The Wine Inside the Incense

The Kosher Terroir. Solo episode, hosted by Simon Jacob. Cleaned from the raw auto-transcript against the locked episode script and the show glossary. Running time on this recording: approx. 49 minutes. A short editor's note on deviations from the locked script and a few uncertain passages follows at the end.

[00:08] Show Open

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.

[00:39] Cold Open

The following is a reading of the ingredients of the Ketoret.

Pitum HaKetoret keitzad? Ve'achad asar samanim hayu vah, ve'eilu hein: hatzori vehatziporen, hachelbenah vehalevonah, mor uketzi'ah, shibolet nerd vecharkom, hakosht shneim asar, vekilufah shelosha, vekinamon tisha, borit karshina tisha kabin, yein kafrisin se'in telata bekabin telata —

[He stops mid-phrase.]

Wait a minute.

Yein kafrisin.

Isn't that wine?

There is wine in the incense.

I have said those words ten thousand times — every morning, between Korbanot and Hodu — at the speed you say the things you know by heart. Eleven spices. The weights. The salt. The lye. And the barrel of wine, right there in the holiest fragrance on earth.

This week, for the first time, I heard it.

This is The Kosher Terroir, and this — in the last days of Elul — is the story of a wine nobody ever drank.

[02:10] Introduction

You've been hearing that sound all month. Near the end of Shacharit, every weekday since Rosh Chodesh Elul, someone in shul lifts a shofar and blows a series of notes. Elul's alarm clock. Somewhere between the ear and the heart, a voice says: prepare.

Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I'm Simon Jacob. If you're listening the day this goes out, it's just a week until Rosh Hashanah.

Here's something I never noticed until this year. The Yamim Noraim run from one sense to another. Rosh Hashanah, we hear our way in — a sound with no words. But follow the ten days to the end, to Yom Kippur, to the Temple, to the one moment the whole year tilts toward — and the Torah hands the climax of that year to the sense nobody expects. Not sound, not sight, not even taste. And this is a wine show, so that one hurts.

The sense? Smell.

Once a year, the Kohen Gadol walks alone into the most restricted room on earth — coals in one hand, and a handful of powder in the other — and the holiest moment in Judaism arrives as a cloud of fragrance.

I've spent fifty years at the drinking end of the wine world. So forgive what happens when I finally read the recipe for that powder slowly — the way I'd read a tech sheet from a winery I was about to visit. Everyone else sees the eleven spices. I see the wine.

Two questions, then, and I want you to hold both of them. What was this wine? And why did the holiest incense in Judaism need wine at all?

The first answer is a two-thousand-year-old argument between an island and a bush — settled, more or less, by a professor and a winemaker who stopped arguing and made the stuff. I'll have a glass of something very close to it on this desk before we're done. The second takes us to the strangest, most beautiful line in the passage — the moment the Gemara asks why the Temple didn't just use something cheaper, something free, that worked just as well. The answer is one line long, and I think it's a Rosh Hashanah teaching hiding in plain sight.

So here's the map. The Temple did four things to that incense before it ever touched fire. Four verbs, in the Gemara's order. They scrubbed it, they soaked it, they ground it, and they burned it. Scrub, soak, grind, and burn. And I'll make you a promise — by the time we reach the fire, you'll realize the Temple has been describing the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur the whole time.

The wine lives in the soak, but every recipe starts with cleaning. So did this one.

[05:40] Chapter 1 — Scrub

Let me tell you what the Pitum HaKetoret actually is. It is a production document — the oldest in Jewish life. Somebody in the Second Temple wrote down not just what went into the incense, but how much, where it came from, what you did to it, and what happened to you if you got it wrong. It survived the destruction of the building it was written for, because we folded it into the siddur and said it every day until it became furniture.

Read it slowly and it stops being furniture.

Three hundred and sixty-eight maneh a year. One for every day, and three extra for the Kohen Gadol on Yom Kippur. Eleven aromatics, each with its own weight: balsam, onycha, galbanum, frankincense, myrrh, cassia, spikenard, saffron, costus, cinnamon bark, and cinnamon. That is a bill of materials. Any winemaker listening just recognized the sheet on the cellar wall.

