September 24, 2007
Kosher Food Porn
Yom Kippur is past and now we are into the five days’ preparation for Sukkot. It’s a harvest fest that also commemorates the 40 years of wandering post-Exodus, with the Jews living in temporary huts in the Sinai while God waited for everyone to die who’d picked up slave mentalities in Egypt.
Nice story, but only that — a story — according to revisionist archaeologists. Lately they’ve found evidence suggesting the Jews were plotzed in Canaan the whole time the Bible has them enslaved in Egypt, then wandering the Sinai. As reported by writer Daniel Lazare in Harper’s a few years ago, competing desert tribes from the period, including Jews, invented “wandering” and “conquest” myths to lay claim to land they’d never been kicked out of but were simply trying to hold onto, in part by spinning elaborate rationales.
One of the fruits of those rationales, literally, is the etrog, or citron. (Also known as esrog, with an “s,” among Ashkenazim of a certain age, including yours truly). Go to the Williamsburg Bridge this week and see black hats caressing the fruit in one hand and ritually waving long, green fronds (lulav) in the other. Or skip the bridge and check an article in this week’s Forward that outdoes Ben Katchor:
“This is a good year for etrogs,” said Levi Zagelbaum, a wholesaler who is president of the Esrog Headquarters Inc. in New York…“It’s not an easy business … I’m so nervous and tense that I haven’t slept for nights. I can find an etrog that I think is perfect, and someone will send it back to me because he doesn’t think so. And then I might sell it for a lot of money to someone else who thinks it’s beautiful. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
… But what determines beauty? Most agree that a beautiful etrog should be shaped like a tower, with a wider bottom and a narrower top. … there is the Chazon Ish (or Lefkowitz), which is shaped like an egg, and the Braverman strain, which has a bumpy exterior. Another type, the Kivilevitz, is a sub-strain of the Braverman. Some like etrogs that are narrow in the center, commonly referred to as “belted” etrogs…Zagelbaum himself prefers an etrog that is straight and bumpy.
Etrogs cost $50 to $100 — apiece. (Do the goyim need to know this? Is it good for the Jews?) Quite the fetish, and the commodity to boot, as evidenced by Mr. Zagelbaum’s brisk business and high anxieties. The Forward recommends a Kosher chocolatier in Park Slope, Brooklyn where one can buy jelly made from etrogs. Presumably it’s to be eaten with pate of hummingbird tongue.
Typically, an etrog is the size of a lemon (for some soft, food-porn etrog footage, click to this Youtube). At least, it was lemon sized in the shtetl. Today, there appears to be something called the Braverman fertilizer, related to the Kivilevitz hydroponic and the silicohen implant. The result: etrogs bigger than XXX-rated breasts (see second Youtube clip).
Speaking of which, look how Chabadniks are sexifying the etrog (final Youtube). Accosting people on the streets to do mitzvahs has taught the Lubavitchers at least one thing: 2 turn people on 2 atavistic religious rituals, u gotta help them shake shake shake. If not their booty, then at least their etrog.
The thing they do with the lulav and etrog — extending it repeatedly to the sides and in front of them (see YouTube)– is called ‘bentching.’ Seems like a useful word, for something.
Debbie:
Nice item about etrog or, as I was taught to call it while prepping for my Bar Mitzvah, “esrog.” (Reform synagogues use the Ashkenazic pronunciation, in which an “s” often substitutes for a “t,” e.g. bas mitzvah instead of bat mitzvah, etc., whereas the Zionist movement seems to prefer the Sephardic.) I’m aware that Sukkoth supposedly commemorates the forty years spent wandering in the desert. But it was originally one of three Canaanite harvest festivals. There was the barley harvest, which, according to a vivid account in the Book of Ruth, was an occasion for feasting, drinking, and love-making. There was the wheat harvest, subsequently turned by the rabbis into Shavuot to mark the day Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai. The third was the fruit harvest, which eventually grew into the Jewish holiday of Succoth, known as the Feast of Booths for the temporary huts that grape
pickers erected in the fields. Feasting, drinking, and sex were no doubt features of the other two as well given the agricultural nature of Canaanite society and the general emphasis on fertility. They were transformed into celebrations of the law only after the Israelites set about separating themselves from the other Canaanites and, in the process, composing an elaborate mythology in which they portrayed themselves not as an agricultural people but as a group of nomadic warriors who, under a pair of chieftains named Moses and Joshua, exterminated the agriculturalists and implanted their own desert cult in their midst.
You should check out the Book of Ruth. It’s a gem.
Judith’s post reads like something Eichmann might have passed on to one of his subordinates as a bit of special knowledge of the Jews and their odd customs. However, Eichmann’s tone would probably have been less derisive.