The Four That Must Be One

The Hook

Most mitzvot ask you to take one thing and do one act. Light this candle. Sound this horn. Eat this bread. And then there is the mitzvah at the heart of Sukkot, which asks you to gather four different growing things, a stiff palm frond, a fragrant yellow fruit, a handful of myrtle, a couple of willow branches, and to hold them all at once, as though a single object. Not one after another. Together, in the same moment, in the same two hands. The Rambam devotes this chapter to that strange bouquet, and the first thing to notice is how much of it is about keeping four things from ever becoming three, or five, or the wrong four.

Because this is the chapter where a beautiful truth hides inside a technical law. If you have the palm, the myrtle, and the willow but no etrog, you have not done a fraction of the mitzvah. You have done none of it. The four species are not four separate credits you accumulate. They are one act, and one act cannot be three-quarters performed. The Rambam is about to teach us, through the driest possible rulings about leaves and lengths and counts, that some things in life only exist when they are whole, and that the moment you have all but one of them you have, in the eyes of the law, nothing yet at all.

Naming the Four, Exactly

The Rambam begins by refusing to let us guess. Each species is defined with the care of a botanist who knows that a near match is a total miss. The frond of the date palm, he writes, means the branch of the palm as it first sprouts, before its leaves separate and spread apart in every direction. At that early stage the closed frond stands straight like a scepter, and that closed scepter is the lulav. Let the leaves open and divide and you no longer have the thing the Torah named. The fruit of the beautiful tree is the etrog, and the boughs of the covered tree are the myrtle, but only a particular myrtle, the one whose leaves grow so densely that three or more of them emerge in a single ring around the branch, covering the stem so completely that the wood beneath disappears. Fewer leaves in the ring, a stem left showing, and it is a different plant.

Then the willow. The Torah says willows of the brook, and the Rambam is careful to tell us this is not a description of where the plant lives but the name of a species. The true willow has a long narrow leaf, an edge that is smooth rather than jagged, and a stem that runs red. Notice what he has done. He has taken four familiar plants and turned each of them into a checklist of exact signs, because he knows what is coming next, the plant that will fool everyone, and the only defense against it is to have said, in advance and precisely, what the real thing looks like.

The Look-Alike by the Same River

Here is the moment the chapter has been building toward. There is another plant, the Rambam writes, that resembles the willow. But its leaf is rounded rather than long, its edge is serrated like the teeth of a saw, and its stem is not red. This plant is called the tzaftzefah, and it is unfit for the mitzvah. Sit with how unsettling that ruling is. The tzaftzefah grows by the same brook. It looks, to a hurried eye, like a willow. A person could gather it in perfect sincerity, bind it into his set, and lift it up in prayer, and he would be holding, according to the Torah, nothing. Growing in the right place was never the test. The willow is not kosher because of where it stands by the water. It is kosher because of what it actually is, its long leaf, its smooth edge, its red stem, and the imposter fails on every one of those counts while sharing the address.

This is one of the quietest and sharpest lessons in the laws of the festival. Proximity is not identity. The tzaftzefah has the whole biography of a willow. Same riverbank, same family, same silhouette from a distance. And it is unfit, because the mitzvah does not ask where you grew up or what you resemble. It asks what you are, tested against fixed and knowable signs. The Rambam has spent four rulings drawing those signs so carefully precisely so that the sincere person is not fooled, so that no one lifts up an imposter believing it is the real thing simply because it came from the right water.

One Mitzvah, and the Ruin of More

Now the Rambam binds it all together, literally. These four species, he rules, are one mitzvah, and each one of them is indispensable to it. All four together are called the mitzvah of lulav, and if even one is missing or unfit, the others cannot be lifted in its place. The most desirable way to perform it is to bind the lulav, the myrtle, and the willow into a single unified bundle in the right hand, with the etrog held in the left, though if a person did not bind them and took all four separately, he has still fulfilled the mitzvah, so long as all four are present. Binding is the beauty. Wholeness is the requirement.

