The Kosher Terroir: Is the Wine Ready for the Third Temple?

Host: S. Simon Jacob

[00:00:08] Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers. If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine. Sit back, relax, and enjoy.

[00:00:37] Do you hear that? Take a second with it. Because for the last nine days that sound was forbidden in Jewish homes all over the world. No wine, no meat, no music, and on Tisha B'Av itself, no food, no greeting, no shalom. We sat on the floor and we practiced losing everything. And now it's over. The calendar has turned. This is the first bottle of wine, and wine is back.

[00:01:21] So while it's in my hand, while the glass is full, and the mourning is behind us, I want to try something—something a little dangerous. I want to ask the question: Are we ready for the Third Temple?

[00:01:36] Go ahead. Ask yourself this week. Ask it in your shul. Ask it at your Shabbat table. Ask it, God help you, online. And then start counting. Because I doubt you will get 90 seconds before you have a fight on your hands between the politics, red heifers, messianism. Who's allowed to want it? How badly? And what are they permitted to do about it?

[00:02:09] Ask a hundred Jews if we're ready for the Third Temple, and you'll get two hundred opinions, and at least one broken friendship. And honestly, the fighting is the answer. You don't even need to finish the argument. A people that cannot ask the question without tearing itself apart has answered it.

[00:02:34] Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I'm Simon Jacob. And if you're hearing this the day it goes out, we are exactly one week past Tisha B'Av, the day we mourned a Temple that fell—our sages say, not to Rome's engineering, but to something much closer to home: Sinat Chinam, baseless hatred. Jews who could not stand each other.

[00:03:02] The destruction we just finished mourning was not a construction failure. It was a relationship failure. And I don't have to tell you that the relationships are not looking very good. Turn on any news, any news. Pick your side, I don't care which, and everybody's tied up in knots. Passions running high in every direction, everyone certain, everyone furious, even the religious world is being pulled into opposing camps.

[00:03:39] If readiness for a rebuilt Jerusalem is measured in how we treat each other, then the honest answer to my dangerous question is no. Obviously no. Look at us.

[00:03:58] Except... except that everyone arguing about whether we're ready has been asking rabbis, politicians, and pundits. Nobody has asked the wine. And it turns out the Temple has very strong opinions about wine.

[00:04:13] Twice a day, every day, morning and afternoon, wine was poured out at the base of the altar in Nisuch HaYayin. If you were with me back on the Seventeenth of Tammuz, you know that when Jerusalem was under siege, the first thing to die wasn't the walls, it was the wine. The whole season of mourning we just came through opened literally on the day the wine stopped.

[00:04:50] So a wine show gets to ask the question differently: Not "are we ready," but "what would it take to start the wine again?" And that question has real answers, written-down answers. The rabbis left us something astonishing: a complete quality spec for altar wine. Where it may grow, how the vineyards must be farmed, what the wine may and may not be—the oldest appellation document on earth.

[00:05:22] And when you read it with today's eyes—and we will—something almost eerie happens. But here's the real reason for this episode: For the past few years, I've been carrying a microphone through the world of kosher wine and spirits—winemakers, distillers, importers. And there's one question I've started asking every single guest: "Do you feel competition from one another?"

[00:05:52] These are rivals—same shelves, same customers, same small market. The textbooks tell you exactly how they should answer. Not one of them has answered that way. Not one. And there's a phrase that keeps coming back guest after guest, unprompted—the same six words. By the end of this hour, I want you to hear those six words, the way I've come to hear them, as the most hopeful sentence in Jewish life right now.

[00:06:28] There's even a Hebrew pun hiding inside them, so perfect, I refuse to believe it's an accident. There's a cluster of grapes so heavy it swung from a pole beneath two men. There's the original sin behind Tisha B'Av itself, which turns out to be of all things a wine story, and the day, this very week, that its punishment officially ended.

[00:06:57] So pour something, my friends. You're allowed again, because the question on the table isn't really about buildings. It starts with a checklist: strip away the politics, strip away the stones, and ask, like a producer, not a pundit, what does a Temple actually need? Because sitting near the top of that list, above the arguments, above the headlines, is a standing wine order—a big one. Let's go read the spec.

[00:07:35] Let's start where this whole season started. If you were with me on the 17th of Tammuz, you'll remember the image that opened our summer. Jerusalem under siege, the city starving, and the moment the Talmud chose to mark as the beginning of the end. Not a wall breached or a gate burnt. The Tamid stopped. The twice-daily offering, morning and afternoon, the heartbeat of the Temple, and with every Tamid a Nisuch HaYayin, wine poured out at the base of the altar.

[00:08:15] When the siege finally choked the city, the first thing to die was the wine. We spent a whole episode mourning that. Tonight I want to flip it over and ask the forward-looking version of the same question: If the wine was the first thing to stop, then to start it again, somebody has to supply it.

[00:08:39] So let's talk like producers for a minute. Not pundits, producers. What did that account actually look like? Every Tamid lamb came with a quarter hin of wine. That's roughly a liter. The exact conversion is argued, like everything worth arguing about, but call it a bottle and a bit.

