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Dear Rabbi,
What’s the deal with shaking the lulav and the etrog for Sukkot? Why does God want us to take plants and wave them around? Sorry to say it, but it all seems really pagan to me.
-Leery of the Lulav
Dear Leery,
The short answer to your question is: We don’t know. We wave the arba minim (the “Four Species”) – etrog (citron), palm, myrtle, and willow – each morning of the Sukkot holiday (except on Shabbat) because the Torah tells us to do something along those lines and because our rabbis interpreted the verses in a certain way.
A slightly longer answer: We could decide to begin and end Shabbat every week at the same time, but we don’t. We let the times of sundown and nightfall tell us when to do that, meaning that Shabbat is a very different experience in the middle of winter and the middle of summer. This keeps us in touch with nature. So too, Sukkot helps us get a little closer to the natural world and its rhythms and components. We get in touch with nature (literally) by handling these four plants in a prescribed ritual, just as we spend time eating (and sometimes even sleeping) in our sukkot.
Some scholars suggest that the Four Species could be some sort of fertility symbol, and some say that it’s all about the rain-like sound of the palm branches, thought to bring rain in turn. And still, others like to talk about the symbolism of the Four Species: the eye-shaped myrtle, the lip-shaped willow, the palm that stands and bends like a spine, and the etrog, shaped (maybe?) like a heart.
But I would encourage you to embrace the arbitrary nature of the ritual here. We do it because it is something prescribed by our Torah and our Rabbis. It helps to keep us mindful of the world around us and takes us out of our everyday experiences for a little while by injecting them with something profoundly Jewish but difficult to interpret rationally.
The rest, as they say, is commentary.