And here's the first thing that should stop you. The Written Torah names four of these — just four: nataf, shechelet, chelbenah, and levonah. The other seven, the weights, the process — none of it is in the pasuk. The Gemara in the first chapter of Keritot derives eleven from the wording of the verse and then hands you the recipe as a baraita. I found that beautiful in a very wine-shaped way, because the label never tells you the élevage. The Written Torah is the label. The Oral Torah kept the cellar notes.

And the cellar notes had a keeper — one family, the house of Avtinas. I'll tell you this as lore, because that's how the Mishnah tells it. Beit Avtinas were the compounders, father to son, and they would not teach anyone else how. The Sages were not pleased, and the family's answer, as the Gemara remembers it, was: our fathers had a tradition that this House will fall — and if we teach the craft, someone unworthy will one day burn it for something other than Heaven. And one detail I can't shake: no bride ever left the house of Avtinas wearing perfume. Ever. So that no one could say, even as a joke, that the family who made the Temple's fragrance was helping themselves to it.

Hold on to that family. Everything we're about to look at, they did with their own hands.

Now go back to the production sheet, past the eleven spices, to the section your eyes slide over every morning. The workshop: nine kav of borit karshina, a lye made from vetch. Twenty-one kav of yein kafrisin — our wine. A quarter-kav of Sodom salt. A pinch of ma'aleh ashan, the herb that made the smoke rise straight. None of these are in the fragrance. You never smelled the lye, and you certainly never smelled the wine. These are the tools.

First verb: scrub. The Gemara asks — the way you'd ask a cellar hand what that bucket is for — borit karshina, what does it come for? To rub the tziporen with it. The onycha, the shechelet of the pasuk, "the nail." Whatever it was exactly, it arrived hard and closed and dull. And the first thing they did was scour it with lye — she'tehei na'ah — so that it would be beautiful. Not clean. Not pure. Beautiful.

And any winemaker will tell you the order here is non-negotiable. You do not extract from dirty fruit. Before anything goes into the tank, it goes across a sorting table, because whatever you leave on the fruit, you will taste in the wine forever. Cleaning is not a preliminary to the craft. It is the first act of the craft. The lye came before the wine.

I'll say the Elul thing once. The first work of this month is not to become fierce. It's to become clean — beautiful before fierce. That's the order the Temple worked in.

Two more lines from the sheet. Two things the Temple refused to do, even though both would have worked.

The first is honey, and it's the right week for it. The baraita says: had you put a spoonful of honey into the ketoret, no one could have stood before its fragrance. So why didn't they? Because the Torah says no leaven and no honey on the altar. That's the whole reason. The best-smelling version of the holiest fragrance on earth was one spoonful away, and they never made it. On Rosh Hashanah evening, you'll dip an apple in honey. Hold that in one hand — and in the other, the family who had a jar on the shelf and never opened it.

The second refusal is about our wine. Twenty-one kav a year, imported, expensive, to soak the tziporen. And the Gemara asks the question a purchasing manager would ask: wasn't there something cheaper? Yes. Mei raglayim. Stale urine — the ancient world's standard treatment for stubborn aromatics. Effective, available, free. So why not?

One line. Ein machnisin mei raglayim la'Mikdash — mipnei hakavod. You do not bring that into the Temple. Because of the dignity. Not because it wouldn't work — because of the kavod. I'm going to leave that sitting there, unexplained, because it's a key to the whole hour and I don't want to spend it yet. We'll come back after the fire.

For now, the spice is scrubbed. It is beautiful. But beautiful is not what the ketoret needs from the tziporen. It needs it azah — fierce. And for that, the house of Avtinas opened the barrel.

[13:04] Chapter 2 — Soak, Part I: What Was in the Barrel?

Second verb: soak. Here is the whole instruction, and hear how short it is. Yein kafrisin — lamah hi ba'ah? She'shorin bo et hatziporen, k'dei she'tehei azah. Why does Kafrisin wine come? To soak the tziporen in it, so that it will be azah. That is the entire job description of the only wine in the Beit HaMikdash that nobody drank.