[00:09:06] Twice a day, every single day, drought or war or winter. That's the baseline. Before Shabbat brought extra offerings, before Rosh Chodesh added bulls and rams at half a hin and a third of a hin each. Before the festivals, before Sukkot alone marched seventy bulls through the course of a single week, each with its own pour.

[00:09:37] Add it all up across a year, and the altar was drinking on a scale of a boutique winery's entire annual production. Thousands of liters. Year in, year out, forever. Now hold that thought, because here's what it means: The Beit HaMikdash was not a customer of the Judean wine industry. It was the anchor tenant. It was the standing order that the whole hillside economy was built around.

[00:10:14] And an order that size, that holy, needed something very serious buyers eventually write. It needed a specification, a spec. And friends, we have it.

[00:10:31] It's sitting in the eighth chapter of Mishnah Menachot, and in the Gemara that unpacks it. And I'm going to make a claim now that I'll stand by: It is the oldest appellation document I know of. I've looked. A vineyard classification and a quality control protocol written down some seventeen centuries before anyone in Bordeaux thought to rank a chateau.

[00:11:08] Let me read it to you the way I read it, the way anyone who's worked the harvest would read it: as a spec sheet.

First, where? The Mishnah asks, where did they bring the wine from? And it answers with a ranking: Kerutim and Hatulim—and here's a detail I love so much I could frame it—the Mishnah grades them with a Greek letter, Alpha. Alpha for wine, First Growth.

[00:11:39] Below them a second tier, named by name: Beit Rima and Beit Lavan in the hills, Kefar Signa in the valley. And then the line that proves they were thinking exactly like an appellation board: "All the land was valid, but from here is where they would bring." Everything's kosher, not everything is worthy. That's not law talking anymore, that's taste.

[00:12:18] Second, how the vineyard is farmed. And this is where if you've been listening to this show for the past few years, you're going to start feeling a chill. No wine from an over-manured vineyard. They didn't want pumped-up, force-fed vines. No wine from an irrigated vineyard—Beit HaShlachim is out. Let me say that plainly: The Temple required dry-farmed wine, by law. The vine had to reach down and drink what the hill of Judea gave it, and nothing more.

[00:12:55] And no wine from a vineyard with crops sown between the rows. The vine gets the ground to itself. And the vines themselves not trained up high on trellises—the Delayot—but Rogeliot: low vines, close to the ground, the old bush vine way, the way you can still see them planted in the most modern, tradition-minded vineyards in the Mediterranean today. Fruit grown for concentration, not for volume.

[00:13:32] Third, the cellar work: Not big storage tanks, small barrels; barrels deliberately not filled to the top, so the wine's aroma could gather in the headspace. They were managing the nose of the wine on purpose in the times of the Mishnah.

[00:13:54] And when it came time to draw the wine for the altar, not from the top of the barrel because of the film that formed there, not from the bottom because of the lees, but from the middle. And my single favorite image in all of it—this one the Gemara gives us—the Gizbar, the Temple Treasurer, sitting beside the barrel as it runs, a reed in his hand watching the stream.

[00:14:22] The moment the sediment started to gush, he tapped the reed and they shut it down. That man had a job title in the Temple bureaucracy, and the job was: don't let a cloudy pour reach the altar. And over it all, the standards on the wine itself: Nothing sweet, nothing smoked, nothing cooked—honest, dry, clean wine or nothing.

[00:14:54] Now step back with me because I don't want you to miss what just happened. Dry-farmed, low-vigor, hillside fruit from named, ranked sites, nothing between the vines, small format elevage, careful racking, drawn clean off the lees, no cosmetic tricks, no cooking, no shortcuts. Friends, that's not an ancient document. That is a manifesto.

[00:15:29] That is almost word-for-word the direction the most exciting corner of Israeli wine has been marching to for the past decade. The growers we've talked about all season, pulling out of the irrigated valley floors and going back up to the hills, dry-farming heat-adapted varieties on their own roots, chasing concentration over quantity, cleanliness over makeup.

[00:16:05] Nobody in those vineyards set out to meet the Menachot spec. Most of them have never read it. And vintage by vintage, without knowing it, they are converging on it, as if the land remembers the order even when we forgot we placed it.

[00:16:26] So here's where part one leaves us, and I want to say it carefully because it's the foundation everything else tonight is based on: Are we ready for the Third Temple? I told you the honest answer is no. Look at us. But notice what we just found. The question has parts, and one part of it—the standing wine order, the oldest line item on the list—is quietly being answered right now on the terraces of the Judean hills, the slopes of the Galilee, and the sands of the Negev.

[00:17:09] The specification survived. The vineyards are coming back into compliance. The wine at least is getting ready, which forces the harder question into the open. Because if the vineyards are further along than we are, what exactly is the holdup?

[00:17:27] The Gemara answers that one with brutal honesty: The last Temple didn't fall because the wine failed inspection. It failed because we did. The way we failed has a name, and that's part two.

[00:18:01] So the vineyards are coming into compliance. The specs survived, the hills are being replanted, the wine is getting ready. Now the hard part. Because a Temple needs more than wine, and the Gemara is devastatingly clear about what the missing ingredient is. I want to spend a few minutes here. Only a few, I promise, because everything else stands on this.

