Do I have to sleep in the sukkah?

Here's what you need to know

Whether you sleep in your sukkah is a question for your own rabbi, and it is worth asking before the holiday rather than at bedtime on the first night. What it turns on: how your sukkah is built and where you put it, what the nights are actually like where you live, whether you can sleep there safely and privately, and what your family or community has done in past years.

The specific rule is

Ask your rabbi, and ask before Sukkot begins rather than during it. The sources treat eating and sleeping in the sukkah as two questions with different answers, and the exemption for genuine discomfort has defined limits that turn on facts about your particular sukkah. What your rabbi will want to know: where the sukkah is built, and whether the difficulty is a feature of the spot you chose or something that came up after you built it, because the sources treat those very differently; whether the problem is cold, wind, insects, noise, privacy, or safety; whether the same difficulty would follow you indoors; and what your household has done in past years. Have those answers ready.

What to bring to your rabbi

• Ask before the holiday starts, not on the first night, so you have an answer before you need one.
• Be ready to describe the sukkah: where it sits, how enclosed it is, and what the nights are like where you live.
• Be ready to say whether the difficulty is something about the spot you built in, or something that arose afterward; the sources draw a sharp line between the two.
• Be ready to say what your family or community has done in past years.
• If your circumstances change partway through the holiday, treat that as a fresh question rather than one the first answer already settled.

What this question turns on

The sources describe the sukkah during the festival as the place you actually live: you eat there, relax there, and sleep there the way you would at home the rest of the year, with your good dishes and your lamp inside and the everyday clutter out. Eating and sleeping are not treated identically, though, and the gap between them is where most of the real-world variation comes from.

There is a recognized category for someone in genuine discomfort, and the sources spell out what falls inside it rather than leaving it to personal tolerance. The examples given are things like wind, insects, or a bad smell. A sukkah too small to stretch out in is named as something that does not count, even though sleeping curled up is unpleasant. The difficulty has to be the kind of thing people are ordinarily bothered by; it has to have arisen after the sukkah was built rather than being a feature of the spot that was chosen; and it only excuses you if going indoors actually escapes it. There is also a rule that someone who builds in a place where he will be unable to eat, drink, or sleep from the start is in a different position entirely from someone whose circumstances changed on him.

Set against that, there is a long and widely accepted practice in colder climates of not sleeping in the sukkah at all, which some later authorities were uneasy about and encouraged people to at least attempt.

That is the shape of the question. Which side of it your own sukkah, your own climate, and your own night fall on is exactly the part a page cannot decide for you, which is why this one does not.

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