Curved wall
Peace and good luck.
I have a 2-meter-high sukkah that stands next to the roof. The roof is 2.5 meters high and half a meter wide. (If the roof were 2 meters high, it would be a classic case of a curved wall.) Is the sukkah kosher?
I’m not sure I understood the drawing. Do you mean that there is a roof that protrudes from the house by half a meter at a height of 2.5 meters. From where it ends, a sukkah begins that does not have two sides and its own roof and needs the wall of the house as a third side? I will answer this drawing.
There are several methods of understanding the law of a curved wall. Some have understood that the halachic wall of the sukkah descends from the edge of the roof straight down. According to this method, the sukkah is of course kosher.
But there are methods in which the halakhic wall rises diagonally (this is the hypotenuse of the triangle wall + roof). For these methods, there is a sukkah that has a wall that rises from the bottom of the wall to the protruding edge of the roof, meaning that it is some distance away from the kosher thatch. Ostensibly, one must ensure that this distance does not exceed 3 tefach (because air is disallowed in 3 tefach on the side as well). For this purpose, one must make a trigonometric calculation of the distance between the diagonal and the thatch. If you do the calculation, you will get a distance of 10 cm, which is ostensibly kosher. However, even if it is said that the distance is less than a tefach (as it does turn out), there is a problem of halakhah to halakhah here, since the distance from the thatch to the halakhic wall is connected to a wall that does not really exist there (this is a halakhic diagonal), and for the Rishonim methods that do not say halakhah to halakhah (as Reka proves), it seems that this would be invalid.
Ultimately, there is a question of certainty here: whether the halakhic approach is like the first or second method, and even if you conclude by saying that they believe like the second method, the question is whether they are saying halakhah for halakhah.
Therefore, there is room for leniency, but I would avoid it if possible.
Happy Holidays.
Now I thought that if you could lower some kind of mat (even from unsuitable thatch material) from the edge of the roof to the edge of the kosher thatch, it would solve the problem.
How beautiful. But the question about the distance from the thatch to the diagonal was referring to a line from the thatch that is perpendicular to the diagonal, right? That is, the shortest distance between the edge of the thatch and a point on the diagonal. Is it clear that this is how it is measured in a sukkah? Maybe they still measure “distance” in a line upwards from the thatch to the roof?
And what helps is there a point where the distance is short, if let's say there is a drawing like this ₪< ש"ח marking a kosher thatch surface and the triangle (in the same plane) is the shape of a roof, is the distance measured to the vertex of the triangle or horizontally at each point.
The distance from the thatch to the roof is half a meter, and the gap there does not interfere with the sukkah. Therefore, it is clear that this is not the relevant gap. There is no need to close it, and therefore no din levod will be said there.
The distance of 10 cm that I calculated is in a straight line from the thatch to the diagonal (and not perpendicular to the diagonal). The distance perpendicular is of course shorter and clearly there is no problem.
Thank you. I mistakenly thought that the half-meter gap from the thatch to the roof was indeed relevant and was not considered a space inside the sukkah but rather a normal distance between the thatch and the wall. (I also admit and am ashamed that I did not calculate the 10 cm before asking, I was just relying on the faint inference that later on I calculated straight, apparently enough similarity of triangles and no need for trigonometry. But now I see that indeed the ratio between half and two and a half is like between ten cm and half. It would have been easier to calculate than to knock and ask, etc.)
Another solution that is easier to implement is to add a waste thatch at the height of the sukkah, so that the diagonal will be to the lower thatch.
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