[00:18:20] The Gemara in Yoma asks the questions you'd expect: Why was the Temple destroyed? And it answers twice, because there were two Temples. The First Temple the rabbis say fell because of the three worst things the Torah knows: idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed—the unholy combination, rock bottom. And that exile lasted seventy years, one lifetime, and they were building again.

[00:18:56] The Second Temple—and here the Gemara slows down because it knows this is going to hurt—the Temple fell in a generation that was occupied with Torah, Mitzvot, and acts of kindness. Read that again. A learning generation, an observant generation, a charitable generation, and it fell anyway, for one thing: Sinat Chinam, baseless hatred, Jews who could not stand each other.

[00:19:32] And then the Gemara does the arithmetic out loud, and it's the most frightening sentence in the whole episode: This teaches that baseless hatred is weighed against idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed combined. The three cardinal sins brought seventy years of exile; Sinat Chinam, we're still counting.

[00:19:58] And if you want to know what Sinat Chinam actually looked like—not the concept, the thing—the Gemara gives you that too in Gittin. And I have never gotten over where the story takes place: It takes place at a dinner party. Jerusalem fell, in the rabbis' own telling, because of a feast: a wealthy host, a guest list, an invitation delivered to the wrong man. Bar Kamtsa, the man he hated, instead of Kamtsa, his friend.

[00:20:43] When the host finds his enemy seated at the table, cup in hand, in front of everyone, he goes to throw him out. Bar Kamtsa pleads, "Let me stay. I'll pay for what I eat." "No." "I'll pay for half of the banquet." "No." "I'll pay for the whole feast." "No, out." And the sages were in the room, says the Gemara, and not one of them stood up. The humiliated man walked out of the party and into the arms of Rome, and the rest is the fast we kept last Thursday.

[00:21:22] Friends, hear it as a listener of this show: The Churban began at a table with wine on it, not on a battlefield. At a meal, the one place Jews are supposed to be joined. The setting of every Kiddush and every Simcha, the instrument of union became the scene of the shattering.

[00:21:50] A week ago we talked about the glass we break under the Chuppah, the wholeness deliberately made for fragments. This is the story behind that glass: The whole people shattered over a seating error while everyone watched and no one spoke.

[00:22:10] Now I told you at the top of the episode that if you ask whether we're ready for the Third Temple, you'll have a fight inside of ninety seconds. I'm not going to referee that fight. I'm not going to tell you which camp is right, and I'm not going to pretend I can't see all the knots, the passions running high in every direction, the certainty, the fury, communities I love pulled into opposing corners, even inside the religious world. You don't need me to describe it. You live it; we all do.

[00:22:52] I'm only going to point out what the Gemara just told us it means. If the Second Temple fell in a generation of learning and Mitzvot over how Jews treated each other at a table, the readiness was never going to be measured in stone. The red heifer is not what we're waiting for, my friends; we are. The second item on the checklist isn't quarried, it's practiced.

[00:23:29] Which is why the most famous sentence Rav Kook ever wrote is not a comfort, it's a work order: "If we were destroyed by Sinat Chinam, baseless hatred," he wrote, "then we will be rebuilt by Ahavat Chinam, baseless love." Love with no justification, no prerequisite, no vetting of whether the other Jew deserves it—the exact mirror image of hatred with no justification. That's the spec for the second item; that's what has to pass inspection.

[00:24:10] And here's the question that turns the whole episode, the reframe I promised you: Stop asking "Are we ready?" It's the wrong question. It just starts the fight again. Ask instead, is there anywhere in Jewish life, anywhere at all, where people already behave like that? Where the man who should be your rival gets treated like your brother? Not in theory, not on a bumper sticker; in business, with money on the line, where being seated at the competitor's table isn't a scandal, it's just normal. I happen to know a place like that.

[00:25:01] I've been carrying a microphone through it for over three years, and I've started asking everyone in it the same question. Winemakers, distillers, importers, people fighting for the same shelf space, the same shop, the same small market. The textbooks are unanimous about how they should answer. Wait until you hear how they actually answer.

[00:25:29] Here's the question; I want you to hear it the right way. My guests hear it cold, in the middle of a friendly conversation, usually right after we've talked about how small the kosher market is and how hard this business has gotten: "Do you feel competition from other wineries? From other distillers? Honestly, do you see them as rivals?"

[00:25:57] Now, before I tell you what they say, let's be fair about what they should say. These are people fighting for the same few inches of shelf in the same few shops, the same importers, the same reviewers, the same customers walking in before Shabbat with a budget for two bottles, not twenty.

[00:26:22] The world wine market is shrinking, my friends—we've covered this before—and when a market shrinks, every business school on earth teaches the same lesson: Defend your share. Your competitor's gain is arithmetic; it comes out of you. A man with a payroll and a mortgage and a warehouse full of unsold vintage has every right, every reason to answer my question with a list of grievances.

