Sukkot & Simchat Torah

Arba'at Haminim: The Four Species

On the first day you shall take the product of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Eternal your God for seven days. (Leviticus 23:40)

In addition to the Sukkah, the most prominent symbol of Sukkot is the Arba'at HaMinim - "The Four Species" - or the lulav and etrog.
The four species are the citron, a citrus fruit called etrog in Hebrew, the lulav-- palm branch or 'frond', arava - 2 willow branches (on the left) and 3 hadas (on the right) - myrtle branches. The branches are bound together and referred to collectively as the lulav. The etrog is held separately in the left hand (if one is right handed).
The four species are not used on Shabbat even when it falls on the first day of Sukkot. The mitzvah applies during the day but not at night.

For instructions on how to wave the lulav, see sidebar.

There are many midrashim and interpretations for the lulav and etrog. The Kabbalists say that the four species of the Lulav represent four different types of Jews:

1. The Etrog has a good taste and a good fragrance. It represents a person with both wisdom (Torah learning) and good deeds.
2. The Hadas (myrtle) has a good fragrance, but is inedible. It represents a person who has good deeds, but lacks wisdom.
3. The Lulav (date palm) is edible, but has no smell. This represents the person with wisdom, but without good deeds.
4. The Aravah (willow) has neither taste nor smell. It represents a person with neither good deeds nor Torah learning.

The Sefer Bahir, a kabbalistic work almost 2,000 years old, describes the four species as four parts of a human being:

1. The Etrog represents the heart, the seat of our emotions.
2. The Hadas (myrtle) has leaves shaped like an eye.
3. The Lulav (date palm) represents the spine, from where our actions emanate.
4. The Aravah (willow) represents the lips, our speech.

The four species must be taken together as a unit. So too, to achieve happiness, one must use all of one's faculties in unison. You cannot say one thing and feel another. We must unify our feelings, our actions, our speech and our outlook. With all of these working together, we are well on the path to self-esteem, tranquillity and joy.

The four species also represent the Name of God. Aravah (willow), Hadas (myrtle), Lulav (date palm) and Etrog represent the Yud and Heh and Vav and Heh of the four-letter Name of God.

Again, the key here is unity. As we say everyday in the Shema prayer: "God is One." Whether things may appear to us as good or evil, we must realize that it all comes from God. One must deal with various pleasant or unpleasant circumstances -- ultimately for one's maximal growth, but at the root everything comes from God.

Thoughts on Shaking the Lulav: A Contemporary Approach

If you were to have to choose four items to symbolize victory, luxury, prosperity, and hope, what would they be? Think about it for a minute- we'll come back to it later.

Meanwhile, on the week we celebrate the holiday of Sukkot, and I don't know about you, but I feel rather self-conscious about taking the central symbols of this holiday: a citron (lemon-like fruit) and a palm branch together with branches of myrtle and willow and shaking them. In discussing the 'reasons for the mitzvot' Barry Holtz has written in his wonderful book, Finding Our Way

Even today when we watch or participate in the ceremony of lulav and etrog, there is that sense of the "primitive" that cannot be ignored...The thought intrudes: What am I doing, a sophisticated modern man, shaking these plants and asking for salvation? After all, I don't really believe that I am going to effect the rain and dew by performing this ritual. (pg. 49)

The breast (or womb)-like etrog and the phallic lulav are probably vestiges of an ancient (pagan?) fertility rite, which makes sense since the Sukkot holiday and final harvest marks the beginning of the critical rainy season in the land of Israel. The Talmud makes this explicit: the waving ceremony in the Temple was to restrain harmful winds (Sukkah 37b-38a). Shaking the lulav is obviously an ancient and 'primitive' ritual-- and therein may lie some of its transformative power, but as a highly rational, twenty-first century modern Jew, I have trouble performing acts that are so obviously rooted in sympathetic magic (shaking the lulav even sounds like rain!).

Another argument for taking the lulav and etrog is to balance being in the diaspora; we are so disconnected from the land of Israel, taking these four species is one way to connect to the land of Israel- but that's not enough of a rationale. I also know that as an urban Jew today, it is healthy for me to occasionally re-connect with nature, and to not always be entirely rational all the time. Again, Holtz writes:

Now of course if you stop me in the street and ask, why do you Jews wave those silly plants on Sukkot, I would have a ready answer: "Silly? They certainly are not silly. Let me tell you about some of the symbolic reasons..."  Along with the rationality, waving the lulav also carries with it a sense of the ancient and the nonrational that is missing from most of my modern existence. It also gives me the simple and incommunicable pleasure of the ritual and its physicality. I am taken back to some ancient form, but I differ from those ancestors (I suppose, although who can tell?) because I am both performing the ritual and watching myself perform it at the same time. The thought intrudes: "Hm. Here I am waving the lulav and etrog. Strange ritual, isn't it" Such it is with modernity: Ritual is not an easy thing for any of us. (ibid, pg. 52)