Azah. Fierce. Bold. Strong to the point of being a little too much — the same root as az panim and oz. In the wine world we'd say intense, concentrated, "a lot of wine." The lye made the tziporen beautiful, and the wine was going to make it loud.

And notice what this wine is not doing. It is not poured at the altar like the libations. It is not drunk. No bracha is said over it. It goes into a vessel with a hard, closed spice, and when the soak is done and the wine is spent, the spice is changed — a wine whose entire career is disappearance.

So what was it? Nobody knows for certain, and the two sides of the argument, it turns out, are arguing about exactly the thing this podcast is named for.

The wine world names its bottles two ways. The Old World names wines after places — Chablis is a village, Rioja is a river valley. The New World names wines after ingredients — this is a Cabernet, this is a Chardonnay. Place, or thing. Terroir, or varietal. The argument over yein kafrisin is that argument. Is Kafrisin a place, or a thing?

Suspect one: a place. Rashi on our passage is short and geographic — yayin she'ba mimakom she'shmo Kapros, from a place called Kapros. Cyprus. The island off our coast, one of the great export vineyards of the ancient Mediterranean, home to a substantial Jewish community in Temple times. On this reading, the Beit HaMikdash had a standing import order with an island: a specific wine from a specific place, crossing the water every year to be poured, not into a cup, but over a spice. Old World. The name on the barrel is where it grew.

Suspect two: a thing. Because the Gemara uses the word kafrisin somewhere else, and there it has nothing to do with an island. In the sixth chapter of Berachot, sorting out which bracha to make on the parts of the tzalaf — the caper bush — the kafrisin are the caper buds. The part you know pickled, on a plate of lox. In the Gemara's own dictionary, kafrisin are capers. So on this reading, yein kafrisin is caper wine — a fierce infusion of the most pungent thing that grows wild in this country. New World. The name on the barrel is what it's made of.

And as a wine person, the caper reading is almost too good. Because the Gemara in Beitzah has a list of the azin — the brazen ones of creation. Yisrael among the nations. The dog among the animals. The rooster among the birds. And some say: the tzalaf among the trees. The caper is the brazen plant — the bush that grows straight out of the stones of the Kotel, uninvited, unwatered, unkillable, flowering in July heat out of a wall two thousand years old. Every Jerusalemite has seen it. Most of us never knew its name.

So follow the logic. The Temple wanted the tziporen azah — and on this reading, they soaked it in the wine of the plant the Gemara itself calls the azah of all plants, the one it lists in the same breath as Yisrael among the nations. The fierce spice, made fierce by the fierce plant, in a Temple built for the fierce people. The symbolism writes itself.

Island, or bush? Here is the most Jewish thing about the whole question: the halacha refuses to answer it. The Rambam, when he codifies the ketoret, doesn't tell you where the wine came from or what it was made of. He tells you what it did — and he gives you the baraita's own fallback: if you have no Kafrisin wine, bring chamar chivaryan atik. Old white wine. The Rambam adds: chazak b'yoter — strong beyond the ordinary.

Think about what that tells you. The Temple wrote the substitution into the recipe. So the recipe was never about the address on the barrel, or the plant in it. It was about a specification. Old. White. Strong. Whatever Kafrisin was, its essence was strength.

And strength — old, golden, strong beyond the ordinary — is something Cyprus can still pour you today. Two readings. Two thousand years without a verdict. And then a professor and a winemaker stopped arguing about it, and made it.

[19:39] Chapter 3 — Soak, Part II: The Glass on the Desk

The professor is Zohar Amar of Bar-Ilan University, who has spent his career identifying — not what the Mishnah's plants and materials symbolize — what they were. The winemaker is Dr. Elyashiv Drori. Regular listeners know the name — Shibi Drori is the researcher who has spent years hunting down the lost grape varieties of this land and coaxing them back into bottles. If anyone was going to try to make yein kafrisin, it was him.