[00:26:51] I have asked that question in one form or another for years now, again, from winemakers, distillers, importers in Israel and across the diaspora. Not one of them has answered that way. Not a single one. Instead, I get brotherhood. Let me give you three tastes of it from this season alone.

[00:27:19] This summer I sat down with two of Israel's craft distillers in back-to-back weeks: Michael Ginasar from Thinkers in Jerusalem, and Ellie Kamiansky at Tavlin out in the Judean foothills at Hartuv. Two gin houses, same tiny market, same shelves, same customers. I even said to Ellie on the air, "We just had Thinkers on the show last week," and I put the question to each of them point-blank: Is it a brotherhood or a competition?

[00:27:56] Neither one hesitated: Brotherhood, a scene, not a scrum. They talk about other houses the way you talk about cousins. Milk & Honey wins the world's best whiskey in a blind tasting in London, and the gin makers in Jerusalem and Hartuv celebrate, because that medal isn't a threat, it's proof of the ceiling. An Israeli bottle can beat the world. "When one of us wins," they told me, "we all win."

[00:28:34] And when you push them, "All right, but somebody's gotta be the competition," you get the answer that redraws the whole map: Not each other, the giants, the big importers, the global brands that own the back of the bar in every hotel in Tel Aviv. The distiller down the road isn't the rival; he's the ally against the rival. You could seat the entire Israeli craft spirits world around one banquet table, and unlike certain banquets we talk about in Gittin, nobody is getting thrown out of it.

[00:29:17] And the winemakers, the winemakers go one step further to the thing that breaks the textbook completely. I don't need to mention specific names because this happens so generally across the entire industry. While I was visiting with one of the winemakers, he received a panic call from another looking for some very specific yeast that he needed to complete a fermentation. And this winemaker looked through, happened to have a few kilos left, and immediately sent it over to the other winemaker.

[00:29:50] Later in the season, another winemaker I know lost some equipment in his filtration area, and he needed help in order to get to bottling. And another winemaker shipped over equipment that day in order to make sure that he could meet his deadlines with bottling

[00:30:16] This is so general in this industry: equipment lent mid-harvest, tank space shared, yeast strains recommended to a competitor. And the number of times I've pushed back and said, "Gentlemen, you understand this is not normal. This is not how industries behave," they have all reached for the same explanation. Every one of them, in almost the same words: "The market out there is enormous. Israel is a drop in it. Kosher is a drop inside that drop. There's no point fighting each other over the drop. The job is to grow it. The pie isn't fixed," they tell me. "Make the category bigger, make the wine better, get more people to the table, and there's more for everybody."

[00:31:15] And then, I promised you, unprompted, guest after guest, like they've all been handed the same script, comes the phrase, the six words: "A rising tide lifts all boats." The first time you don't notice it. The third time you smile. By the fifth time, you start wondering who's organizing this. Nobody is organizing this; it's just what they all believe, separately, independently, in cellars a hundred kilometers apart. The most repeated sentence in three years of interviews on this show is an image of everyone rising together.

[00:32:06] Now I've held this back all episode, and I can't hold it anymore, because there is a joke hiding inside that sentence, and I refuse to believe it's an accident. Go into any wine shop in Israel, pick up a bottle of Israeli Syrah—and there are so many now, it's become one of the signature grapes in this land's revival—now read the Hebrew on the label: Samach-Yud-Resh-Heh (Sirah). Friends, sirah in Hebrew is the word for boat. Every bottle of Israeli Syrah is labeled in the Holy Tongue "boat," which means that every time a winemaker looks me in the eye and says, "A rising tide raises all boats," the language itself is winking at us. The tide is rising and it is lifting, quite literally, all Syrahs. Somewhere in the World to Come, whoever it is that arranges these little non-coincidental things is very pleased with himself.

[00:33:15] But let's give this mindset its proper name because it has two, one from economics and one from Torah.

[00:33:27] And they are both older and deeper than my silly pun. The economists call it positive-sum thinking: a fixed pie versus a growing pie. Zero-sum is the logic of the siege: Whatever you have you took from me, every table has a limited number of seats, and a man at the wrong one must be thrown out. Listen to that logic carefully, friends. That is Churban logic. That is the logic of the dinner party in Gittin.

[00:34:04] And the growing pie, abundance that spreads across all the players as the whole rises—that's the other logic. I'd go so far as to call it Temple logic: one building for everybody, where every tribe's pilgrimage made the city richer for the rest.

[00:34:26] And Chazal got there first; they always seem to get there first. The Gemara in Yoma 38, if you're writing it down, a teaching by Ben Azzai, hands down a principle that I think of now as the technology underneath every one of those interviews: "By your name they will call you, in your place they will seat you, and from what's yours they will give you." And then the punchline: "No man can touch even a hair's breadth of what has been prepared for his fellow." What Heaven set aside for your competitor was never yours to lose. His great vintage doesn't come out of your allotment. There are no seats at a table that anyone can steal from you. In your place they will seat you.

