There is something almost strange about celebrating Sukkot in Jerusalem. Around you is a city built from stone—walls that have stood for centuries, buildings pressed into the hills, history everywhere you look. And then, for one week, balconies, courtyards, and sidewalks begin filling with sukkot—temporary shelters covered with branches.
They are not meant to be permanent. That is precisely the point. Sitting here in Jerusalem during Sukkot, the biblical Feast of Tabernacles, I have found myself thinking about that contrast again: we spend so much of our lives trying to make things secure, while God gave Israel a feast built around something deliberately fragile.
I am in Jerusalem this week participating in the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem’s Feast of Tabernacles gathering, meeting believers who have come from different nations and sharing the message of Yeshua. And there is one question Christians often ask during this season: What does this Jewish feast have to do with us? It is a fair question. But perhaps we begin finding the answer when we stop looking primarily at the sukkah itself and ask why God told His people to live in one in the first place.
In the wilderness, Israel had to learn something about security. There were no permanent houses, no walls to lock at night, no carefully constructed future they could point to and say, This will keep us safe. God commanded His people to remember those wilderness years by dwelling in temporary shelters during Sukkot. The structure was fragile, but the lesson was not about architecture. Their security had never been the shelter. Their security was the God who walked with them.
That is what keeps bringing me back to this feast. Scripture says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). John describes the Word becoming flesh and “dwelling” among us—a word that carries the image of pitching a tent, or tabernacling, among us. The God who made His presence known among Israel came near to us in Yeshua. He did not remain distant. He entered our world, lived among us, and made His home in the middle of human weakness.
Even Peter seems to reach instinctively for this picture at the Mount of Transfiguration.
When he saw Yeshua with Moses and Elijah, his immediate response was to offer to build three shelters. It is one of those wonderfully human moments in Scripture—Peter is overwhelmed by what he is seeing and wants somehow to make a place for it, to hold onto it. But the glory of God was never something Peter could contain beneath a temporary roof.
Perhaps that is why this particular Sukkot has been good for me personally. Ministry has its own constant movement. There is always another conversation, another person to meet, another need waiting, another plan already beginning. Even here in Jerusalem I am sharing, speaking, meeting people and talking about what God is doing. Yet I also need what this feast asks of all of us: to remember Who is actually holding everything together.
We are preparing for important things in Nazareth and the Galilee, including the work ahead at our ministry building in Nof HaGalil and our vision for the Lighthouse to become a house where people from different backgrounds can encounter the Lord. I care deeply about those plans. We pray over them, work toward them, and ask God to open the right doors. But Sukkot is a useful interruption to our confidence in everything we can build with our own hands. Buildings matter. Plans matter. The work God gives us matters. None of them is our foundation.
From this window in Jerusalem, that truth feels particularly close.
This earthly city is precious to us, and Scripture gives Jerusalem a unique place in God’s purposes. Yet our hope does not finally rest even in stones as old as these. We are waiting for the day when God will dwell with His people fully, when what Sukkot has pointed toward across generations will no longer be remembered through a temporary shelter.
Until then, perhaps the fragile roof still has something to teach us. We build, work, prepare, and make plans for tomorrow. Then Sukkot comes around and quietly reminds us to look above all of it.
God is with us. That has always been our security.
With love from Jerusalem,
Pastor Saleem