I clearly remember building my first Sukkah, because it came at a very sad time. It was twenty years ago, after we lost a child soon after he was born.

My daughter, 5, came home from Sunday school all excited about the Sukkot holiday and its wooden harvest hut. She asked if we were going to build a Sukkah, and I said yes.

We were living in Baton Rouge, and Southern Sukkah-building has its hazards. The mosquitoes nipped at my ankles, and while clearing the bamboo and brush in my backyard, a bee bit my lip, which swelled up.

Nature in Louisiana is fierce - hot sun, strong winds, mammoth clouds, giant mosquitoes. But our choice for the ‘skhakh’ (hut cover) was glorious: I used droopy rich green banana leaves, stiff palmetto fans set on top of hand-cut bamboo poles, tied with vines to the rickety Sukkah frame.

Far from being a carpenter, I had no clue how to build a sturdy Sukkah. The only instruction I followed was that the Sukkah walls be formed in the shape of any of the three Hebrew letters that make up the word “Sukkah”: a squarish ‘samech,’ a three sided ‘Kof,’ or a two-and-a-half-walled ‘Heh.’ I love the Jewish “letterism.” A building shaped like a letter that spells its name is a mysterious kind of writing: using wood, nails, vines, and natural growth to make a statement.

The Sukkot festival is called the “Season of Our Joy.” I find it strange to have a Mitzva commanding us to be joyous. Certain Mitzvos strike me as so counter to our natural emotions as to have a power no rationalist could understand—like the Shema prayer’s commandment to “Love G-d with all your heart”--or this commandment to experience joy, even in sadness.

It was a time of great sadness for me and my wife, and here ironically, I was building a hut for the Festival of Joy. My daughter made crayon drawings and colored paper chains to decorate our structure.

We also were learning Sukkah Tech 101: how to tie apple and squash hangings. Later I would advance to power-drilling fruits and vegetables and running string through them, but in those days we practically had to reinvent macramé to string up recalcitrant pears and apples. There they hung and rotted at the bottom over the next few days -but the bees and flies loved them.

We sat in the Sukkah. We blessed the Sukkah. The Sukkah shook in the wind - my carpentry skills guaranteed it. We ate our meals in the Sukkah, and gradually started coming to it in the afternoons. My wife and I talked in the Sukkah, took long walks in the late autumn afternoon, and then returned to the Sukkah for sunset, and moonlight, and deep night. We sat at a round table made out of an old wooden cable core wheel, with lit candles and macaroni and cheese and wine, blessed and felt blessed.

It was good at our time of loss to be open to the wind and even the rain, to be open to the hard light of the sun and the quizzical light of the moon. One night, a storm blew our whole Sukkah down, but I quickly rebuilt it.

We welcomed the ‘ushpizin’ (guests) into our Sukkah, the invisible ancestral soul-guests traditionally invited at this holiday. We welcomed Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, all the “seven shepherds” of the prayer book. We asked them to join us in our humble Sukkah. We also welcomed all those we had lost, our grandparents, my mother. And we welcomed our son, our invisible guest, though he was already there, dwelling in our hearts.

We didn't know it then, because we were just Sukkah beginners, but the symbol of the Sukkah itself is the heart—known in the Kabbalistic sefirot as ‘tiferet’ (compassion and beauty). We didn't know it at that time in the Kabbalah language, but we knew it in our own experience, because after Sukkot was over, we realized that some healing of the heart had begun.