October 17, 2019 – Rav Shira Shazeer – MWJDS School Rabbi
Sukkot is here, and I’ve spent the school week watching students encounter the lulav, etrog, hadas and aravah, the four species of plants that we gather on this holiday and shake in every direction. There is something about mitzvot that revolve around physical objects. They engage our senses in a different way, circumventing the brain and reaching straight through our bodies into our souls. Students are naturally drawn to the lulav and etrog sets. They want to touch, hold, wave, and even smell them. Even as the fourth grade assembled the sets last week in preparation for the holiday, they started to form attachments to the ones they had personally handled.
Each year as I get to know my own set, and as I introduce students to the four species, I think of the well known midrashim that symbolically connect each of the plants to human beings. There are two well known midrashim that I come back to, an “easy” one and a “difficult” one. The easy one compares each plant to a part of the body through which we interact with the world and the divine; the heart, the spine, the eyes and the mouth. Bringing them all together, then, represents a fully embodied intentionality to our actions.
The difficult midrash compares the qualities of each plant to a kind of person, a person endowed with both, one, or none of two valued character traits; taste and smell in the plants, corresponding to good deeds and scholarship in people. The conclusion of this midrash is that God commands us to gather the four species so that they can be judged as a group, each one compensating for the failings of the others. I am both drawn to and repelled by this midrash, and I debate each year if I will share it with my students and which ones to share it with.
I love the recognition in this midrash that there is more than one way to be of value to one’s community, that we don’t all bring the same qualities to the table and that we are all needed to complete the whole. And I struggle with the text’s choice of only two qualities of value, and its assertion that the poor aravah, the willow, has neither quality. On first reading, the midrash seems not to recognize what is wonderful and valuable about the willow, or its corresponding human who is neither a scholar nor an exceptionally good person. When I do share this midrash, I see students tendency to look around the room, wondering who falls into which category and which one they themselves belong to.
It is no secret that the rabbis of this era valued Torah and good deeds highly, often to the exclusion of other qualities. It is interesting then, that this is not a midrash about ranking. It does not say, “come and learn how perfect the etrog is, with both taste and smell!” It does not encourage the community to exclude those who lack the two highly valued qualities. It does not read out those who don’t fit the mold.
This week, we heard about incidents of antisemetic and racist social media posts among middle and high school students here in Framingham. These, added to the rising reports of hateful speech, vandalism, and violence against so many minorities and vulnerable groups in the last several years, threaten to put a damper on the season of joy that the Torah dictates we should be experiencing this week.
It is in the context of joy that the mitzvah to gather the four species of plants is given (Lev. 23:40) “…you shall take the product of hadar trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God seven days.” Somehow this gathering of plants is meant to help us find the joy of the season. A less often quoted midrash looks at each plant in turn and declares “This is the Holy Blessed One”, citing a verse to prove the connection between each plant species and God. Even the willow, which in the imagination of the other midrash is devoid of notable redeeming qualities, is identified here as a symbol of God.
Looking back to the “difficult” midrash, it is striking that the midrash does not conclude that either the etrog, which has both positive qualities, or the willow, which has no positive qualities to mention, could be left out of the group that is bound together. They are both deemed necessary to atone for each other. Reading between the lines, I return to the positive message of this midrash. If the one who has it all and the one who brings nothing are both included, it must be that there is more to life than taste and smell, more than just scholarship and “good deeds”. There are qualities which the rabbis were not inclined to mention, perhaps because of their intense focus on their favorite qualities. But those unmentioned qualities are not nothing. They hold their own value, recognized or not by the community and its leaders. Each of these qualities identifies its owner as a representation of God, and the Rabbis were wise enough to know that their own failure to identify a person’s value to the community, did not negate the inherent value and importance of that individual.
Perhaps the joy of bringing together those four different plants, each with its own character and quality to be admired, is in understanding ourselves as part of a community that will value all of its members, whether their qualities are obvious or invisible. And if our joy is threatened this week by those who seek to spread hate on the basis of superficial differences and their own lack of imagination and empathy, let us respond with our lulav, etrog, hadas and aravah bound tightly together and wave them proudly and insistently in every direction, spreading the vision of our people, that each of us brings unique value to our community and to the world and each of us reflects the image of the divine. Moadim L’simcha, wishing you a joyous holiday!