But my self-consciousness (together with Barry Holtz, it seems) is perhaps even shared by the ancient Rabbis who emphasized symbolic and allegorical meanings for the ritual. Popular rabbinic 'midrashim' match the four species to four types of Jews, teaching that ALL Jews must be 'held' together, or that the four species symbolize the spine, heart, eye and mouth to teach that all our body must serve God. These allegories may be useful before doing the mitzvah, ie. as the reason to do the mitzvah in the first place, or, as the public reason, as Holtz suggests, but not so much as during it.

Whatever meaning we might want to attach to the four species, (and the rabbis came up with lots of sets of four besides the two commonly quoted: the matriarchs, God's four letter name, the patriarchs (plus Joseph) etc.), I need to know what did these four species mean originally (besides the wish for rain and fertility) and why were these four species specifically chosen. While the Rabbi's midrashic insights are illuminating, these four species were not arbitrarily chosen. Each of them represented important ideas and values for the ancient Israelite. After all, the land of Israel is full of different plant varieties. There must be something specific about these plants themselves that we have lost track of.

To answer this, we have to look at the holiday of Sukkot itself. Like the other 'pilgrimage' festivals, Sukkot operates on two levels: it is both an agricultural and historical festival, and the four species relate on both levels. Historically, Sukkot represents the wandering of the Israelites (dwelling in 'booths') and their entry into the land of Israel. The date palm, a source of sustenance for desert nomads to this day, evokes the oases where the Israelites encamped in the Sinai Desert. The willow, growing on the banks of the Jordan River today as in antiquity, recalls the Israelites' crossing the Jordan into the land of Israel. When they entered the land and settled in its hills, the Israelites found forests and thickets where myrtle proliferated. After many generations of clearing, terracing, plowing, and planting, the Israelites could grow grain and fruit and even the demanding citron.

According to Nogah Hareuveni of Neot Kedumim, Israel's Biblical landscape reserve, the four species also have a special relationship with water. According to the Talmud, the Four Species are "advocates for water." The citron and willow depend on constant supplies of water. The date palm, native to hot, wet oases, is a sign of water in the desert. The myrtle can survive many months without water. The etrog, even more than typical citrus fruit, requires an exorbitant amount of water to grow.(In fact the rabbis make a Hebrew-Greek play on the Torah's words 'the fruit of a goodly tree' [hadar] "don't call [the etrog] 'hadar' but 'hydor' [water]" (like the English word 'hydro' today!)). Like the willow, citron, and date palm, our lives depend on water. Like the myrtle, we need to survive Israel's long months of dryness. Advocates for water, the Four Species help focus the fervent plea for rain. In the landscapes they evoke, these four plants recall the Israelites' passage from the dry desert to the fertile (if watered by rain) land of Israel — which we celebrate during the seasonal passage from dry to wet.

Even more than this, each of the four species has its own associations that are mostly lost to us today, but with a little imagination can be reconstructed. The lulav's sword-like shape may be the source of the tree's association with victory; the victor in a court case would emerge carrying a palm frond). The Hasmoneans used the palm to symbolize their triumph over the Syrian-Greeks and it appears on ancient (and modern Israeli) coins. The etrog is a symbol of fertility (the fruit retains the pistil-the female reproductive organ) and luxury (because of its demanding water requirements). The myrtle is able to withstand very dry conditions (even fire!) and its fragrant leaves remain green and upright without water long after cutting (a favourite among florists). It therefore came to symbolize immortality and prosperity. The willow only flourishes near abundant water, and is so dependent on water- that if a spring dries up, the willows nearby will wither. Willow then represents our dependence on water and our prayer and hope for rain.

I don't know what you came up with for your four symbols of victory, luxury, prosperity, and hope, but the Rabbis have a neat, compact botanical package that conveys all that, AND connects to both the natural and historical levels of the Sukkot holiday. And it's environmentally friendly to boot. Now, I probably would not have chosen these plants (or any plants for that matter) to represent the qualities listed here, but who doesn't want (or need) to pray for victory, luxury, prosperity and hope in the coming year. I sure do, and isn't it nice to be able to do it with tangible, ritual symbols that are over 2000 years old?

When I bless the lulav and etrog this year, my wish for the coming year will be that we all are blessed with victory, luxury, and prosperity and hope.

Hag Sameach.