The temporary dwelling
Tomorrow evening Sukkot begins, and Jewish families will carry their dinner tables out of the house and into a hut with a roof of branches. The roof is supposed to be thin. Built properly, it lets you see the sky through the gaps, and when it rains, you get wet.
The command comes from Leviticus 23:42: live in booths for seven days. The next verse gives the reason. Future generations should know that God settled the Israelites in booths when He brought them out of Egypt. The exposure is part of the practice. A sukkah that shelters you as well as your house does has missed something.
The Talmud (Sukkah 11b) records a dispute about what those original booths were. Rabbi Eliezer says they were the clouds of glory that surrounded Israel in the desert. Rabbi Akiva says the people built actual huts.
Rashbam, the twelfth century commentator and grandson of Rashi, sides with Rabbi Akiva and then asks why the festival falls when it does. Sukkot comes at the harvest, when the grain is in and the house is full. That is when you leave it. You move into a hut to remember a generation that owned no land and had no houses, so you won't tell yourself what Deuteronomy 8:17 warns against: that your own strength and the power of your hand produced all this.
The festival arrives at the moment you feel most secure and takes you out of the building that makes you feel that way.
Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, the nineteenth century rabbi of Frankfurt, notices the grammar of verse 43. The Torah does not say future generations should know that Israel lived in booths. It says they should know that God made them live there. For Hirsch, the memory centers less on the huts than on who kept the people alive inside them.
When the permanent job starts to look temporary
A lot of us in tech spent the last decade inside a house that felt permanent. We had titles, and we had the reasonable expectation that knowing how to do a hard thing would keep being worth something.
AI has made some of those walls feel thinner. I don't think it makes all roles obsolete, and I distrust confident predictions about which ones will survive. The worry I hear from colleagues is narrower. It's the fear of being hollowed out while keeping the job: you still hold the title, but your day consists of pasting a request into a model, forwarding what comes back, and clicking approve.
There's a crude name for this going around: the meat proxy. A person who sits between a model and the people who need its output, whose remaining function is to move text from one window to another and to have a name attached when something goes wrong.
I've seen this firsthand many times over the last several months. Replies shared that are clearly written by an LLM, and when asked about that reply, the person clearly did not even read what they shared. Pull requests opened with code no one even looked at. So many examples they are hard to limit just to a few.
I use the phrase because it names a real fear with some honesty. I don't accept it as a description of what professionals are. It describes what a badly designed workflow can turn us into, and the people who design workflows can choose differently.
Hirsch is useful here. In Horeb, his 1837 work on the commandments, the chapter on Sukkot addresses two people. The first has a full barn and faces winter calmly. The second had a poor harvest and sits at the table picturing years of scarcity. Hirsch sends both of them into the sukkah. He tells the prosperous one that wealth and possessions, and even the talents people are proudest of, are not what secure their existence, and that acquired abilities can change. He tells the frightened one that the fragile hut is where the ancestors were sustained.
Hirsch's answer is trust in God. The professional question sitting underneath it is uncomfortable for both groups. If you feel safe because your skills are in demand, Hirsch says those skills were never your foundation. If you feel afraid because your skills are being automated, he says the same thing.
Both workers are being asked to locate their worth somewhere other than in whatever the market happens to pay for this year.
Leave the permanent house
The Mishnah that opens tractate Sukkah (1:1) rules that a sukkah taller than twenty cubits, roughly ten meters, is invalid. Rabbi Yehuda disagrees and declares it fit. The Gemara on Sukkah 2a asks where the limit comes from, and three sages give three answers.
Rava reads Leviticus 23:42 as an instruction to leave your permanent home and live in a temporary one for seven days. Below twenty cubits you can build something flimsy. Above that height, the structure has to be sturdy enough to count as a permanent building, and a permanent building doesn't qualify.
Rabba reads the next verse, "so that your generations will know." Under twenty cubits, your eye catches the roof without effort and you know where you're sitting. Above that, you stop noticing it.
Rabbi Zeira cites Isaiah 4:6, which describes a sukkah as shade from the heat. In a structure that tall, the walls cast the shade and the roof stops doing its job.
I read each of these as a test you can run on your own working life.
Rava's test applies to titles. A title is built to feel permanent. It survives reorgs on your LinkedIn profile and tells strangers how to rank you. Rava disqualifies the permanent structure for a week, which leaves a question worth sitting with: what remains of my work if I take the title away?
