While the reusable and sustainable bamboo mats designed for Sukkot are certainly Kosher to Schach your Sukkah, and many use bamboo-only, and we do use them for much/most of the Sukkah coverage, there’s something about evergreen Schach peeking through. That green has extra special Sukkot vibes, especially here in the Northeast.
We don’t want to cut down trees for one holiday, but we do have some longstanding arrangements with tree cutters who are anyways cutting or trimming evergreen to buy the boughs off them for the holiday. Some years this is easier than others, some years it can be quite a challenge. But we do love that extra green Sukkah vibe, and so we make extra efforts for it.
Dr. Herman Prins Salomon insisted on the green Schach, and only the evergreen for his Sukkah on Norwood Street that we’d help him with each year. He loved the Sukkah, but only liked it with the greens. Now our Sukkot each year at Shabbos House is dedicated in his memory – so we have to have at least some green, he wouldn’t have it otherwise.
The years when it’s been harder to get some green schach, usually come with a story and a message.
Sukkot 5787/2026 seemed to be a much harder year for green Schach. As of Yom Kippur we had no leads. I made my calls a week or two earlier, and then more calls and messages, but nothing was available in time for Sukkot. I was trying to get into the mindset that maybe we’d have to do with bamboo mats alone this year. But then I thought of Herman…
We got the call on the day after Yom Kippur, an old tree-service friend who has helped us before, said that a job came up and he does have evergreen for our Sukkah! And he would be able to bring it by in time for our Sukkah Building BBQ! He had two conditions: If we could pay his workers for the extra effort in cutting the boughs instead of just shoving into the chipper. And if we could include him and his family in our prayers!
True to his word, his workers came by with a big truck load and dumped it all near the ramp of our deck where we build the Sukkah. It was good ample green Schach, exactly what we needed.
But here’s the thing. Along with the many cut branches, and underneath them, the dumping of the truck dumped a whole lot of mulched tree. Piles and piles of it. We had the desirous Schach and all this undesired mushed-up wood-chip. We used the Schach for the Sukkah and worked to shovel up and find ways to dispose of all that wood-mush.
Indeed, life often gives us a package deal. We learn that since the Garden of Eden, there is no absolute perfect good without some bad mixed in, no absolute bad without some good. Life is a mixed bag. Sorting it out, finding and choosing the good and emphasizing it, that’s the challenge.
The Talmud says that Rabbi Meir was a nutcracker, he knew how to extract the meat of the nut and throw away its shell. This isn’t always so easy or so simple. Most of the time the gold is in the ore, the diamond is in the rough. Extracting and separating, discerning, defining and refining, knowing what’s the wheat and what’s chaff and finding effective ways to focus and prioritize and choose – this is the wisdom of life.