Making a spectacle of ourselves :(

Friday morning, my husband, who's fortunate enough to have a more flexible work schedule than I have, took our Shabbat/Sabbath dinner to our local synagogue so that we could eat it in the shul's sukkah without carrying our food there on Shabbat (which is prohibited in a neighborhood without an eruv). Imagine our chagrin when, after Arvit/Maariv (the Evening Service), we went into the sukkah with the other folks who'd attended services to make kiddush and discovered that, for the first time, we would be the only ones eating Shabbat dinner there. Not even the rabbi's or cantor's families were there, and no, neither family has its own sukkah. With only the kindly Shabbos goy keeping us company, we did a quick Birkat HaMazon/Grace after Meals so that the poor fellow could turn off the lights and go home.

Next year, Sukkot begins on Shabbat, so there won't be a Shabbat Chol HaMoed on which we must eat in the sukkah. (We don't always eat in a sukkah on nights when we're not required to eat bread/make a motzi, but, when not eating in a sukkah, we avoid all grain products except corn [which is considered a vegetable, not a grain, in Jewish law], so as not to eat grain products outside of the sukkah.) But, in future years in which there's a Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot, we'll try to arrange to eat dinner in a friend's sukkah or in another synagogue's sukkah. It's a sad business when one has to hop on a subway and/or train to enjoy a Yom Tov because there's no real community left in one's own community.