Brian Schwartz
THE LULAV
IN THE FALL YOU SEE them scattered around the city, black-clad, often with their hats askew and patchy, youthful beards, with a question they are required to pose to passing strangers. They are out on street corners in force during the autumn holiday of Sukkot, which means they’ll most likely be holding lulavs and etrogs. And yes I feel a little guilty about repeating the word they in my previous sentence. I feel guilty passing by these young men in the city without some show of recognition, if not solidarity. Guilty enough that, if one of the missionaries circling Astor Place catches my eye as I thread through pedestrian traffic on my way to work, I can’t lie to him—I have to answer. Are you Jewish? I’ll wait until I’m most of the way past him, so the young man, earnest in his questioning, has no chance for a follow-up, no chance to accost me with the frond-like lulav in his hands. Halfway between a whisper and a grunt, I’ll tell him: Yes. Then I hurry forward, uncaught by the net he’s cast, and I’m safe because the rest of Manhattan is flowing toward the sharp-eyed proselytizer, presenting him with an infinitude of possible Jews.
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To picture a lulav, to see it the way I saw it, imagine a long, dry stalk of reed-like grass, or a spatulate fan of woven dried grasses. When I began to write this essay, I searched for impressions in my memory—impressions of lulavs—and those memories, indistinct at best, failed me. I saw in my mind’s eye a bamboo-like stalk with long green leaves whiskering out at the top. But the picture in my head—turns out it was more fiction than fact.
The etrog I know better. It’s easier to recall: a lemonlike fruit, bright yellow, knobbed with citrusy warts that give it the feel of a manmade object designed for easy gripping. What does it symbolize? Let me get back to you. I want you to understand the uncertainty I felt when I first attempted to recollect these objects and their meanings. This is all we need to establish for now: Like the lulav, an etrog is associated with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
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In my twenties, I used to run through Prospect Park in Brooklyn a few times a week. I’m no longer a Brooklynite—my last run through the park was more than a decade ago—but I remember how often knuckly tree roots interrupted the narrow dirt path under my feet; I remember needing to move off the path at times to make way for a caravan of horses carrying amateur riders around the park’s inner oval; I remember, on weekends, hearing drumbeats two-thirds of the way through my route, then slowing down to look at the circle of blissed-out percussionists slapping congas, forty or fifty drummers strong. On a warm fall day—it must have been the fall, because Sukkot is an autumn harvest festival—at about the midpoint of my run through Prospect Park, I saw several dark-clad youths milling around under a ginkgo tree. One of them scanned my face and asked me the question. “Are you Jewish?” And I thought: I can make eye contact and everything, I’m in full stride, there will be no consequences. I looked the sharp-eyed teenager in the face and said, “Yes! I am!” And he began to run with me. This delighted his friends, whose laughter was audible even as we—my proselytizer and I—ran away from them. The day was warm, yet this young man following alongside me wore black slacks and a matching jacket; surprisingly, his suit and his heavy leather shoes didn’t seem to weigh down his swift feet.
“Wait, you’re Jewish?” he said. He hustled along next to me; I felt him at my right elbow. I tried to pick up the pace. I’d already run more than two miles and was soaked in sweat.
“Wait,” he said. He wasn’t afraid of the secular world. Or he wasn’t impressed by the secular world. I don’t know. I could see that a part of him, at least, wanted to show me that he could win a footrace between us.
I didn’t want to encourage him. I didn’t want to ignore that he was a human being capable of a wide range of thoughts and feelings. But I kept running.