Rabba's test applies to workflows. A process that grows tall enough stops being visible to the people inside it. You approve the pull request an agent wrote and forward the summary a model produced, and you no longer look at what is over your head. Becoming a relay happens gradually, as the roof rises, and by the time you'd notice, you've stopped looking up.
Rabbi Zeira's test applies to institutional status. You can sit in shade that comes entirely from the walls, meaning the company's brand, its legal team, its market position, and believe your own roof is protecting you. Take the walls away and you find out what your work was covering.
The Mishnah later (Sukkah 2:9) compresses the practice into one rule: for all seven days, a person treats the sukkah as permanent and the house as temporary.
For one week the Mishnah reverses which structure counts as real, and a week is long enough to learn what you were leaning on.
More than a meat relay
If a professional is more than a relay, the part that stays theirs has to be named specifically. I count five things.
The first is judgment you answer for. A model can propose three architectures for a service. Choosing one means knowing the team's on-call capacity, last quarter's budget fight, and the migration that failed two years ago. The person who chooses defends the choice in the postmortem. If you can't explain why you picked it, you routed it.
The second is interpretation. Requests arrive underspecified. A product manager asks for a dashboard when the question underneath is why churn spiked in one region. The model will build the dashboard. A person has to hear the question.
The third is relationships. In developer relations, my field, the artifact is the smaller part of the work. A tutorial matters because a developer who trusts you tried it and wrote back when it broke on their machine. I see this firsthand when a builder tells me explicitly that a sample application code or a tutorial or a blog post directly helped them ship their next feature, like in this recent example.
The fourth is moral discernment. Some outputs are accurate and still wrong to send. A layoff announcement can be factually correct and needlessly cruel. A support reply can quote the policy and ignore the person. A model will produce the text; deciding whether it should go out belongs to whoever sends it.
The fifth is responsibility for consequences, and this is where the relay model breaks. It assumes responsibility can travel with the text. It can't. When an output causes harm, the person who forwarded it answers for it. The meat proxy joke half-admits this: the proxy is the one left holding the liability.
If your name goes on the output, you need the time and standing to check it, change it, or refuse it, and a job that withholds those three is asking you to carry risk without authority.
That last point is aimed as much at managers as at individual workers. Organizations that want AI speed with human accountability have to budget for the human part.
Work without the fantasy of completion
Many communities read Kohelet during Sukkot. It opens with havel havalim (1:2), usually translated "vanity of vanities" or "utter futility." It's a strange book for a festival the liturgy calls the time of our rejoicing.
Kohelet spends chapters on the emptiness of accumulation. He built, planted, and amassed, and found nothing that lasts. Then in 3:13 he says that when a person eats, drinks, and sees good in their labor, that is a gift of God. The book doesn't reconcile these. Labor can't secure you, and labor done well is one of the few good things you get.
That tension cuts against two stories told about AI and work. The optimistic story says abundance will finish the work and that output is the measure of a good life. The pessimistic story says that if a machine can produce the work, the work was never worth much. Kohelet rejects the first because nothing you build is permanent, and the second because the good in labor was never measured by volume.
Rabbi Tarfon puts it as an obligation in Pirkei Avot. The day is short and the work is great (2:15). It is not your duty to finish the work, and you are not free to desist from it (2:16). Rav Tarfon assumes the work outlasts the worker. That frees you from the fantasy that the right tool will close it out, and it removes the excuse that because a tool exists, you can step away.
The sukkah also comes with a limit. It is a seven-day practice, and at the end the family goes back into the house. The Torah doesn't ask for a life of permanent exposure. A company that praises fragility to justify keeping its people precarious has read the festival backward.
R' Tarfon's teaching removes both the promise of completion and the permission to disengage, which leaves the worker with obligation instead of security.
What we carry back inside
When the week ends and the sukkah comes down, a few questions are worth bringing into the house.
If you're an individual contributor: which decision did you sign this month that you couldn't defend without the model's text in front of you?
If you manage people: whose name goes on the AI-generated work your team ships, and does that person have the time and authority to reject it?
If you shape an organization: which relationships did automation replace this year, and did anyone check what was lost?
Rashbam's reason for the festival was that a full house makes it easy to forget who built it and what sustained you. The equivalent risk at work is forgetting which parts of the job were yours.
What part of your work would you refuse to let become a relay, and have you told anyone at work?