The Kitchen Sukkah With the Stuck Skylight

By Rabbi Yair Hoffman for 5tjt.com

One of the many positive things about teh Far Rockaway/Five Towns community are the shiurim that are arranged every chol haMoed in the various shuls, where Rabbonim, learned Baal HaBatim, yeshivaleit and others who are machshiv Torah gather together and hear shiurim from learned Talmidei Chachomim.

Rav Daniel Asher Kleinman shlita  delivered a lomdishe at the Agudah of Long Island this morning.  He was introduced by Rav Meir Braunstein shlita.  Rav Kleinman introduced a fascinating question in regard to a Sukkah inside a house kitchen where the skylight door was stuck and could not be opened.  The kitchen Sukah had two skylight, where each skylight was 4 ft wide by 6 feet long.  They open the skylight over the schach.

There was also a peninsula, but it is not a wall that reaches the ceiling. The Gemorah discusses many fascinating halachic concepts that we have received as halacha dating back to Moshe Rabbeinu at Sinai.

One of them is gud asik – which means the wall goes up.  It legally considers a pre-established “wall” to figuratively continue upwards infinitely. For this to work, the wall must be a minimum of 10 tefachim from the ground and within 3 tefachim from the ground.

Another one is dofen akumah.  If on part of the roof of the Sukkah there is an area of less than 4 amos of invalid sechach but not empty space of air and it is between the top of the wall and the kosher schach, the concept considers it as if the adjacent wall is bent or moved.  The Sukkah under the kosher schach remains kosher.  One may not sit under the invalid schach, however.

The Kitchen Sukkah with the stuck skylight would not be kosher unless one combines both of the above two concepts.  However, this idea of combining two halacha l’moshe concepts is the subject of a debate.  Rabbi Akiva Eiger learns that they cannot be combined, while the Mishna Brurah seems to say that it can.

Rabbi Kleinman was trying to figure out a way in which a sofa could be employed as a third wall in order to allow the family Kitchen Sukkah of one of his congregants to be used. Ultimately, he employed the use of a couch with secular books underneath it to allow it.  The shiur focused on the various halachic issues and hurdles, and whether such a fix could be employed through a gentile or on the other hand, perhaps even a Jew may do so under certain circumstances.

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Please be mispallel for Yair Nissan Ben Sara who is undergoing a procedure today beh.