LOCAL LULAV
I’m considering harvesting a local lulav to shake this Sukkot. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, and I was inspired by a workshop from Kohenet Shamirah on this topic. Great thanks to her for assembling sources.
I mean all four species when I use the term lulav. This includes the fruit and the three things that you hold in the other hand and shake, not just the palm frond. Why not just buy one the way I have the past many years? Two core reasons.
First, the planning and harvesting of a local lulav will connect me deeper to the more than human world. I’ll have to think about the local ecosystem, learn to recognize some trees, play with the differences between the river valleys where I live and the mountains/hills which are but a few minutes drive away.
Second, I know nothing about the ecology of the growing and harvesting of the four species in the traditional lulav you buy through your local synagogue or Chabad house, and the chances that any of the four species are grown/harvested in ecological and sustainable ways are pretty minimal. Anyone want to bet on which pesticides are sprayed on the etrogim to make them look flawless?
I begin with the fact that the core purpose of the lulav is to bring the rain down from the male heavens to fertilize the female earth. Israel as a Mediterranean climate has both a dry season and a wet season. The core purpose of shaking the lulav is to promote the beginning of the rainy season. Water is life. The lulav is a very wonderful piece of pagan magic.
The original Biblical commandment from Leviticus 23:40 actually only specifies 2 of the four things that traditionally make up the lulav. “On the first day you shall take the fruit of a beautiful tree, the branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook and you shall rejoice before YHVH your God for seven days.” So the lulav (date palm) and the aravah (willows of the brook) are specified, but the other two components are not and are highly open to interpretation.
I’m also going to keep in mind two other aspects of the lulav. First they come from 4 geographically diverse parts of Israel. The Etrog is from the plains, the Lulav or date palm is from the desert, the Hadass or myrtle is from the hills and the Aravah or brook willow is from wet places along creek banks. So I want to echo that if I can figure out how. Second, they are all water loving plants. That makes sense, since the lulav as a whole is all about water.
Let’s look at the four different aspects of the Lulav. They are:
Etrog
Lulav
Hadass
Aravah.
The etrog is what the Rabbis eventually decided on as the “fruit of a beautiful tree.” I have no idea of how you distinguish between a beautiful and an ugly tree. Given that I think of Rabbinic Judaism as having a voice but not a veto, to quote Mordechai Kaplan (insert this quote in substack). I have no problem using a local fruit. I’ll probably use an apple or possibly a different local harvested organic fruit sourced from the local farmer’s market. Also, something with a blemish is certainly more beautiful on a deep level than something that looks perfect because it’s been sprayed with poison.
The lulav is more complicated for me. First, the Biblical text is clear, even if apparently what we typically use aren’t actually branches of a date palm but are instead sprouts, undoubtedly because they are cheaper/easier. I also have a personal connection with date palms because the first summer I was in Israel we stayed on a Kibbutz in the desert that grew date palms and I worked there harvesting them and getting cut by the sharp edges of date palm fronds.
The lulav is core to the magic of the ritual we perform in the Sukkah. The shape of the lulav is phallic and represents the masculine sky fertilization of the mother earth through rain (semen). The lulav is also what produces the sound that is somewhat like rain when we shake it.
I’m playing with the idea of using white pine boughs. Shaken they make a softer sound, more like a drizzle than the rain we need, but at least it kind of sounds right. Then though it isn’t quite as phallic as a palm frond, it’s still pretty phallic shaped, so that works.
The hadass has at least two different possible directions we can go seeking a local equivalent. The Biblical text does not specify myrtle, it just says a bough of a leafy trees. Thus one direction is looking for a tree where the leaves are so thick that they cover the branch, as the myrtle does. So if there were a plant (the myrtle usually grows as a shrub but can be a small tree according to the website of Neot Kedumim) that grew in the hills or mountains somewhat locally here where the leaves covered the branches, that would work as a replacement, no problem. I spent some time at the end of August in the mountains of Vermont looking for such a plant, and came up empty. Open to suggestions.
The other direction is to harvest something from the hills/mountains that smells good. Leviticus Rabbah 30:12 (material is from the 3rd to 5th century CE) says that the hadass has a good smell but no taste. Maimonides also supports this idea (Guide for the Perplexed Part 3 43:6). A friend who knows a ton about trees and this ecosystem offered the following possibilities: spicebush, black walnut, bayberry, magnolia, calycanthus. Now the only one of those I can identify is black walnut when the walnuts fall. There’s a reason I’m starting this process now when I have some time to walk in the hills and look for these trees with a guide book and smell them to see if any speak to me.
The aravah is a willow that grows by the side of brooks. Google tells me that there are four different kinds of willows that grow in riparian zones in Vermont. Black Willow, Shining Willow, Pussy Willow and Sageleaf Willow. So that is straight forward, I just need to be able to identify one of them and harvest it with its permission.
I expect this project to connect me more deeply both to the more than human world and to my ancestral tradition. And aren’t those core purposes of sacred practice?
