The Beautiful Thing You Have to Own

The Hook

There is a kind of person who cannot enjoy anything until it is perfect, and there is a kind of person who cannot commit to anything until it is entirely his, and this single chapter of the Rambam seems, for most of its length, to be written for exactly those two people. It is relentless about the beauty of the four species. A hole the width of a needle disqualifies an etrog. A small growth on the wrong part of it disqualifies it. If its little protruding tip, the pitam, is snapped off, it is unfit. The leaf at the heart of the lulav, if it splits down the middle, ruins the whole thing. And then, as if perfection were not demanding enough, the Rambam adds a second and stranger requirement. On the first day of the festival, the beautiful set in your hand does not count for the mitzvah unless it actually belongs to you. Borrow your neighbor's flawless etrog and you have fulfilled nothing.

You could read three quarters of this chapter and conclude that Sukkot is a festival for perfectionists and owners, people careful about flaws and careful about property. And then the chapter ends somewhere you would never have predicted. It ends with the greatest sages of Israel dancing in the Temple courtyard with torches of fire in their hands, juggling, whistling, bowing to the ground, celebrating so wildly that they said whoever had not seen it had never seen joy in his life. The chapter that began by disqualifying an etrog over a pinhole ends by praising a king who danced until his dignity was gone. Somehow those are the same chapter, and the whole secret of Sukkot is in how they connect.

The Beauty That a Pinhole Can Ruin

Begin with the exactness. The Torah calls the etrog the fruit of a beautiful tree, hadar, and the Rambam takes that word hadar and turns it into a long, precise catalog of what beauty forbids. An etrog pierced all the way through by even the thinnest needle is unfit. An etrog missing the slightest bit of its substance is unfit. One whose pitam has been removed is unfit. One covered in small growths over the wrong places, or over most of its surface, is unfit. The lulav has its own severities. If its central spine is bent forward like a hunchback, unfit. If the paired leaf at its top, the tiyomet, splits so that its two halves separate like the prongs of a fork, unfit. Even the myrtle must keep three leaves in a single row to stay kosher. This is a law that will notice the smallest thing and reject the whole for it.

And yet, buried in the same chapter, the Rambam quietly relaxes almost all of it. All of these disqualifications, he rules, the blemishes, the missing substance, the split leaf, even an etrog that was stolen, apply only on the first day of the festival. From the second day on, and through all the rest of the days, they are all kosher. The exactness that seemed to be the very essence of the mitzvah turns out to bind for a single day. The standard is real, and it is temporary. There is a moment for which only the flawless will do, and then that moment passes, and the wilted, the imperfect, the slightly damaged are welcomed back.

But two things never soften, on any day. An etrog that cannot be eaten at all, one that is forbidden produce, orlah from a tree's first years, or untithed tevel, stays unfit the entire festival, because it is not truly a fruit. And a species tangled up in idolatry stays unfit the entire festival, because a mitzvah cannot be built out of a transgression. The Rambam is drawing a fine and important line. A blemish is a matter of beauty, and beauty is demanded for one day and then released. But a thing that is essentially disqualified, forbidden at its root, is never released at all. Some flaws are cosmetic and pass. Some flaws are in the substance, and those the calendar cannot cure.

It Has to Be Yours

Then comes the requirement that catches everyone by surprise, because it has nothing to do with the beauty of the etrog and everything to do with who owns it. On the first day, the Rambam rules, a person does not fulfill his obligation with a borrowed lulav. The verse says take for yourselves, lachem, and the Sages heard in that word a demand of ownership. A borrowed set, however perfect, is not yours, and on the first day only what is yours will do. It is a startling contrast with the sukkah itself, which you are explicitly permitted to borrow. You may sit for seven days in a hut that belongs to someone else, but you may not, on the first morning, lift a lulav that belongs to someone else.

The Rambam then explores the tender mechanics of how ownership can be given and how it can slip away. If your friend hands you his etrog as an outright gift, it is now yours and you have fulfilled the mitzvah. And here is the beautiful part. Even a gift given on the condition that you give it back counts as a real gift. Your friend may say, this is yours, on condition that you return it to me, and in the instant you lift it and shake it, it is genuinely, legally your own, and you have fulfilled the mitzvah, and then you hand it back and it becomes his again. Ownership can be total and momentary at once. But the Rambam adds the shadow side. If it was given to you on that condition and you fail to return it, then retroactively you never fulfilled anything, because a condition unmet unravels the gift, and it turns out to have been, all along, as though stolen. The ownership was real only because you honored the terms of the giving.

He carries this into the harder cases. You should not, on the first day, hand your lulav to a small child before you yourself have used it, because a child can legally receive property but cannot legally give it back, so once it is in his hands the ownership is stuck there. Partners who bought a set together, or brothers drawing on an undivided inheritance, do not fulfill the mitzvah on the first day either, unless each gives his share to the other as a gift, because a thing owned in part is not, for this one purpose, owned at all. On the first day, the mitzvah does not want a beautiful object you are near. It wants an object that is fully, unambiguously yours.

