When I heard that the Israeli President Shimon Peres was to meet Bill Clinton in a fancy convention in Manhattan during Sukkot, I immediately wanted to join in.  A few phone calls to Jerusalem and emails to Bill Clinton's people and I got myself invited as a journalist.  

During the opening speech by our host, Bill Clinton, I realized what the conference was all about: commitments.  The rich and powerful (Bill Gates and President Barack Obama, to name a few) joined forces under the auspices of the Clinton Global Initiative to pledge their commitment for action to advance worthy causes.  I felt like a guest in Manhattan's biggest wedding:  everybody was exchanging vows in front of me.

When I met Mark Zitter in his sukkah, he explained to me why every year at the beginning of Fall he builds a structure, only to take it down when the week-long holiday is over.   Mark has a commitment of his own - to halakha (Jewish law).  

"You sit in the sukkah," Mark explains, "because God told you to sit in the sukkah." Mark's logic is not unlike Clinton's: You try to follow through on your commitments, and it is up to you how you do it.

So Mark, 60, doesn't like prefab sukkots - for one, he has some halakhic issues with them - so he is more imaginative than the standard, yet well within the boundaries of the law.  Since July he had been planning and preparing his sukkah.  The walls of the temporary squared shelter are made of plastic lenses used to cover fluorescent light fixtures, suggesting a smart play between the fragility of the thin bright plastic panels and the rigidity of the pattern.  If you placed Mark's sukkah in Union Square in New York with a sophisticated title like "The Pattern of the Transience," you'd end up with art worthy of the New Yorker.

But Mark's sukkah is rather in his back yard in Teaneck.  And while the end of Sukkot marks the beginning of the iteration of the blessing of the rain in prayer, that holiday was already rainy.  So the old bamboo branches on top - the required organic roof covering or s'khakh - could only partly hinder the rain, when Mark hosted me in the sukkah.  The trickling rain was wetting the minimal decoration, mostly trinkets that can be left in the unlocked sukkah as they are valued only by their owners.  

Mark shows me a red ribbon, a first-place award for a sukkah he constructed years ago, and then he points at the fading picture of the gdoilim (the great rabbis), portraying some of his favorite Jewish scholars.

Among the many rules that Jewish law dictates, Mark says he gravitates to the mitzva (rule) of sukkah.  "The food in Pesach [Passover] stinks and Shavuot is too short," he recaps, while in Sukkot, if weather permits, he can barbecue, eat and shmooze with his wife Bonnie, their four daughters and guests.   

By tradition immediately when Yom Kippur is over you strike the first nail in the sukkah, bridging two important holidays that Mark regards as contrasting.

In that solemn day of Yom Kippur, one accounts for one's conduct in the past year.  This is again very Clintonesque.  At the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan, Bill Clinton approach is not merely future-looking.  His friends, who paid $20,000 to join the Commitments Club, also report on how they followed-through on their commitments in the passing year.

Yom Kippur is the culmination of Yamim Noraim, the ten days from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur, that the Jewish calendar dedicates to connecting the past to the future.  The beginning of the year wraps together the accountability for past acts with the hope of the ongoing commitment for improvement in the year to come.    

And after Yom Kippur, Sukkut is the first major event or yom tov in which we are to experience our renewed halakhic commitment in the new year.  And at the end of Sukkot the annual cycle of Torah-reading starts yet again from Bereshit, from Genesis, in the festivity of Simkhat Torah (the rejoicing of the Torah).

So Mark, known as a "Litvasche flower child" by his friends, enjoys the sukkah, as temporary and transient as it is ("life is temporary" he comments), which accentuates the ever-lasting question in Judaism:  What is the value of a commitment which you take pleasure in following-through?

Mark, a teacher of chemistry, opts for a rationalist, stringent answer:  The simkha (happiness) of the holiday is required by law as well, so rejoicing his sukkah is just as much a part of his halakhic commitment.