Sun One Organic Farm hosts 16 Cubits to celebrate Sukkot

Bethlehem, CT — From October 2–7, 2025, Sun One Organic Farm hosted 16 Cubits, a reimagined observance of the ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot.  Architects, designers, and lay participants lived together on the farm while foraging materials and building three sukkot (the plural of the Hebrew “sukkah”) for three days, culminating in a public open day on October 5, with live music, dancing, eco-kashrut food, a mushroom foraging walk, and public building and symposia.

A collaboration between rabbinical student Ethan Blake and sustainability architect Misha Semenov-Leiva, 16 Cubits hosted its inaugural festival last year at Urban Adamah, a Jewish urban farm in Berkeley, CA;  this year’s setting in rural Connecticut realizes their original vision, an opportunity for participants to spiritually immerse themselves in fully eating, sleeping, and dwelling outdoors and live cooperatively and intimately for the festival.

Reimagining Ritual Through Design

16 Cubits challenges participants to reinterpret the conventional “Home Depot” sukkah by returning to ancient practices of local and naturally sourced materials [relevant quote from Nehemiah at bottom].  This year’s teams embraced the challenge with bold creativity, resulting in sukkot that experimented with wood, cornstalks, and mycelium grown and harvested on the farm (or farmer neighbors in Connecticut).

Festival founder Ethan Blake reflected that the event is about more than constructing temporary dwellings — it is “a remix of ritual, design, and ecological experimentation — a way to inhabit tradition while innovating our material future.” Each sukkah became a living laboratory, inviting visitors to reflect on how sacred architecture can engage ecology and community simultaneously.

Impact and Significance

The 2025 festival reinforced the value of interdisciplinary approaches to sacred architecture, situating the sukkah not only as a liturgical object but also as a platform for sustainable design experimentation. It offered an invitation to rethink what it means to dwell in ritual space: temporary, living, and deeply attuned to local ecology.

For scholars of religion and ecology, 16 Cubits presents a compelling case study of how material practice, spiritual imagination, and environmental consciousness can converge. It foregrounds the potential for religious rituals to inspire creative, ecological interventions that resonate beyond traditional communities.

“They found written in the Teaching that the LORD had commanded Moses that the Israelites must dwell in booths during the festival of the seventh month, and that they must announce and proclaim throughout all their towns and Jerusalem as follows, ‘Go out to the mountains and bring leafy branches of olive trees, pine trees, myrtles, palms and [other] leafy trees to make booths, as it is written.’ So the people went out and brought them, and made themselves booths on their roofs, in their courtyards, in the courtyards of the House of God, in the square of the Water Gate and in the square of the Ephraim Gate. The whole community that returned from the captivity made booths and dwelt in the booths—the Israelites had not done so from the days of Joshua son of Nun to that day—and there was very great rejoicing” (Nehemiah 8:13-17).

Learn more here.