[Avodah] Picnics, restaurants, shops, and desks

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Zev Sero wrote:

> 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.

RZS continued at length, giving a compelling argument for this view. However, Rav Moshe Feinstein, in Igros Moshe OC 3:93, says that one may *not* do so, and that the heter for "holchei derachim" exists only for one who has a real "l'tzorech" need, such as for business, but not for "tiyul v'taanug b'alma" - a mere enjoyable outing.

If I understand his logic correctly (which I might not, so please see his words in the original), it goes like this: Imagine a person who enjoys sleeping outdoors, directly under the sky, and often does so for that very reason. Could one argue that because the sukkah takes the place of his house, he should therefore be allowed to do so on Sukkos as well? Such logic would make sense only if Rava's dispensation ("mitzta'er patur min hasukkah") extended to people who enjoy being away from home. But it did not. Rava restricted the p'tur to a mitzta'er. One who is pained by being in the sukkah/home may go elsewhere, but one who merely enjoys the elsewhere more than the sukkah/home must go to the sukkah.

Rav Moshe explores this logic further in Igros Moshe EH 4:32:8, where he discusses a person who has gone to Eretz Yisrael for Sukkos, and now finds that he has only a limited number of days in which to see the sights. Must he stay in places where a sukkah is accessible, or is this enough of a tzorech to allow him to travel wherever he wants during Chol Hamoed? Suppose he took his vacation to a destination other that to Eretz Yisrael; can he spend Chol Hamoed seeing those sights as well? See what he writes there, to help fine-tune his definition of "tzorech".

Akiva Miller

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