[00:35:31] Do you hear it? That's the answer to Bar Kamtsa. The whole catastrophe in Gittin began with a man thrown out of a seat, and the Gemara in Yoma is telling us the fear underneath the whole evening was a lie: Nobody can take your seat. The winemakers of Israel are running their businesses with real money, real mortgages, real risk, on the assumption that Yoma 38 is simply true, and it's working.

[00:36:13] One more thing, because I can hear a sharp listener objecting: Doesn't competition drive quality? Doesn't rivalry make everyone better? Chazal knew that too: Kinat Sofrim Tarbe Chochmah—the rivalry of scholars increases wisdom. There is a kosher kind of competition, the kind where your neighbor's brilliance raises your game instead of your blood pressure. And that's exactly what we hear in the cellar. Nobody's coasting. They taste each other's wines and go home and prune harder. That's Kinat Sofrim. What they've refused is the other thing, the Bar Kamtsa thing.

[00:37:00] So here's where we've arrived: an industry full of people who know exactly how small they are—a drop inside a drop—and who have somehow turned that smallness into the very reason for confidence. Grow the tide, lift the boats. Nobody touches what's prepared for his fellow.

[00:37:37] And I want to tell you why that particular alchemy, smallness transformed into confidence, stops me in my tracks every time I hear it. Because we have stood in this exact spot before, as a people, at the edge of this very land...

[00:38:21] ...in grape season, holding this very fruit in our hands. And that time we ran into the same arithmetic and got the opposite answer. We looked at ourselves and saw something small, and it destroyed us. It cost us 40 years in the desert, and the rabbis say it lit the very first fire of Tisha B'Av. That time we were the grasshoppers.

[00:38:39] That alchemy we just watched in the cellars—smallness transformed into confidence—I told you it stops me in my tracks, and here's why: We've run the exact same experiment before, as a people: same land, same season, same fruit hanging on the same hills, and we got the opposite result. And the opposite result cost us everything. And we spent last Thursday sitting on the floor because of it.

[00:38:48] I'm not speaking in metaphors. I want to tell you about a reconnaissance mission about 3,300 years ago

00:38:59 - S. Simon Jacob: And I want you to notice the whole way through that it's a wine story. It's told in the language of this show. Twelve men, one from each tribe, princes—the Torah calls them leaders and the best available—sent north out of the desert to scout the land of Canaan. And the Torah drops in a detail that most readers slide right past, but no listener of our program ever will: It tells us the season, and the days were the days of the first ripening grapes—grape season. They were sent into wine country at the exact moment the fruit begins to show what it's going to be, when a scout can walk a hillside and read next month's harvest hanging on the vine. Whoever timed this mission timed it like a vintner.

00:40:00 - S. Simon Jacob: And so the twelve went up, through the Negev, up into the hill country, through Hebron, and they came to a wadi so thick with fruit that the place was renamed for what they cut there: Nahal Eshkol, the Valley of the Cluster. One cluster, that's what they took—one cluster of grapes, carried on poles, on their shoulders. And the Gemara in Sotah describes the logistics and concludes it took eight men to carry it—eight princes of Israel staggering down the hill country under a single bunch of grapes, with two more carrying a pomegranate and a fig, like a mobile exhibition of what this soil can do.

00:40:54 - S. Simon Jacob: Hold that picture. It's the first terroir report I know of anywhere on record. The land was showing off. The sample crushed the inspection. If the twelve spies had been an appellation board, this land got its classification on the spot: Alpha, First Growth, finest site in the portfolio.

00:41:25 - S. Simon Jacob: And then they came home and filed the report. And the report starts accurately: "We came to the land, and truly it flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit." The cluster is right there on its poles, Exhibit A. The tasting note is flawless.

00:41:43 - S. Simon Jacob: And then comes one small word: Ephes, which in modern Hebrew means zero, but in biblical Hebrew means "however." And everything after that word is not a tasting note; it's fear wearing data as a costume. "The cities are fortified, the people are giants," and then the land itself—the land whose fruit is sitting in front of you on two poles—"It's a land that devours its inhabitants." The same abundance rebranded as an appetite: Too big means it eats you.

00:42:32 - S. Simon Jacob: And then they say the sentence, the one this chapter is named for, the one I'd argue is among the most psychologically precise sentences in the entire Torah: "We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we were in their eyes." Listen to the order of the clauses: "In our own eyes first," and so therefore in theirs. The Torah is telling us the mechanics of it: The self-image came first, and the world simply countersigned it. Nobody called them grasshoppers; they manufactured their own smallness, and then read it reflected back from every face they met. That's not a report about the inhabitants of the land; that's a report about the inside of a man.

00:43:34 - S. Simon Jacob: Two of the twelve dissented, and the Gemara adds a detail like a knife: They were the only two who had carried nothing down from Eshkol. Yehoshua and Calev saw what that beautiful fruit was about to be used for, and they refused to shoulder the exhibit for the prosecution. And Calev stood up against his ten colleagues and said the single most positive-sum sentence in the Chumash: "Aloh Na'aleh—We will surely go up, and we will take hold of it, for we surely can." Same land, same giants, same data, different read. Ten saw a fixed pie they were too small to fight for; two saw headroom.