Amar's argument goes like this. Cyprus has an ancient specialty. You harvest the grapes and you don't press them. You lay them in the sun, on mats, for days, until they shrivel and the sugar concentrates. Then you press, ferment, and age — and what comes out is golden, honeyed, fifteen to seventeen percent alcohol, and keeps practically forever. Today that wine is called Commandaria, and it has a reasonable claim to being the oldest wine on earth still made under its own name. Amar looked at the fallback — old, white, strong beyond the ordinary — and said: that is a description of this wine. So he and Drori made a batch the ancient way. Dried grapes. Concentrated must. A dessert wine in the strength range of a Port.

For what it's worth, here is where I come down. I think it was the island. Not because the caper reading is wrong — the symbolism really is that good — but because of the fallback. You don't substitute a bicycle for a horse. You substitute a horse for a horse. If the backup was old strong white wine, the original was something like old strong white wine. The Temple's backup plan tells you what the main plan was.

Which is why there's a glass on my desk. It's not Commandaria. It's a kosher wine made the same way — grapes left to dry in the sun before they were ever pressed. I'm not going to name it, because the name isn't the point. The method is. I want you to smell what the Temple was buying. If you have anything like it in the house — a late-harvest white, anything golden and sweet and strong — go get it. Everyone else, come stand next to me.

Big to small. Don't hunt for the apricots yet. First question: what hits you before any fruit does?

That. That prickle on the top of your nose, like the air over a glass of brandy. That is alcohol — sixteen percent of it, rising off the surface. Hold on to that sensation, because that lift is the whole story. It is not the part of the wine you enjoy. It is the part that does the work.

Now, smaller. Under the lift: honey, dried apricot, candied orange peel, sun — this is what drying grapes does; it takes summer and folds it in on itself. And at the back, if the wine has any age: something nutty, a little bruised, like the inside of an old wooden box. That's oxidation. That's time. In a young white we'd call it a fault. In this wine, it's the point. The baraita said atik. Old. This is what old smells like.

Now, here's the thing I actually want to teach you, and it changes how you hear the baraita. That lift — the alcohol — is a solvent. The best natural solvent for aromatic compounds human beings have ever had. Every perfume on earth, to this day, is fragrant material dissolved in alcohol. That is what perfume is: a tincture.

Now think about the tziporen. Whatever it was — the Rishonim argue: a shell-like thing from the sea, or a hardened resin — every description agrees it arrived hard and closed. It did not give off its smell just sitting there. So look at what Beit Avtinas did: a lye scrub to strip the surface, then a long soak in the strongest wine they could import. That is not folklore. That is a perfumer's extraction protocol. The soak didn't add a flavor to the spice. It pulled the spice's own fragrance out of hiding and made it available to the fire. Azah.

And now the urine line from Chapter 1 stops being strange and becomes proof. Stale urine is ammonia — the other great traditional treatment for stubborn animal aromatics. When the Gemara says it would have worked, it's being technically correct. Two solvents. One noble, one not. The chemistry is identical. The kavod is not.

Read the spec sheet like a tech sheet, and every word earns its place. Old — fully fermented, maximum alcohol; old is a proxy for strong. White — because they had just scrubbed the tziporen beautiful, and a red would have stained it; strong enough to open the spice, clear enough not to mark it. And the Rambam's chazak b'yoter isn't praise. It's a line off a tech sheet: minimum alcohol, high.

The baraita is not folklore. It is a spec sheet, and it holds up. Two thousand years later, a professor and a winemaker followed it and got a wine that does exactly what it says.

So we can name the wine, more or less. Old, white, strong, from the island, doing a perfumer's job in a spice loft in Jerusalem. What we haven't explained is why the spice — soaked, finished, fierce, ready — went back into the mortar the night before Yom Kippur.

[26:51] Chapter 4 — Grind

Third verb: grind.

Go back to the number. Three hundred and sixty-eight maneh — three hundred and sixty-five for the days, and three extra, set aside all year for one man and one morning. And here is what they did with those three. On Erev Yom Kippur — the day before — they took them, already finished, already compounded from spices that had been scrubbed and soaked and blended, and put them back into the mortar. And ground them again. K'dei she'tehei dakah min hadakah. So that it would be fine — from the fine. Finer than fine.

