The Four Species
Luria, Yaacov
THE FOUR SPECIES YAACOV LURIA Essex Street, the western edge of Seward Park in the lower East Side, blends the sacred and the profane. From grey plastic pickle barrels arises the aroma of dill,...
...While a customer bargains with Leibel, Mordecai talks with this visitor about the shipment of the arba minim which he shepherded from Israel to Essex Street...
...Sitting in the rented store, its counters gleaming yellow and green with citrons and fresh palm fronds, are Leibel's two assistants, a young Israeli couple named Mordecai and Nehama...
...Psalms are chanted while the etrog and lulav are waved in all directions—wherever God is to be found...
...The etrog is cradled in a small, square cardboard box...
...But all four types, says Mordecai, are needed to make a balanced community...
...From grey plastic pickle barrels arises the aroma of dill, garlic and brine that drifts through stores selling fabrics and lingerie, cheese and honey, and religious books, prayer shawls, and yarmulkes...
...He goes to Safed in Galilee to find the best myrtle...
...Modest, as a devout young woman should be, Nehama only listens...
...Every year at this season, Leibel Bistritzky, who normally presides at a kosher dairy and grocery at number 27'/2 Essex, becomes an etrog and lulav merchant...
...It pleases the eye, but more still, it has a personality that belongs to itself alone...
...Ah, by then the best would be already sold...
...The visitor calls Mordecai's attention to a blond, heavyset young man who is examining an etrog with a magnifying glass...
...It means beauty, majesty, splendor, glory, magnificence, radiance...
...But Mordecai is not content until he tells a parable from the Midrash...
...Then congregants, etrog and lulav in hand, join in a procession around the synagogue raising their voices in hosannahs, named from the Hebrew hoshia na (save us...
...At the bottom is the aravah, the willow that neither tastes nor smells good, which suggests the Jew without either learning or good deeds...
...The visitor thinks that Mordecai's verbal performance itself is an example of hadar...
...Mordecai, a Lubavitcher hasid like his employer, is a law student at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv...
...Moved now by an imprecise and vaguely understood urge, he asks Mordecai and Nehama to select an etrog and lulav for him to carry home...
...Some of them are obviously on their way home, looking contented and fulfilled...
...As long as the twigs are red and the leaves have smooth edges, it's a kosher aravah," Mordecai explains...
...The citrons—only the best—are wrapped in boxes...
...What has just now seemed petty and overfussy emerges as a tradition-hallowed search for perfection...
...Ah, how I wish I knew better English to tell you what lies in the word hadar...
...A bit over three feet in length, the lulav becomes the centerpiece of an arrangement which includes three sprigs of myrtle and two willow branches...
...In Hebrew the etrog and lulav are called arba minim, or four species of plants...
...The visitor has come only to observe and satisfy his curiosity...
...In Israel the myrtle is a tree, not a flower...
...It has hadar...
...At the Canal Street corner there is an outdoor vegetable market where avocados, oversized and gone slightly soft, sell three for a dollar...
...At times he holds it up to the sunlight in the doorway and gently tries to dislodge with a tooth pick what looks like a tiny speck of soil...
...Closely related to the lemon, which it resembles, the citron is larger and tapers towards its top...
...He will pay much more than the thirteen dollars we get for the cheapest etrog and lulav...
...THE FOUR SPECIES YAACOV LURIA Essex Street, the western edge of Seward Park in the lower East Side, blends the sacred and the profane...
...The four species are likened to the four kinds of Jews: The etrog, at the summit, with both a good taste and a pleasant smell, symbolizes the Jew who has both learning and good deeds...
...The palm branches are stacked in wooden frames...
...Closer to the holiday he could buy cheaper...
...It all begins in the Zlotchevsky orchard in Rishon L'Tzion, South of Jaffa...
...To sing hosannahs to God one must wave heavenwards a palm branch and a citron of singular beauty...
...During the holiday the arba minim give the synagogue a special aura...
...Mordecai hefts a citron in his upraised palm...
...What is "the best...
...In English you translate hadar as 'goodly,' yes...
...Now Yussi is working like ten horses," says Mordecai...
...Now he must gather everything to be shipped...
...Every August Leibel rents an empty store close to his and has it ready for Zlotchevsky and his precious merchandise...
...The remaining three species include the lulav, a palm branch cut before its fronds have spread apart, the hadas (myrtle), and the aravah (willow...
...Willows grow in America—the only one of the arba minim not imported...
...Some years ago an Israeli citron grower named Zvi Zlotchevsky heard of Leibel's reputation for fair dealing and invited him to become his partner...
...Then why not come later...
...All at once the visitor sees the young man with the magnifying glass and the tooth pick in a new light...
...What about the willows...
...Before the autumn rains begin in late October, Yussi cultivates, fertilizes and prunes his trees...
...Then he cuts palm branches—hundreds and hundreds of them...
...Leibel, though only fifty-one years old, wears a long, fullface grizzled beard which gives him a patriarchal presence...
...See, how it has mounds and pits— like hills and valleys on the earth...
...These are mentioned in a single verse in the Bible (Leviticus XXXIII, 40): "On the first day (of the holiday of Succot) you shall take for yourself the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of thick-leaved trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days...
...Yaacov Luria has publishedfiction and poetry in The New Yorker and Harper's...
...After twenty-nine years of growth, the citron trees are a bit over ten feet tall...
...The myrtle must be kept moist and refrigerated, or they dry up...
...They need not be perfect examples of their kind, he adds, just beautiful enough to qualify as hadar...
...Each of the happy ones is carrying, triumphantly and tenderly, an etrog and lulav, without which no observant Jew could celebrate the festival of Succot...
...Everything is ready...
...Just before Succot, the last in the cluster of holidays that usher in the Jewish New Year, the street swarms with bearded men in black suits and hats...
...A very particular customer," notes Mordecai...
...In between are the lulav with taste but no scent— the Jew with learning but no good deeds—and the myrtle with scent but no taste—the Jew who is virtuous but ignorant...
...The whole business flies 5,000 miles to New York, and Nehama and I shlepp along too...
...If all goes well, by the following July the fruit is mature enough to pick...
...The lulav, long and green, could pass for a wand or a sword in its plastic sheath...
...His work last appeared in moment's May issue...
...How terrible if everyone were a learned tzaddik (or saint...
...The fruit of goodly trees" is the etrog, or citron...
...The fruit of goodly trees.' But in Hebrew, what a word is hadar...
...So thank God for El-Al...
...This year Leibel is sad because Zvi died recently in Israel, but the tradition is being maintained by his son Yussi...
...Their gaits are quick and urgent, their faces set in determination...
...He comes early and takes his time...
Vol. 3 • September 1978 • No. 9