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The young missionaries who spread out around New York’s five boroughs during Sukkot are members of the Chabad movement, a particular branch of Orthodox Judaism that originated in the late seventeen hundreds. The movement sprang to life in what’s now the border area between Belarus and Russia—roughly the place where my Jewish grandparents were born, although neither of them had any association with Chabad. According to the Encyclopedia of World Religions, “Chabad helped to create the baal teshuvah movement, the goal of which is to bring non-Orthodox Jews into the spiritual, ideological and theological camp of Orthodoxy.” In other words, identifying and approaching less observant Jews—Jews like me—is very much Chabad’s jam, partly because members believe that if they increase the number of Jews performing religious rituals and mitzvahs, the Messiah will come sooner. And if more Jews like me discover a latent desire to become observant—a desire trigged by the power of prayer, or the tactile appeal of handling lulavs and etrogs—that’s even better. There are Chabad communities all over the world now, including in the regions of Eastern Europe where Jewish life and culture were devastated by the Holocaust. But the main headquarters of Chabad’s global movement sits in Brooklyn, on Eastern Parkway, eight blocks or so from the edge of Prospect Park.
In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James meditates on the spiritual temperature of belief. He writes, “All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to recrystallize about it.” The sentence grows out of James’s thoughts about religious conversion, implying that, to be real, our metaphysical transformations must reorganize and reshape everything about us. By this logic, my encounters with Chabad missionaries have left me cold: they haven’t changed the way I live my life. But in my memory there is something still living about the overtures these dark-clad youths have made toward me over the years in multiple New York City neighborhoods. I do feel a desire—certainly not a cold or calculated one—to be recognized as a Jew. I see a lulav, an etrog, and I think, Those are mine, too.
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The lulav is comprised of multiple plants, requiring branches from three separate trees: palm, willow and myrtle. These branches are braided together to create what looks like a mutant stalk of celery, wild, rough, and inedible. Jewish mystics have argued that the three species of tree combined in every lulav reference specific body parts, our backbone, our eyes, and our mouth, while the lemony etrog represents our heart. (I love the notion of the human heart as lemon flavored, pulpy, sour, yet nourishing. No matter how different I am from the observant young men who inquire about my Jewishness on the streets of NYC, perhaps we have similar citrus in our ribcages.)
A cousin of the lemon, the etrog (known in English as a citron) comes from a plant with shallow roots. For that reason, growers are sometimes tempted to graft parts of the plant onto hardier citrus with deeper roots, like a lime tree. But according to Jewish law such grafting renders an etrog unfit for ritual purposes, so rabbis visit etrog orchards in order to inspect the roots of the plants.
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At our dentist’s office in New Jersey, just before Dr. S put the tools in my mouth for his final check of my enamel, he asked politely how I was doing during the endless pandemic. Half-jokingly, I said “Oy vey ist mir,” the well-known Yiddish phrase for oh woe is me, although my dentist and I had never discussed religion or ethnicity or anything like that before. Still, I knew, or thought I knew, he was Jewish, because of his name and—I admit it—because of his face. And as he began to scrape around my molars with the pointed metal implement that, come to think of it, so resembles a yad—the silver pointer, tipped with a tiny sculpted hand, that Jews use to mark their place as they read from a Torah scroll—as he scraped, my dentist said, “Speaking of oy vey: how about our brethren in Brooklyn with the black hats, not agreeing to wear masks or socially distance or shut down their yeshivas? It’s a virus, fellas. God cannot inoculate you.” My dentist’s disapproval of our coreligionists added pressure to the pointer pressing on my teeth. I couldn’t speak back to him with his fingers blocking my tongue, but I wondered if members of the Chabad sect in particular were among the Orthodox Jews who were flouting public health recommendations regarding masks and social distancing. And I noted the phrase our brethren, as well as my dentist’s mystified inflection as he spoke. Our brethren, two words laced with irony, confusion, disappointment, anger, affection, recognition, and a measured longing for rapprochement.
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During the initial handling of the lulav for the Sukkot holiday, Jews recite the Shehecheyanu, a prayer for marking firsts and “new fruit.” Translations of the prayer’s Hebrew differ somewhat depending on the Jewish authority offering the interpretation. But the more strictly traditional translations insist on God’s regal masculinity, God’s power to give us life:
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has granted us life, sustained and enabled us to reach this occasion.