The Gemara asks why, and the answer looks like grammar and turns out to be theology. In Shemot, God already says of the ketoret: grind it fine. Every day's incense was fine. But in the Torah's Yom Kippur chapter, describing the handful the Kohen Gadol carries inside, it adds a word: ketoret samim dakah. Fine incense. It was already fine — why say it again? To teach you that for this day, fine is not fine enough. On Yom Kippur, the finished thing gets finished again.

The spice had been through everything. It would have burned beautifully on any other morning of the year. And the night before the one morning that mattered most, they put the finished product back through the hardest step. Not because anything was wrong with it. Because of what it was for.

And now the detail that made me put the Gemara down and just sit there. The grinding had a soundtrack.

The baraita records what the compounder said while he worked the mortar — out loud, in rhythm with the pestle: Hadek heitev. Heitev hadek. Grind it fine — fine, grind it. Like a work song. And the Gemara asks the obvious question — why is he talking to a mortar? — and Rabbi Yochanan gives an answer that was written for a wine podcast two thousand years before there was one.

K'shem she'hadibur ra l'yayin — kach hadibur yafeh l'vesamim. Just as speech is bad for wine, so speech is good for spices.

Speech is bad for wine. I've heard that sentence in every serious cellar I've ever stood in. You do not chatter over an open vat. The best winemakers I know go quiet when they're working — not superstition, attention. Wine is made in silence. Chazal knew that. But the spices were the opposite. The man at the mortar sang to them. The Temple's two great crafts had opposite acoustics: the wine was made quietly. The ketoret was made out loud.

Now hold that against the calendar, because the map I promised you is about to land, and I'm only going to say it once.

Elul is the scrub and the soak, the quiet part. A shofar in the morning, and then a month of private work — accounting, cleaning, sitting in the barrel. Nobody sees it. That's the wine.

Rosh Hashanah opens the grind, and the grind is loud. Think about what the next ten days actually sound like. A hundred blasts of the shofar. Selichot before dawn, said out loud, together. Vidui — which the halacha insists we speak, not think. Avinu Malkeinu, shouted by a whole room. The Aseret Yemei Teshuvah are the loudest ten days of the Jewish year, and Chazal told us why: the voice is good for the spices. You take the person who did the quiet work all Elul, and you put him back in the mortar, out loud, for ten days, so that he will be dakah min hadakah.

And Yom Kippur is the fire. Scrub, soak, grind, burn. Elul, Rosh Hashanah, the Ten Days, Yom Kippur. I told you the Temple has been describing the season the whole time.

It wasn't only the spice that was prepared. The opening Mishnah of Yoma: seven days before Yom Kippur the Kohen Gadol is taken from his house and sequestered in the Temple. The elders read him the order of the day, again and again. He rehearses. The night before, they keep him awake. The spice was ground twice; the man was drilled for the week. The Temple did not improvise holiness. It soaked, ground, and rehearsed its way there.

And then the morning. Vayikra sixteen. Coals in one hand, two handfuls of twice-ground powder in the other. Past the curtain, alone. V'chisah anan haketoret et hakaporet — and the cloud of the incense covers the kaporet. And he does not die. Everything we've talked about — the lye, the barrel from the island, the mortar, the song — exists so that one cloud will rise, once a year, in that room.

One last piece of Beit Avtinas lore, and then the fire. When the family made the ketoret, the Gemara in Yoma remembers, the smoke went up in a column, straight as a staff. And when the Sages, frustrated with them, brought in expert perfumers from Alexandria, the Alexandrians compounded the spices well enough — but their smoke scattered. Only Beit Avtinas knew the herb. The Sages brought the family back. Anyone can buy the ingredients — the eleven were on the sheet. What the Alexandrians didn't have was the thing that isn't on any sheet: the pinch that makes the smoke go straight. Every great cellar has one of those. It's never written down.

So: the spice is finer than fine. The man is ready. The cloud goes up straight. Which leaves the question I've held since the Intro. Of all the senses God could have chosen for the holiest moment of the year — why smell?

[34:37] Chapter 5 — Burn

Fourth verb: burn.

