“Dwell in booths [Hebrew, sukkot] seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths.” The Talmud understands this commandment as requiring that one eat and conduct everyday activities in this hut-like structure. Gil Student explores a modern-day implication of this requirement:

A sukkah needs to be usable. Rabbi Moses Isserles (16th-century Poland) writes that a sukkah in which you cannot do certain basic things is an invalid sukkah. . . . According to Isserles, [then], does a sukkah today need WiFi?

I ask this because many people cannot take vacation from work for all of Sukkot. They have to work on some or all of ḥol ha-mo’ed [the last six days of the holiday, during which work and other activities are permitted]. However, particularly since the changes to work habits caused by COVID-19, many people will work from home during Sukkot. Do they need to work in their sukkah? If they do, they probably need WiFi in their sukkah so they can work. If so, a lack of WiFi might raise questions about the validity of the sukkah of someone who needs to work.

Therefore, it would seem that if you have to work from home, you should set up a workstation in your sukkah. If that requires WiFi, then you should make sure your WiFi extends to your sukkah and use it only for things that are permissible in a sukkah. It might even be true that according to Isserles, your sukkah is invalid if you cannot work inside it. . . . However, according to the Mishnah Berurah, [a highly regarded early-20th-century halakhic compendium], even though you should be able to work from your sukkah, if you for whatever reason you cannot, your sukkah is still kosher.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.