Dear Mordechai,
My sukkah doesn’t have one of those fancy awning things to keep it dry. Do you recommend putting up a schlock?
Drenched
Dear Drenched,
This is a good question. A lot of people like to cover their sukkahs, even though if it rains, you’re technically supposed to eat in the house. But rain isn’t really the problem. The problem is that a sukkah is not designed to be waterproof; it’s designed to keep out most of the sun. So once it rains, the sukkah takes the next seven days to dry, and everyone’s sitting in a puddle, constantly shifting to pick at his or her clothing. Also, the schach is just going to be dripping into your food for the rest of Yom Tov. So, number one, you want to make sure to thoroughly clean your schach before you build your sukkah, because who knows what’s been living in there on the floor of your garage. It’s a nest of giant branches.
But if you don’t have a high-tech mechanism for keeping things dry, the cheapest idea is to buy something called a “schlock,” which sounds like a bad word, but it’s not as bad as some of the words you say while rolling up a schlock.
I mean, yes, it works, in that when you come into the sukkah after the rainstorm, the sukkah is dry. But removing the schlock is pretty hard. You’re standing up on a stepstool or the wet railing of your porch right before lunch, everything is slippery and cold, and you’re trying to take off the tarp, which, it occurred to you once you got up there, didn’t keep the rain away from your sukkah as much as it caught all the rain and is now impossible to take off. Remember, these are the same tarps people spread during a drought to catch as much water as possible.
You’re also not supposed to just take the whole tarp off, for halachic reasons. You’re supposed to roll it, like a tube of toothpaste or a schach mat. Though if you do have a schach mat, you’ll realize that it cannot actually support the weight of the water. So you’ll walk into your dry sukkah after a rainstorm to see several sections of your schach jutting down, filled with several gallons of water apiece. Do you know what happens when you roll up a tarp with puddles on it? Do you think the water waits until it gets to the far end of the sukkah and then comes out there, like toothpaste? No. It comes out the sides. And who’s standing on the sides, lower than the tarp, right in the path of gravity? With his arms up over his head and his sleeves hanging like funnels, telling the water where to go?
But don’t worry, not all the water will end up on you. A lot of it will fall inside the sukkah, torrenting down between the edge of the tarp and the walls, right along the decorations. So if you have a tarp, then instead of sitting in a sukkah that will be at least somewhat dried since the rain stopped, you end up eating in a newly-drenched sukkah, soaking wet from rolling up the tarp five minutes ago, all thanks to the schlock.
So my advice is that it’s a lot easier, instead of fighting with a piece of plastic that is impossible to fold, to just run around the sukkah after the rain with a couple of beach towels, wiping all but the chair your least favorite sibling sits on.