The Gemara in Berachot asks, out of nowhere, in the middle of the laws of blessings on fragrance: Eizehu davar she'haneshamah nehenit mimenu, v'ein haguf neheneh mimenu? What is the thing the soul enjoys — and the body gets nothing from? Havei omer: zeh hareiach. It's smell.

Think about why that's true. Every other sense takes something. Taste consumes. Touch takes hold. Smell is the one sense that leaves the world exactly as it found it. Nothing eaten, nothing held — the fragrance passes through you. It is the closest thing the body has to a purely spiritual experience, and Chazal said so. So when the Torah gives the holiest moment of the year to smell, it is choosing the one sense in which a human being can receive without taking. In the one room where nothing of this world belongs, the offering is the one thing this world cannot keep.

And look at the two ends of the season. Rosh Hashanah opens with a sound that has no words, and Yom Kippur, in the Temple, closes with a scent that has no substance. Bookends — both aimed straight past the body at the neshamah, with ten days of the grind in between.

A piece of lore, for the picture, from the Gemara in Yoma: the goats in Jericho used to sneeze from the smell of the ketoret. Jericho — twenty-odd kilometers away, and a thousand meters down. The women of Jericho didn't need perfume. A bride in Jerusalem didn't need to adorn herself. Take that not as meteorology, but as a statement of purpose. The fragrance was not for the Kohen Gadol, not even for the room. It went out. It rolled down the hills to people who would never see the inside of the Temple. The holiest smell on earth was, by design, impossible to keep.

Which brings me to the teaching that makes this a Rosh Hashanah episode, and not just a Temple episode.

One of the four spices the Torah itself names is chelbenah. Galbanum. And on its own, galbanum smells terrible — not challenging, bad; a bitter, sulfurous resin. The Torah counts it among the spices of the holiest fragrance on earth, by name. And from that, the Gemara in Keritot, in the name of Rabbi Shimon Chasida, draws a conclusion that has nothing to do with incense and everything to do with the next few weeks: Kol ta'anit she'ein bah miposh'ei Yisrael einah ta'anit. Any fast that does not include the sinners of Israel is not a fast. Because chelbenah smells bad, and the Torah put it in the ketoret.

The blend requires its harshest member. Not tolerates — requires. Leave out the chelbenah and the compounder is liable for his life. The eleven are not ten good ones and a bad one. They are eleven. And when they go on the fire together, the smoke is one smoke, and it rolls down to Jericho as one smell, and nobody standing in it can tell you which part was the galbanum.

Rosh Hashanah has never been an assembly of perfect people. The room you'll stand in is a blend, and the halacha built it that way on purpose. Erev Yom Kippur, the very first words before Kol Nidrei will be: Anu matirin l'hitpalel im ha'avaryanim. We give ourselves permission to pray with the transgressors. Many connect that line to this Gemara. The holiest night of the year opens by putting the chelbenah back in the blend.

Now I owe you two debts from Chapter 1. This is the fire.

The honey: a spoonful would have made the ketoret irresistible, and they never added it, because the Torah said no. The urine: it would have done the job for free, and they imported a barrel from an island instead, mipnei hakavod. Side by side, they are one lesson from two different directions. The honey says: you do not improve on the recipe, even when you could. The urine says: you do not cheapen the recipe, even when no one would know. Both protect the same thing — not the result; the result was fine either way — but the manner. How you do a thing is part of the thing. Kavod wasn't an ornament on the avodah. It was a line item in the budget.

That is the most useful thing the Temple has to say to us this week. The Yamim Noraim tempt us toward shortcuts — the fast tefillah, the vidui on autopilot, the apology that gets the job done — and the ketoret says, from two thousand years away: that isn't nothing, but it isn't the recipe. Do it b'kavod. Do it the expensive way. Import the barrel.

One last thing, and I'm going to label it, because the Gemara does not say this. Nobody in Chazal says this. This is me, thinking like a wine person in Elul, and you should take it exactly that seriously.

Go back to what the wine did to the tziporen. It didn't turn it into something else. It didn't add a flavor. The fragrance was in that spice the whole time — closed, hard, locked inside a shell. The soak drew off what obscured it and pulled out what was already there.

