I DON’’T know who this happened to, but I am assured by the person who told me that it did happen, as he heard it first hand.

It was somebody’s first Sukkos. That is, the first time this family ever built a sukkah and observed the mitzvah. OK, nice. Sukkos is a cross between lovely and spiritual. Well, these people went out to sleep in the sukkah — taking in the new religious experience — but they forgot to turn off the sprinkler system . . .

• • ••   •   •

How long does it take to switch planes, especially when deplaning from an international flight? About two or three hours, depending on baggage retrieval, customs, etc. — and that’s if you land on time.

What about 30 minutes?

Once we spent Sukkos in Israel and I had to be back at the IJN the very day after the holiday ended. Here was the plan, crazy at it sounds:

Take the wee-hours-of-the-morning flight from Israel, due to land at Newark Airport at 7 a.m. Then, switch to the UAL morning flight to Denver, scheduled to take off at 7:30 a.m. Yup, 30 minutes to deplane, get through passport control, and customs, and switch terminals, and get to the gate to board the Denver flight.

Here was the strategy:

Get a seat right next to the front door of the aircraft; check no luggage; be first off the plane — and run.

Things went smoothly until I got to customs. I take the customs forms very seriously, and if it asks whether you’re carrying any fruit, then, if I am, I say so.

I was bringing home an esrog because it’s a wonderful spice for Havdalah. The esrog wasn’t kosher, and because of that it was cheap.

I desperately tell the customs official of my intense time pressure. He is oblivious. He opens my hand luggage in as relaxed and slow a fashion as possible, befitting his government job.

An African American, he picks up the esrog — not exactly typical fare in American fruit stands — and begins to look it over.

He asks, “What’s this?”

What am I supposed to do, start explaining what an esrog is?

I say, “this is a citron.”

Citron?

Sounds funny even to me. To him, it doesn’t help at all.

The clock is ticking. Every minute counts.

He twists the esrog this way and that, examining it studiously, from every possible angle.

He is taking his time. I’’m plotzing.

Apparently, we have a culture clash.

Suddenly, a light goes on.

“Hey, is this an e-s-r-o-g?” he exclaims.

My good customs official names the esrog! Forget citron!

Is this an esrog?

“Yes!” I say.

“Oh. OK. No problem. Go right ahead!”

(P.S. I made the plane.)

• • ••   •   •

When a sukkah is built in your backyard, nobody sees. When you put it up or take it down really has no impact on anyone else.

It’s not like that in Jerusalem. Most people live in condominiums (often with porches made to accommodate a sukkah). Everybody sees your sukkah.

Here I am, about two weeks after Sukkos ended that year. Somebody is on the street in front of our condo, walking leisurely on Shabbos. I’m there.

Suddenly, this stranger looks at me in anger and says, “Terrible! Look, it’s two weeks after Sukkot, and some guy still has his sukkah up! A blight on the neighborhood.”

I have no no choice but to nod in agreement. “Terrible, yes . . . ”

However, guess who left his sukkah up, and made sure to get it down lickety split the very next day . . .

• • ••   •   •

Back to sleeping in the sukkah: There’’s a Yiddish phrase, “tzaddik im peltz,” which literally means “a pious person with a coat.” It connotes a guy who plays righteous but, when it’’s cold outside, keeps the coat for himself and doesn’’t share. Everybody else freezes.

OK, the phrase doesn’’t exactly fit this circumstance, but here I am in Jerusalem trying to sleep in the sukkah. Another family’s sukkah is about 10 feet away. This family decides it’’s a nice and pious thing to invite over some friends to stay up all night singing and eating and studying Torah. On Sukkos.

I keep trying to go to sleep, but they’’re only 10 feet away, and the noise is loud. And they’re good friends, and they’’re really into it, and would not take kindly to a request, however softly put, to end the all night session (or at least take it inside).

My just concluded Yom Kippur training on how not to get mad was sorely tested.

• • ••   •   •

You don’’t need to go to Jerusalem to find sukkahs in close proximity.

Here are two Denver families, each in its own sukkah, in its own yard, but the yards are right next to each other. One family is enjoying its Sukkos evening meal when suddenly, loudly, comes an unseen request yelled from an adjoining sukkah, “”Neil, we ran out of ketchup. Can you please pass the ketchup?””

SUKKOS is a about the only time that high powered rabbinic types relax. I was told that the Sephardi scholar Rabbi Ovadia Yosef does not even visit the cemetery on the yahrzeit of his father so as not to take the minutes (or hour) away from Torah study. But on Sukkos, anyone can — or at least back in the day anyone could — visit him at certain hours of the day in his sukkah.

He “received the public,” as they put it in Hebrew. If you never had the chance to trade a few words with an eminence, this was your chance. And you could do it with the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, with the chief rabbi of Israel, with other leading scholars, even with the leading Ashkenazi rabbi of the generation . . . I visited Rabbi Yosef S. Elyashiv many times on Sukkos.

Today, since Rabbi Elyashiv is 100 years old (until 120!) and is in immeasurably greater demand now than then, I doubt whether this is still possible. But it was possible then, or at least possible for me since I volunteered to drive one of his mechutanim (and his son) to visit the preeminent rabbi.

In those days, relatively few Jerusalemites had cars and I took advantage of my own to offer rides to great people. On Sukkos (as well as Passover) the reward was a personal visit to Rabbi Elyashiv.

Once, when the three of us arrived, Rabbi Elyashiv was out, but we were told he would soon return. Meanwhile, his wife related a short but telling incident.

Talk about a culture clash. You might need to remove your cultural spectacles to understand this one.

Keep in mind that now, some 35 years later, Mrs. Elyashiv is no longer among the living, while Rabbi Elyashiv has 500 living descendants, stemming from 10 children.

So how does a rabbi earn that phenomenal distinction? Whatever else comes into play, a phenomenal wife makes a critical difference. Mrs. Elyashiv was the daughter of the legendary tzaddik of Jerusalem, Rabbi Aryeh Levine.

Rabbi Elyashiv has studied Torah his entire life, for decades locking himself in the Ohel Sarah shul in Meah Shearim. One day —his wife was telling us — the rabbi came home at 1 p.m. for lunch, and one of his children was burning up with  fever.

Mrs. Elyashiv did not tell her husband.

She did not want to distract him from his Torah study. Torah study was their joint project; and the reward therefrom would be shared jointly. So, to help it along, she would take care of the child herself.

It was imperative that her husband’’s Torah study not be interrupted.

Not everyone is on this level, but check the results . . . I have led you on. The number of his living descendants is not 500. The number extends to the sixth generation (!) and is some 1,500 souls! (That is a conservative estimate. When a family gets this big, it becomes hard to keep track.)

Such was the dedication to Torah of the matriarch of this vast family, as heard in Jerusalem, on the porch of the extremely modest Elyashiv apartment, on Sukkos, ca. 1976.

Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News