[Avodah] Sukkah on Shabbos

[David Riceman]

[In case people were wondering, I was away from home for the weekend,
and my hosts did not have internet access. With this post, I just cleared
out the queue. -micha]

Chana Luntz wrote:
>  The reason I am saying this is that, all the poskim seem to say very clearly
> that the d'orisa obligation is yeshivu k'ain tadiru - you shall dwell in the
> sukkah the same way that you dwell in your house.  That would seem to
> suggest that if it is a form of yeshivu that is not k'ain tadiru, then it
> would not be a d'orisa - but then, what is it, nothing?
> <snip> Some other people who went's solution was to bring a pop
> up sukkah - and when we passed it, we saw a man, who clearly had a large
> family, sitting in this tiny sukkah with a son on each knee, and about four
> or five other sons standing wedged against him while eating their lunch,
> while the wife and daughters milled about a few metres away.
> <snip>  But you
> cannot tell me that what this man at Legoland was doing was yeshivu kein
> tadiru - NOBODY, but nobody eats his lunch the way he was eating it, and
> even less so the way his sons were eating it.

Hazal set minimum shiurim for sukka which are well below what I imagine
housing was like even in those days -- can you imagine living in a 7 tefah
by 7 tefah house? I suspect "teishvu k'ein taduru" has to be understood
in the subjunctive: live as you would live if this were your house.
This explains lots of peculiar details in halacha -- dinim associated with
rain, for example. I just acquired a copy of Damesek Eliezer last week,
so I'll point you to 640:4:11 (the very last comment, on the Rama's remark
"v'ein hamitztaer patur ... ").

There are, furthermore, other kiyumim which one does in a sukka --
l'ma'an yed'u doroseichem (see OH 625:1), for example.

>  presumably the simple answer to
> what to do when one went to Legoland would be simply to picnic.  But Rav
> Moshe, inter alia, is dead against this, and says that that ptur is only for
> a tzorech like business.

I haven't looked at the tshuva you allude to, but I wonder about this.
Hazal compare someone eating outside to a dog; but certainly no one I
know has a visceral response to someone eating an ice cream cone while
strolling, or to someone eating at a picnic. So I wonder whether the
halacha was codified when people ate meals only in their homes except
in extreme situations.

David Riceman