Skip to main content

Esrog Pomander: A pleasant sort of sacrilege

esrogs 003Okay, it only FEELS like sacrilege, the fact that I am taking my mother’s esrog and ours, which maybe cost over $100 just two weeks ago, and stabbing them full  of hard pokey cloves.

Boy, do my hands smell great.  And what an astonishingly relaxing way to pass the time when my energy hasn’t come back from yom tov, and I need to sit quietly in denial of all the non-Yom Tov work that must be done to catch up.

esrogs 005Traditionally, pomanders are made very neatly, with the cloves in nice, straight lines.  You can even draw the lines on with a sharp pencil – the fruit darkens as it dries, and they won’t show on the finished product.  I did one with “straight” lines (not pencil-marked); the other has the cloves arranged in more of a spiral pattern, which I did draw on, but it doesn’t show.

esrogs 004Whoops – knocked off the pitom!  Now it’s pasul… oh, yeah – it’s worthless anyway!  (that’s the pitom, lying on the table next to the esrog… I stuck a clove in to replace it)

Naomi and I used skewers to poke the holes (wooden skewer ends will turn to mush after a while, so you may need a few) and took turns for a while, poking and pushing in the cloves.

esrogs 001Two nice Jewish uses for an esrog pomander: 

1)  Havdalah!  Many people use cloves anyway as besamim, and the esrog adds another dimension of hiddur (beautification). 

2) Yom Kippur!  There is a custom to pass around an esrog pomander in shul on Yom Kippur afternoon for two reasons:

a) it revives the spirit (in Yiddish, a mechaya – it brings you back to life!), and

b) normally, we recite so many brachas on food and other things that we easily make the 100 brachas in a day that some say are mandatory, but on Yom Kippur, we are missing all our food brachas.  Smelling a pomander lets us recite borei minei vesamim, and gain an “extra” bracha.

(On a fresh esrog with no cloves,  you’d probably say the fruit-smell bracha, “shenosein reiach tov b’peros”, whereas with a shrivelled clovey pomander, you can’t really smell the fruit anymore.  For more information on brachas for smells – what a fascinating topic to procrastinate over! – click here and scroll down to “What Bracha do I recite on an Esrog?” (near the bottom)

Oh, man, I am so BORED by this craft…

esrogs 002

(she didn’t really get bored, but the hard cloves did start to hurt her fingers pretty quickly)

Speaking of hard cloves, the whole time I was doing this craft, I was sitting and thinking about the probably connection between the English word “clove” and the French word “clou,” which means “nail.”  Thinking about it, deciding it probably isn’t worth Googling.  

But, hey:  if you didn’t know the French word for nail is “clou,” and that a u often changes to a v in the shift between languages, then feel free to Google it and see just how closely the words are related.  I suspect it’s no coincidence, but lack the energy to find out.

Comments

  1. Actually, at least it's a continuation of the holiness. maybe the grandkids can do it for us next year...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love your comments!

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

What do we tell our kids about Chabad and “Yechi”?

If I start by saying I really like Chabad, and adore the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, z"l, well... maybe you already know where I'm headed. Naomi Rivka has been asking lately what I think about Chabad.  She asks, in part, because she already knows how I feel.  She already knows I’m bothered, though to her, it’s mostly about “liking” and “not liking.”  I wish things were that simple. Our little neighbourhood in Israel has a significant Chabad presence, and Chabad conducts fairly significant outreach within the community.  Which sounds nice until you realize that this is a religious neighbourhood, closed on Shabbos, where some huge percentage of people are shomer mitzvos.  Sure, it’s mostly religious Zionist, and there are a range of observances, for sure, but we’re pretty much all religious here in some way or another. So at that point, this isn’t outreach but inreach .  Convincing people who are religious to be… what? A lot of Chabad’s efforts here are focused on kids, including a