[Avodah] Picnics, restaurants, shops, and desks

[Zev Sero]

Reviewing the halachot in siman 640, it occurred to me that it should
be permitted to have picnics on sukkot, and even to eat in restaurants
without a sukkah.

The whole point of a picnic is that you are *not* eating at home; usually
you start out comfortably at home, where you could easily eat your meal
in peace, and instead of eating there you pack your meal and shlep it out
to some outdoor location in order to eat davka there.  Since we're supposed
to treat our sukkah exactly as we treat our home all year, surely the same
thing applies: one leaves ones sukkah and eats in the outdoors.  Just as
one does not build a house at the picnic location during the year, so one
should not need to build a sukkah during sukkot.

And it seems to me that the same should apply to restaurants.  Not fast-
food places where the point is to grab a meal where one happens to be,
and if it were practical to carry the meal home and eat it there one
would do so, but fancy restaurants where the whole point is to leave home
and go *out* to eat.  Restaurants originated in 19th century France as
spas, places where one could go to restore ones spirits by being pampered
and treated as an honoured guest, part of which treatment was that one
could "utter ones provision" (as a famous court case put it) and have it
served.  Over the years the treatment became more concentrated on the
food and less on the other stuff, but it still remains the case that the
essence of the restaurant experience is that one is not at home!  Nor is
one in another person's home; that's a different experience again (though
when I was a child in Melbourne, there was a kosher restaurant which was
indeed in someone's home!)   So it seems to me that on sukkot the
experience is that one is not in ones own sukkah.  Why one should
therefore need to be in someone else's sukkah is not clear to me.

One question I have that makes me hesitate to apply this principle as
I have done here, is that shopkeepers, who all year eat their lunches
in their shops rather than building houses in the city or going home
for lunch, are told that on sukkos they must build sukkos in the city
or else go home to their sukkos, even if they live far away.  I don't
understand the basis for this halacha.  Is it that their shops are
considered their "homes" during the day?   And how does this halacha
apply to the case of people who eat at their desks at work, rather than
take time to eat in the lunch room provided by their employers?  Do we
once again say that one's desk is one's daytime "home" and thus one
needs a sukkah, or that one is davka eating in a place that is not home,
even on a temporary basis, and thus one should be pattur from a sukkah?


-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
zev at sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
		                            - Yitzchak Rabin