Walk into a synagogue on the festival of Sukkot and you will meet one of the strangest religious spectacles that you are ever likely to encounter: rows of otherwise sober, competent adults clutching assorted sprigs of vegetation and shaking them, with grave solemnity, at the four points of the compass.
The custom is biblical. In Leviticus, the Israelites are commanded to take up four species on Sukkot (Leviticus 23:40): the lulav, a palm frond; the etrog, a fragrant citron; the hadas, a sprig of myrtle; and the aravah, a branch of willow. These are bound together, blessed, and waved with great pomp and enthusiasm throughout the week-long festival. To the uninitiated, it resembles an outbreak of botanical lunacy, the sort of ritual that might be dreamt up by a Celtic Druid high on his own supply. Yet, as with every facet of ancient Jewish practice, the biblical commandment of the four species has, over the centuries, been imbued with endless reams of symbolism, allegory, and homiletic ingenuity.
One celebrated reading, preserved in an ancient rabbinic midrash, treats the four as four kinds of Jew, sorted along two axes: taste and fragrance. The etrog possesses both, and so it stands for the Jew who has both learned much Torah and performs good deeds. The lulav, from the date palm, has taste but no fragrance, and stands for the Jew of learning without good deeds. The hadas has fragrance but no taste, the Jew of kindness without learning. The aravah possesses neither, symbolising the Jew who can boast of nothing at all, the unpromising specimen that occupies a marginal place within the community.
Of course, the force of the midrash is the message that none are rejected. Israel is not an assembly of elite etrogim. There is space for all—brilliant and unlettered, refined and uncouth, accomplished and struggling. The four species are bound together, solemnly blessed, and elevated in unison.
There is, however, a mischief lurking in the phrase itself. The word min, in rabbinic Hebrew, means a kind or a species; yet the very same word also signifies a heretic. Arba minim, the term used to refer to the four species of sukkot, also denotes four heretics. Having noticed this pun years ago, my naturally contrarian and ill-disciplined mind has, ever since, followed the pun down a series of decidedly disreputable paths.
As a student, and occasional teacher, of modern intellectual history, I cannot help but notice that my people have produced their own arba minim: four great heretics whose works have left their ineffaceable mark on the modern Western mind, and whose rebellions bear, unmistakably, the fingerprints of the tradition they abandoned. More remarkably still, these four thinkers—whose heresies were social and philosophical as much as religious—fit rather neatly into the four-part schema proffered by this rabbinic midrash all those centuries ago, if re-read through some rather roguish modern conceptions of intellectual achievement and moral aroma.
Sukkot, Leopold Pilichowski (1894)