We translate teshuvah as repentance. It's a bad translation, because repentance sounds like becoming a different person. Shuv means return. Teshuvah means going back to something that was already there. I have never found a better picture of it than that spice and that wine. Teshuvah is not becoming someone else. It is a long, patient soak that strips away the residue of a year — the shell, the grime, the stuff that was never you — until what was always underneath can finally rise. The yein kafrisin, at the time of the Temple, didn't make the tziporen fragrant. It made the tziporen able to be what it was.

That's the reflection. Take it or leave it. But if it helps you over Rosh Hashanah, I'll be glad I said it.

A wine that was never tasted, preparing a fragrance only the soul could use. Let's bring it to the table.

[42:53] Closing

Three things I'm taking to the table on Rosh Hashanah night, from a wine nobody ever drank.

One. Preparation is not the warm-up for the great moment. It is most of the great moment. The cloud lasted seconds; the scrubbing, the soaking, the grinding, the seven days — that was the year. If you have felt, this Elul, that you are all preparation and no arrival: you are doing it exactly the way the Temple did.

Two. How you do a thing is part of the thing. They had the honey and they didn't open it. They had the free solvent and imported the barrel. Nobody would have known. Only God would have known. Import the barrel.

Three. No blend is complete without its harsh ingredient. Not the ketoret, and not us. Whoever is standing near you in shul on Rosh Hashanah night who you would not have chosen — that's the chelbenah. The smoke doesn't rise without them. And somewhere in that room, to someone, the chelbenah is you.

Two small things I'd like you to actually do. Tomorrow morning, between Korbanot and Hodu, you'll reach the words yein kafrisin. And when you do, hold that breath — and think about the barrel that vanished so that the spice could rise. Then keep going. And then, Rosh Hashanah night, before kiddush — before anyone drinks — lift the cup and smell it first. Big to small. Ask the wine one question: what soaked, for how long, so that you could smell like this? Then say the bracha.

And now I owe you something. At the top of the hour I started a paragraph and never finished it. I stopped mid-line on two words, and then we spent forty minutes inside them. So let me finish it now, slowly this time. And listen — because I think you're about to hear a paragraph you've said ten thousand times, for the first time.

Yein kafrisin se'in telata, vekabin telata. Ve'im ein lo yein kafrisin, meivi chamar chivaryan atik. Melach sedomit rova. Ma'aleh ashan kol shehu. Rabi Natan HaBavli omer: af kipat hayarden kol shehu. Ve'im natan bah devash — pesalah. Ve'im chisar echad mikol samaneha — chayav mitah.

Ve'od tanei bar Kappara: ilu hayah noten bah kortov shel devash, ein adam yachol la'amod mipnei reicha. Velamah ein me'arvin bah devash? Mipnei shehaTorah amrah: ki chol se'or vechol devash lo taktiru mimenu isheh laHashem.

And Bar Kappara further taught: had he put a spoonful of honey into it, no person could stand before its fragrance. And why do they not mix honey into it? Because the Torah said: for no leaven and no honey shall you burn as a fire offering to Hashem.

You heard it that time, didn't you.

The barrel. The fallback. The honey they never opened. The lye that made it beautiful, and the wine that made it fierce. The free thing they refused, mipnei hakavod. The man singing to the mortar, because the voice is good for the spices. It was all there. It was always there. We just said it too fast to smell it.

That's the episode. And I think it's the season, too. Everything we need for these days is already in the paragraph. Elul just asks us to say it slowly.

Rosh Hashanah, the shofar. Ten days after that, the memory of a cloud. And in between, the grind — out loud, together, sinners and saints in one blend, the way the recipe was written.

May we be a little more azim this year — fierce like the caper in the wall, in the right direction. May we do the expensive thing when no one is watching. And may we come out of the soak more fragrant than when we went in.

I'm Simon Jacob, and this has been The Kosher Terroir. We would like to wish all our listeners and their families a ketivah vachatimah tovah — tizku l'shanim rabot, ne'imot u'metukot. Shanah tovah u'metukah. And as always — l'chaim.

And one last ask. Please share this with one person who says Pitum HaKetoret every morning.

[~48:37] Outro

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.