Regardless of the particular translation, the prayer strikes me as an odd choice for hardworking agrarian people celebrating the harvest: Didn’t ancient Jews do a ton of work trying to coax sustenance from the land? If so, why give an invisible deity so much credit for the olives, the grains, the etrog? I’m not saying there was no luck or contingency involved in farming arid climes; I’m not saying the prayer isn’t fitting for other occasions; I’m just saying, if I were a farmer, I’d feel tempted to give myself props any time my labor resulted in a successful harvest.
The Orthodox young men approaching strangers with lulavs in New York City would most likely have ingrained in their minds the idea of God as king and creator, a presence to whom they owe their very lives. I don’t believe this. Which is not to say I’m utterly unmoved by the Shehecheyanu: As an apostate’s son who grew up only occasionally attending temple, I still feel comforted by the sound of Jewish prayer, touched by a glowing sense of community. These prayers, these rituals, these rules about which tree branches to bind together and what to say when shaking the lulav up and down. The rabbis’ anxieties about proper fruit, about roots that are shallow or deep.
My older brother, when he was in his twenties, became an observant Jew (and ultimately a rabbi). Even a single family—as few as two brothers—can provide instructive case studies in interdenominational Jewishness.
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One time I allowed myself to be waylaid by one of the young men who asked, “Are you Jewish?” I not only said yes, but I took the lulav and etrog from him—he may even have draped a prayer shawl over my shoulders, I really can’t recall. This was in the underground turnstile area of the Union Square subway station, right by the steps that lead further down to the N train. The young man tapped his finger on the prayers I was supposed to say, and told me how to hold the fruit and the tree parts, how to shake them. What I remember is not the missionary’s face, or his voice, but the sea of commuters that parted around us as we stood there together, and the feel of the lulav in my hands, the prickle of plants scraping against my palms, focusing my senses. The subway rumbled beneath me; above me, above the ground, Manhattan rose up into the sky. But I was not being pushed along by the crowd, I was fanning the air, stirring the atoms of the city, shaking instead of being shaken.
The lulav and the etrog, those objects he handed to me, created a different space within the familiar, bustling place underneath the streets of Manhattan. That space allowed us to meet on neutral ground, not his Jewish neighborhood and not my secular neighborhood, neither Crown Heights nor Park Slope, but a place where we were both Jewish people who could speak the same language and the same prayers. It is telling, I think, that interdenominational Jewishness has no fixed address—there’s no building I know of, no permanent space or place where Jews with notably different perspectives and belief systems might debate their different understandings of the world. We only practice the ancient Jewish art of argument with other Jewish people whose lives look a lot like our own. And maybe it goes both ways: maybe the black-clad young men, when they return from the secular borderlands they’re asked to patrol those few times a year, wish they’d been able to ask questions more probing than “Are you Jewish?”
I keep coming back to the lulav: its weaving together of separate branches, its ease of use, its droopy beauty. I think of our ability to pass the lulav from hand to hand, person to person. If more Jewish people could do that once a year—hand off a ritual baton that helps us feel our roots, from the observant community to the secular community and back again—we might understand how different we are, and how we’re different, and how much more we need to do to bridge the gap.
But I remember how my dentist expressed the dilemma, too, as he shook his head and held my tongue: our brethren. They are so far away from us. Why are they so far away? I like to think the different objects I might hold in my hands—a lulav, an etrog—could temporarily scrape away at the separation between myself and the Orthodox Jews who annually seek me out on the streets of New York City. But I know, too, if I bridged the gap, they—my brethren—they would want to put words in my mouth.
BRIAN SCHWARTZ has published stories and essays in Blackbird, Harvard Review, and TIMBER, and in the anthology Inheriting the War. For several years he wrote the sports column A Fan's Notes at The Rumpus. Since 2003, he has been teaching in NYU's Expository Writing Program.