00:44:23 - S. Simon Jacob: The ten won the night. The people wept until morning: "Let's go back to Egypt," a generation begging to return to the fixed pie of slavery where at least your portion was certain, rather than walk into abundance that would have to be trusted.

00:44:46 - S. Simon Jacob: And the verdict came down measure-for-measure, almost gently, the way the deepest punishments do: "You said you couldn't enter; very well, you won't." Forty years, a year for each day of the mission, until every man of that self-appraisal lay in the desert. The grasshoppers were taken at their word.

00:45:10 - S. Simon Jacob: And the rabbis in Taanit add the detail that turns this from ancient history into this week: That night of weeping, they dated it—it was the Ninth of Av. And they put words in the mouth of Heaven that I cannot read without flinching: "You wept a weeping for nothing (Bikyah Shel Chinam), and I will fix for you a weeping for generations." Tisha B'Av, the Churban of the First Temple, the Churban of the Second—the whole weight of that day the rabbis hang on a peg planted that night, the night a people looked at the most generous terroir report ever filed and heard a threat.

00:46:03 - S. Simon Jacob: Do you hear the word doing the work in that sentence? Chinam—a weeping of chinam, for nothing, baseless. Now put the season's vocabulary side by side: It began with Bikyah Shel Chinam, weeping for nothing. It ended, the Gemara in Yoma told us, with Sinat Chinam, hatred for nothing. And Rav Kook told us the cure: Ahavat Chinam, love for nothing. One coin, three faces—the entire arc of Jewish catastrophe and Jewish repair in a story about what we are willing to feel without a reason: fear, hatred, or love.

00:47:05 - S. Simon Jacob: One more turn of the story, and that's the one that gets me: The tradition works out the itinerary. The spies were sent at the end of Sivan and came back on the Eighth of Av—forty days. Lay that over our calendar: Their mission is the Three Weeks. The weeks we just spent in mourning—no wine, no music, no weddings—are almost day-for-day the weeks the twelve were walking through the vineyards of this land, watching the grapes ripen and deciding what story to tell about them. Every year while we mourn, the calendar quietly retraces their route. The season of mourning is a forty-day walk through wine country that ended in the wrong conclusion.

00:47:55 - S. Simon Jacob: So now, now go back to the cellars of part three and tell me you don't have chills: An industry of people standing in that same hill country at this same season holding that same fruit, people who know their smallness with total precision—a drop inside a drop. They'll tell you themselves the exact arithmetic of the spies, and they have taken that arithmetic and reached Calev's conclusion instead: Aloh Na'aleh. The market can be entered, the pie can grow, smallness isn't the verdict, it's the headroom. "My neighbor's success is proof of the ceiling, not a bite out of my share."

00:48:52 - S. Simon Jacob: And think back to that cluster: Eight men under one bunch of grapes. The land was never telling the spies "you are small." The land was telling them, "My abundance is not a one-man load. Fruit this size requires partners. It has to be carried on poles between people, on multiple shoulders, or it doesn't come down the hill at all." The message was cooperation, and they heard humiliation.

00:49:24 - S. Simon Jacob: Thirty-three centuries later, in the same hills, the winemakers and distillers of Israel are finally carrying the cluster the way it was always meant to be carried: together or not at all. That, my friends, is what a tikkun looks like—not a ceremony, not a grand declaration, a corrected instinct. The sin of the spies was a story a people told itself about scarcity in this land, and the repair is a different story, told in the same vineyards about the same fruit by people who look at the same numbers and choose confidence. It's being told right now, this season, in tasting rooms and barrel cellars, from the Golan to the Negev, one borrowed pump and one shared winemaker at a time.

00:50:26 - S. Simon Jacob: And if that sounds like wishful thinking, if you want proof that this repair is real, proof with a date on the calendar, I have it. The date was a day ago, and almost nobody noticed. I promised you proof with a date on it; here it is.

00:50:49 - S. Simon Jacob: A day ago, this past Wednesday, was the Fifteenth of Av, Tu B'Av, and if you blinked, you missed it. No Seder, no shofar, no candles in the window. The only trace most of us saw was a line missing from the morning prayers. In the hierarchy of the Jewish year as we actually live it, Tu B'Av barely registers—a minor footnote six days after the most devastating day of the calendar.

00:51:24 - S. Simon Jacob: Now listen to what the Mishnah says about that footnote: "There were no days as festive for Israel as the Fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur." Read it again slowly, because it refuses to sink in. Not Pesach, not Purim, not Simchat Torah. The two most joyful days of the entire year, says the Mishnah in Taanit, were Yom Kippur and this Tu B'Av, the day almost none of us can explain.

00:52:01 - S. Simon Jacob: And what did they do on it? The daughters of Jerusalem went out and danced. They danced in the vineyards in white dresses, and the Mishnah adds a detail that after everything we've said tonight should stop your heart: The dresses were borrowed, every single one. The Gemara walks it down the whole ladder: The king's daughter borrowed from the High Priest's daughter, the High Priest's daughter from the deputy's, and on down rank by rank until the Gemara stops bothering with the rank and says it plainly: V'chol Yisrael Sho'alim Zeh MiZeh—and all of Israel borrowed from one another, so that no one, no one would be shamed by what she didn't have.