The Night the Wise Men Danced

And now the chapter turns, and everything careful and exacting in it opens into something wild. Beyond the ordinary joy commanded on every festival, the Rambam writes, there was an additional celebration in the Temple on Sukkot, the Simchat Beit HaSho'evah, the rejoicing of the place of the water drawing. On the night after the first day, they would set up a gallery so the women could watch from above and the men from below, and they would light enormous golden lamps whose glow filled every courtyard in Jerusalem, and the Levites would stand on the fifteen steps with harps and lutes and cymbals and flutes, and the pious and the great ones of the generation would dance before them holding torches of fire, singing, and the celebration would run the whole night through.

Then the Rambam does something remarkable. He tells us who danced. It was not the crowd. It was the Rashei Yeshivot, the heads of the academies, the members of the high court, the elders, the men of stature. The greatest and most dignified men in Israel were the ones leaping and juggling torches and bowing until they could kiss the ground, while the whole nation came only to watch and to hear. The people most entitled to stand on their dignity were exactly the ones who threw it away. And the Rambam closes the entire chapter, and with it the laws of the festivals, by making this the very point. The joy a person feels in doing a mitzvah, out of love for the God who commanded it, is itself a great service, and one who holds himself back from that joy, who stands aside guarding his own honor, is called a sinner and a fool. He quotes King David, who danced and whistled before the Ark with everything in him, and when his wife accused him of undignified behavior for a king, answered that he would make himself lighter still, because there is no honor, David said, other than to rejoice before God.

The Unifying Principle

So what binds the pinhole in the etrog to the king dancing in the dust? The chapter has quietly been teaching one idea the whole time. The mitzvah of the four species is about giving God something that is genuinely beautiful and genuinely yours, and the celebration at the end reveals what that giving is finally for. The exactness about beauty on the first day is not fussiness, it is the insistence that when you first come before God you bring your best, unblemished, the pitam intact. The demand that it be owned and not borrowed is the insistence that the offering be really you, not a gesture made with someone else's property, not a holiness you are only near. And the wild dancing of the sages is what happens when a person who has brought his best and his own finally stops holding anything back at all.

The Ari taught, and the Rambam himself alludes to it in the closing words of this chapter, that a service performed with true joy can cause even grave sins to be overlooked, that the joy is not decoration on top of the mitzvah but a power greater than the sin beneath it. The Baal Shem Tov built his whole path on this, that a Jew serves God most truly not through the severity of his exactness but through simcha, through a gladness that lifts the whole person past his own calculations. And the Alter Rebbe explained why it must be the greatest ones who dance hardest. The deepest joy comes precisely from bittul, from the loss of the self, and only someone with a real self to lose, a Rosh Yeshivah, a king, can perform that loss completely. The etrog must be perfect and owned so that there is a real, whole self standing there to give. And then, in the joy, that whole self is given away. The Lubavitcher Rebbe pressed this Simchat Beit HaSho'evah joy out past the walls of the study hall and into the streets, teaching that a happiness which stays private has not yet finished its work, that real joy in a mitzvah is meant to overflow and draw others in, exactly as the light of those golden lamps once filled every courtyard in Jerusalem.

Modern Application

You live most of your life in the first two movements of this chapter and almost never reach the third. You are careful. You want the thing you offer, at work, in your home, in your service of God, to be without flaw, and you want it to be truly yours and not borrowed, not performed with someone else's convictions. That carefulness is right, and the chapter honors it. There is a first day, a threshold moment, when only your genuine best, unblemished and your own, is the right thing to bring.

But the chapter refuses to let carefulness be the end of the story, and it warns, in surprisingly sharp words, against the person who never gets past it. To guard your dignity so tightly that you cannot rejoice, to stand at the edge of the celebration protecting your own composure, is not caution, the Rambam says. It is the sin of the fool. The etrog was exacting so that you would have something whole to offer, and the offering was never complete until you let go of it in joy. The most careful person in the room and the person dancing without inhibition are supposed to be the same person, and the dancing is what the carefulness was for.

The Closing

The Rambam ends the laws of the festivals not with a ruling but with a picture, a king dancing and whistling before God, told by his own wife that it is beneath him, answering that he would gladly be lower still, because there is no honor in the world except this. It is a strange place to end a book of law, and it is exactly the right one.

First you bring the flawless fruit, and you make sure it is truly yours and not borrowed, because a threshold deserves your genuine best and nothing less. And then, having brought your whole and unblemished self to the door, you are asked to do the one thing all that carefulness was preparing you for, which is to stop protecting it. The wisest men in Israel danced with torches until dawn while everyone watched, and they were not being undignified. They had simply understood the whole chapter. You perfect the offering so that you will have something real to give away, and you have not truly given it until you have given it in joy.