Siegel served for more than four decades as senior rabbi of Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago. He is managing director of faith-based advisory services at Hilco Real Estate, where he advises congregations, schools, JCCs, senior living organizations and other nonprofit institutions on real estate strategy and long-term financial sustainability.