00:52:51 - S. Simon Jacob: Hold that: Six days after Tisha B'Av, six days after the day of the shattering, the day born from grasshoppers weeping, the calendar pivots hard into a vineyard, into dancing, into a festival deliberately engineered so that abundance was shared and nobody could be embarrassed about her portion. The rich lending to the poor as the entry fee of the holiday. That, my friends, is Ahavat Chinam with choreography.

00:53:33 - S. Simon Jacob: And why that date? What happened on the Fifteenth of Av? The Gemara gives a list of reasons, and I promise you, when I first read that list, with this episode already half-written, I had to put the book down, because it reads like it was commissioned for tonight.

00:53:52 - S. Simon Jacob: Reason One: The Fifteenth of Av is the day the dying stopped. The generation of the spies, the grasshoppers of part four sentenced to fall in the wilderness, didn't die randomly across the forty years. The Midrash paints the scene: Every year as the Ninth of Av approached, the fear returned, graves were made ready, and every year thousands didn't rise. Until the fortieth year, when the Ninth of Av came and went and no one had died. They assumed they'd miscounted the date, and they waited. And when the moon stood full over the camp on the fifteenth, when there could be no more mistake about the day, they understood it was over. The decree was spent; the punishment for the grasshopper mindset had an expiration date, and that expiration date became a festival—the festival they celebrated, of all places, in the vineyard. The very landscape the spies had slandered became the dance floor of forgiveness.

00:55:13 - S. Simon Jacob: Reason Two: The day the tribes were permitted to marry into one another. For generations before, inheritance law had kept the tribes marital-wise fenced off from each other, and on the Fifteenth of Av the fences came down. Israel could become one family in the most literal sense there is.

00:55:45 - S. Simon Jacob: Reason Three: The day the tribe of Binyamin was readmitted to the nation. After the civil war at Givah, the ugliest internal wound in the Book of Shoftim, a war that nearly erased a tribe of Israel, it was on Tu B'Av that the ban was lifted and Binyamin was brought back in. The day Jews stopped treating Jews as enemies.

00:56:11 - S. Simon Jacob: Are you hearing the pattern? Strip away the details, and every reason is the same reason: The dying stops, the fences fall, the estranged brother comes home. Tu B'Av is the calendar's festival of reunion, walls between Jews coming down one after another. And where does the tradition put the party? Not in the study hall, not in the Temple courtyard—in the vineyards. When Jewish unity finally gets a holiday, the tradition sets it among the vines. On this show, we do not consider that a coincidence.

00:57:04 - S. Simon Jacob: And one more from the list, a small one, my favorite: The Fifteenth of Av was the day they finished cutting the year's wood for the altar, the last dry logs laid up for the fires of the Beit HaMikdash—a supply secured for the season, and they had made a holiday out of it. Sound familiar? It's the checklist again. The altar had a wood order and a wine order, and the completion of the supply line for the sacred was itself a reason to dance. The Temple's logistics were never a burden in Israel; they were a Simcha.

00:57:43 - S. Simon Jacob: So look at what the calendar itself is telling us this very week: Six days, six days from the floor to the vineyard. From the day Sinat Chinam burned the house down to the day the dresses were borrowed so no one would feel poor. The tradition didn't put months between grief and hope; it put six days, as if to say the turn is always this close. The same week that mourns the grasshoppers dances in the vines they were afraid of.

00:58:21 - S. Simon Jacob: By the strict count we gave you back on the Seventeenth of Tammuz, today, the Sixteenth of Av, is the literal last day to get vines in the ground. But by the more widely accepted reckoning, the window actually closes on Tu B'Av itself. Either way, the message of the calendar is identical: If you're going to plant, you plant now.

00:58:47 - S. Simon Jacob: And there's one more thing the calendar is saying, and it's saying it today.

00:58:58 - S. Simon Jacob: The day this episode goes out, today is the Sixteenth of Av. Longtime listeners already know why that matters, because we built a whole chapter on it back on the Seventeenth of Tammuz: the Orlah clock. The vine needs forty-four days in the ground before Rosh Hashanah for the year to count as its first—thirty days to take root, fourteen to count as a year. Count back forty-four days from the First of Tishrei, and this is where you land today. The Sixteenth of Av is the strict last day of the planting window, the final day you can put a vine in the soil of Eretz Yisrael and have this year count towards its future.

00:59:50 - S. Simon Jacob: The day after the festival of reunion, the calendar issues its last call: Plant today. Whatever it is—a vine, a partnership, a repaired friendship, a phone call to a competitor down the road—the window is open now, and the years only count if the roots go in.

01:00:18 - S. Simon Jacob: So the spec is being met in the vineyards. The Middah is being lived in the cellars. The calendar has already turned, and it's holding the door open.

01:00:36 - S. Simon Jacob: One question left, the one we started with standing over a glass of wine: Are we ready?

01:00:50 - S. Simon Jacob: The glass I poured at the top of the hour is still sitting here, right where I left it. It's been listening to the whole episode: the spec sheet, the dinner party, the cellars, the grasshoppers, and the dancing. So one last time, the dangerous question: Are we ready for the Third Temple?