There is a tenderness hidden in that ruling about binding, easy to miss because it sounds like a mere convenience. The three that are bound, the palm and the myrtle and the willow, are joined into one physical object, so that a person lifts them as a single thing rather than as a bundle of separate stems he happens to be holding at once. And yet the law refuses to make the binding indispensable, because it will not let the beauty of unity become a new way to fail. If you did not bind them, you have still done the mitzvah, so long as all four are in your hands. The wholeness the Rambam demands is not the neatness of the knot. It is the presence of every member. He wants the four together, and he is willing to accept them loose in your fist rather than pretend that a person who forgot to tie them has held nothing. Completeness is the law. Binding is only its most beautiful expression.

Then come the counts, and with them the chapter's final surprise. One lulav, one etrog, two willow branches, three myrtle branches. And here the Rambam draws a line that runs against every instinct we have about serving God generously. A person may add extra myrtle branches, he writes, as an adornment of the mitzvah, but adding to or subtracting from the number of the other species renders the performance unfit. You cannot take two etrogim because one felt insufficient. You cannot bind in a second lulav out of love. The very abundance that feels like devotion is, for those species, a disqualification. Only the myrtle absorbs more without harm. Everything else has an exact number, and to exceed it is to break it. He closes with the measures, the lulav no shorter than four handbreadths and always measured by its spine rather than its leaves, its spine rising a full handbreadth above the myrtle and willow bound beneath it, the myrtle and willow themselves no shorter than three handbreadths, the etrog no smaller than an egg. A set can fail not only by being wrong but by being too little, and not only by being too little but by being too much.

The Unifying Principle

Run the chapter together and one idea holds all of it. This is the mitzvah of the whole, and a whole is destroyed as surely by a missing part as by an extra one, as surely by an imposter as by an absence. That is why each species is named with such precision, why the look-alike from the same river is cast out, why all four are indispensable and none can stand in for another, and why even generosity, an extra lulav offered in love, ruins the set. The mitzvah is not a pile of good things to be maximized. It is an exact assembly, and its holiness lives in its completeness, not in its quantity.

The Sages saw in these four species the four kinds of Jew, the one with the taste of Torah and the fragrance of good deeds, the one with taste but no fragrance, the one with fragrance but no taste, and the one with neither, the plain willow that has no scent and no flavor at all. And the teaching that stopped the Chassidic masters in their tracks was this, that the Holy One says, let them all be bound together in one bundle, and they will atone for one another. The willow, the Jew who seems to bring nothing, is not optional. Take him out and the whole bundle is unfit, and the etrog with all its taste and fragrance cannot be lifted. The Alter Rebbe taught that the essence of a Jew is not in his revealed qualities, his taste and his fragrance, but in the simple point of the soul that every Jew shares equally, and it is that shared point, not the differing gifts, that binds the four into one. This is why more of the fragrant species cannot help. You cannot repair a bundle that is missing its plainest member by adding a second etrog. The unity is not built from surplus at the top. It is built from including the bottom.

The Closing

And so the law against adding turns out to be the deepest kindness in the chapter. The Baal Shem Tov taught that the simplest Jew, the one who can only cry out a single word of prayer, reaches a place the scholar's eloquence cannot. Chapter seven is that teaching made physical. You are not permitted to crowd the bundle with more of the impressive species, because the mitzvah is not asking for your abundance. It is asking for the exact four, including the scentless willow, held as one. Sfat Emet writes that the willow is taken up last and shaken hardest precisely because the part of us that feels it has nothing to offer is the part that most needs to be lifted and included.

A mitzvah that can be ruined by too much is teaching you something the rest of your striving keeps hiding. You cannot love your way past a missing piece by piling on more of what you already have. The bundle is holy only when it is whole, when the fragrant and the plain and the merely present are bound in the same fist and lifted together, and when the willow you were tempted to leave out turns out to be the one without whom none of the rest could rise. Hold all four, exactly four, or you are holding nothing yet. That is not a burden. It is the promise that no one, and no part of you, is expendable.