Taking and shaking the Sukkot holiday's Four Species
It can be argued that no holiday plays up to Jews' inner desire to accessorize quite like Sukkot. Aside from the bling adorning the festival's titular huts, there's also the commandment to acquire, gather and wave around "The Four Species."
It can be argued that no holiday plays up to Jews' inner desire to accessorize quite like Sukkot. Aside from the bling adorning the festival's titular huts, there's also the commandment to acquire, gather and wave around "The Four Species" (date palm frond or lulav, myrtle branches or hadasim, willow branches or aravot, and a citron or etrog). In Jerusalem, finding the perfect set and often also an ornate case, sleeve or tote for the Four Species (the Arba'at HaMinim, as they're called in Hebrew) is the name of the game.
But buying, transporting and storing is just the beginning of the Jerusalem Four Species experience. Jewish tradition holds that the set be shaken in a special way every day of the holiday, minus Saturday. During morning prayers, men (and, in many congregations, women as well) march around the synagogue while shaking the species in a special sequence (up, down, right, left, forward, backward) and chanting prayers for God's help.
Once the holiday ends, many families keep the etrogim around and make homemade jam out of them, while Uzi-Eli Chezi, an icon of the Machane Yehuda merket, sells extracts, refreshments and potions from the etrog's extracts all year round. Some also have the tradition of keeping dried citrons or
inserting cloves into them as a decorative havdalah piece for the weekly
post-Shabbat ceremony. As for the lulavim, they make for excellent if not so child-friendly faux
swords. En guarde!
No two Four Species sets are alike, so each year, a mini industry pops up with nearly every city having a market for vendors to hawk their inedible produce. Jerusalem's Four Species Market (click here to see opening hours and more details for the 2010 incarnation)
is adjacent to the Machane Yehuda market, but there are also a number
of other markets spread around the city, most notably in the more
religious neighborhoods (click here to see a complete list in Hebrew). While a "standard" Four Species set will sell for about 60 NIS, better produce - especially the etrogim, which have strict specifications and are especially prized - can run to ten times that and even more. The Israeli hit movie Ushpizin, for example, is centered around one very, very expensive etrog and a struggling ultra-Orthodox family in the Nachlaot neighborhood.
The Four Species hearken back to an ancient time when the agricultural holiday of Sukkot was more closely connected to the harvest and the coming rains in the mind of the Judean layman.
Images courtesy of rahel_jaskow, Brian Negin and Yehuda Cohen from Flickr under a Creative Commons license, and by Flash90 for GoJerusalem.com.
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