01:01:09 - S. Simon Jacob: Here's my honest ledger—no politics, no camps, just what we found tonight:

01:01:23 - S. Simon Jacob: The wine, the wine is further along than anyone knows. There is a spec; it survived two thousand years in the eighth chapter of Menachot, and on the hillsides of Judea, the Galilee, and the Negev, vineyard by dry-farmed vineyard, the land is quietly coming back into compliance, most of the growers not even knowing whose order they're filling.

01:01:47 - S. Simon Jacob: The Middot in most of Jewish life—you know the answer. We can't ask the question without a fight. We're still knotted up, still shouting, still at Bar Kamtsa's banquet somewhere every single day.

01:02:05 - S. Simon Jacob: But in one corner—one loud, joyful, underestimated corner that smells like fermentation and wet barrels—the answer is already yes. And I need you to understand what makes that corner different, because it is not that winemakers are nicer people than the rest of us. Nobody in this episode is singing Kumbaya. These are businesspeople with payrolls, mortgages, and unsold pallets standing in the toughest wine market in three generations, and cooperation is the strategy they chose because it wins.

01:02:47 - S. Simon Jacob: Ahavat Chinam, it turns out, isn't a greeting card; it's a business model. It is right now, in the cellars of Eretz Yisrael, outperforming. And if baseless love can work between competitors fighting over the same shelf, then don't you dare tell me that it can't work between Jews fighting over headlines.

01:03:17 - S. Simon Jacob: Back in section two, I gave you Rav Kook's famous line, the short version. You've earned the whole sentence now, and the whole sentence is bigger than the one you know: "If we were destroyed, and the world with us, through baseless hatred, we will rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, through baseless love." And the world with us—did you catch it? Rav Kook wasn't talking about fixing a community; he was saying the stakes of how Jews treat each other are the world's stakes. The tide he's describing doesn't just lift our boats.

01:03:58 - S. Simon Jacob: Because look at what we're watching tonight: A people that wept for nothing and got a night of weeping for generations; a people that hated for nothing and got two thousand years of this fast; and a tradition that answered both six days later with a festival where the dying stopped, the fences fell, the lost tribe came home, and every dress in the vineyard was borrowed. V'chol Yisrael Sho'alim Zeh MiZeh—all of Israel borrowed from one another; eight men under one cluster, because this land's abundance was never a one-man load; a treasure with a reed guarding the purity of a pour; and a generation of winemakers and distillers standing in the spies' own footprints holding the spies' own fruit, saying Calev's words instead: "Aloh Na'aleh—We can surely go up."

01:05:11 - S. Simon Jacob: So here's what I want from you this week: Not a donation, not a share—though share it—an act, one act of Ahavat Chinam with a cork in it.

01:05:24 - S. Simon Jacob: This Shabbat put a bottle on your table, a bottle made by someone or representing someone you could call competition: another community's winery, a producer you've argued about, a label you've always walked past, a person who you've always said bad things about. Pour the wine for your guests and say something good out loud and by name about the person who made it, or the person you have difficulty with. That's it; that's the whole assignment.

01:06:05 - S. Simon Jacob: You will be doing at your table exactly what the winemakers of Israel are doing across the entire industry, and exactly the opposite of what was done at a certain table in Gittin the night everything broke. Because the Third Temple is not waiting for a quarry; it's waiting for enough tables like that one.

01:06:33 - S. Simon Jacob: Did you hear that? That's a second glass. I never just pour one anymore; this episode cured me of it. The first glass was the question; this one's the answer. This one is for the winemaker down the road from you, the distiller across town, the Jew across the aisle—whoever you've been seated across from at the wrong banquet.

01:07:02 - S. Simon Jacob: A rising tide lifts all boats, and in the language of this land, go look at the label: Every Syrah is a boat. The tide is rising in the cellars of Eretz Yisrael. It rose this week, six days after the floor, right on schedule, the way it always does. The only question left, the real Third Temple question, is whether we get in the water.

01:07:39 - S. Simon Jacob: L'chaim to all the boats, all of them.

01:07:40 - S. Simon Jacob: I'm Simon Jacob, and this has been The Kosher Terroir. If tonight moved you, send it to one person you'd like to share a glass with. That's how this tide rises.

01:07:52 - S. Simon Jacob: And stay close, because the season turning is my favorite stretch of the year. Harvest is about six weeks out, Elul is coming to the vineyards, and I'll be taking you to the crush pads and the barrel rooms of a new vintage, and introducing you to a movement of Israeli winemakers I've started calling the "Sabaristas," who are about to change what the whole world thinks Israeli wine is. You'll want to be there for that.

01:08:28 - S. Simon Jacob: Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem, and remember: Somewhere on a hill in Judea right now, a vine that went into the ground this week has just started counting.

01:08:40 - S. Simon Jacob: This is Simon Jacob, again, your host of today's episode of The Kosher Terroir. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you're new to The Kosher Terroir, please check out our many past episodes[cite: 1, 2].