The Wine Inside The Incense

Welcome to the Kosher Teruah. 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. The following is a reading of the ingredients of the katorat. פתום הקטורת קצד ואחד עשר סמנים היו בה. ואלו הן הצרי והציפורן, החלבנה וחלבונה, מור וקצייה שיבולת נרד וקרקום, הקשת שנים עשר וקילופה שלושה וקינמון תשע, בורית קרשינה תשע קבין, יין כפריסין Talatah beka bin talatah. Wait a minute. Yayin kafresin. Isn't that wine? There is wine in the incense. I have said those words 10,000 times, every morning between korbanot and odoo, at the speed you say the things you know by heart. 11 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 teruah, and this, in the last days of Elul, is the story of a wine nobody ever drank. You've been hearing that sound all month, Near the end of Shacharit every weekday since Rosh Chodesh Elul, someone in the Beit Knesset 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 Teruah. 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 Yomim Noraim run from one sense to another. Rosh Hashanah, we hear our way in, a sound with no words, but following the 10 days to the end. To Yom Kippur, to the temple, to the one moment the whole year tilts towards. 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 is 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 50 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 11 spices. I see the wine. 2 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 2,000-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 4 things to that incense before it ever touched fire. 4 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 10 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. Chapter 1, The Scrub. Let me tell you what the Pitomah Ketoret 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 a Siddur and said it every day until it became furniture. Read it slowly and it stops being furniture. 368 manah a year, one for every day. And three extra for the kohin gadol on Yom Kippur. Eleven aromatics, each with its own weight: balsam, anika, 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: Netaf, Shechelet, Helbana, and Levona. The other seven, the weights, the process, none of it is in the Pasuk. The Gemara in the first chapter of Kritot derives eleven from the wording of the verse. And then hands you the recipe as a brayta. 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 Aftinas. I'll tell you this as a lore, because that is how the Mishnah tells it. Beit Aftinas 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 father 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 Aftinas wearing perfume. Ever. So that no one could say, even as a joke, that the family had made the Temple's fragrance and 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 cav of borit karsina, a lie made from vetch. 21 kav of yin kafresin, our wine, a quarter kav of sedum 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 cellarhand what that bucket is for. Borit kashina. What does it come for? To rub the Sippurin with it. The anakah, the shachelet 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. Shitehei na, 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 lie came before the wine. I'll say the Elol 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. 2 more lines from the sheet. 2 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 Brit HaSays, 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 cavaier, imported, expensive, to soak the tsporin. And the Gemara asks the question a purchasing manager would ask: Wasn't there something cheaper? Yes, meraglayim, stale urine, the ancient world's standard treatment for stubborn aromatics. Effective. Available, free. So why not? One line: "אין מכניסים מרגליים למקדש", מבנה הכבוד. You do not bring that into the temple because of the dignity. Not because it wouldn't work, but because of כבוד. 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 Tziporin. It needs it as za, fierce, and for that the house of Vitanas opened the barrel. The second verb. Soak. Here is the whole instruction, and hear how short it is. יין כפריסין למה היא באה? ששורשים בו את הציפורן כדי שתהיה עזה. Why does כפריסין wine come? To soak the ציפורן in it, so that it will be עזה. That is the entire job description of the only wine in the Beit HaMikdash that nobody drank. Aza, 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 seporin 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-close spice, and when the soak is done. And the wine is spent, the spices changed, in a wine whose entire career is disappearance. So what was it? Nobody knows for certain, and the 2 sides of the argument, it turns out, are arguing about exactly the thing this podcast is named for. The wine world names its bottles in 2 ways. The Old World names wines after places. Chablis is a village, and 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 Yayin Kafrisin is that argument. Is Kafrisin a place or a thing? Suspect 1. Place. Rashi in our passage is short and geographic. Wine sheba mimakom shishmo Kapros. From a place named Kapros, Cyprus, the island off our coast, one of the great export vineyards of the ancient Mediterranean, home to a substantial Jewish community. In the temple's times, on this reading, the Beta Migdash 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 too—a thing. Because the Gemara uses the word kafrisin somewhere else, and there it has nothing to do with an island. In the 6th chapter of Brachot, 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, yayin 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 Beitza has a list of the Azin, the brazen ones of creation: Israel among the nations, the dog among the animals, the rooster among the birds, and some say the salaf among the trees. The caper is the brazen plant, the bush that grows straight out of the stones of the Kotel. Uninvited, unwanted, unkillable, flowering in July heat, out of the wall, 2,000 years old. Every Jerusalemite has seen it. Most of us never knew its name. So, follow the logic. The Temple wanted the Sipporin azah, and on this reading, they soaked it in a wine Of a plant the Gemara itself calls the azah of all plants, the one it lists in the same breath as Israel among the nations. The fierce spice made fierce by the fierce plant in the temple built by 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 codified 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 braita's own fallback: if you have no kafrisin wine, bring chomer היבריין עתיק, old white wine. The Ramban adds, זק ביותר, 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 The specification: old, white, strong. Whatever kaphresin was, its essence was strength. And strength, old, golden, strong beyond the ordinary, is something Cyprus can pour you today. 2 readings, 2,000 years without a verdict, and then a professor and a winemaker Stopped arguing about it and made it. The professor is Zohar Amar of Bar-Ilan University, who has spent his career identifying not what the Mishnah's plants and materials symbolize, but what they were. The winemaker is Dr. Ali Shiv Drury. Regular listeners know the name Shiv Drury. He's a researcher who has spent years hunting down the lost grape varieties of this land and coaxing them back into the bottles. If anyone was going to try to make Yain Kefrisin, 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, 15 to 17% 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, and 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, 16% 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 apricots, candy 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. It's time. In a young white, we'd call it a fault. In this wine, it's the point. The breiter said "atique," 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 brighter. 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 materials dissolved in alcohol. That is what perfume is—a tincture. Now. Think about the Sippurin. Whatever it was, the Rishonim argue, a shell-like thing from the sea or hardened resin, every description agrees it arrived hard and closed. It did not give off any of its smell just sitting there. So, look at what Beit Haftinas 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. Aza. 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 is being technically correct. Two solvents, one noble, one not. The chemistry is identical; the kavod is not. Read the spec sheet like the 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 siporin beautiful, and a red would have stained it. Strong enough to open the spice, clear enough not to mark it. And the Rambam's zach biyoter isn't praise, it's a line off the tech sheet. The Braita is not folklore. It is a spec sheet and it holds up. 2,000 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—it soaked, finished, fiercely ready—went back into the mortar the night before Yom Kippur. The third verb: grind. Go back to the number: 368 mana, 365 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. Kedai shitekhaye daka min hadaka. So that it would be fine from the fine, finer than fine. The Gemara asks why, and the answer looks like Gemara and turns out to be theology. In Shemot, God already says. Of the katorat, 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 the word "katorat samim daka," 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 burnt 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 camera down and just sit there: the grinding had a soundtrack. The Breiter records that the compounder said that while he worked the mortar out loud in rhythm with the pestle, "הדק היטיב". הטיב הדק, grind it fine, fine grind it. Like a work song. And the Gemara asked the obvious question: Why is he talking to the mortar? And Rabbi Yochanan gives an answer that was written for a wine podcast 2,000 years before there was one. כאשר שידבר רליין כאשר ידבר יפה לביסמים. 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 that I've 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. Hazal knew that. But the spices were the opposite. The man in the mortar sang to them. The Temple's 2 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 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 sounds like: a hundred blasts of the shofar, slichot before dawn, and out loud together vidui, which the halacha insists we speak, not think. Avinu Malkenu's shouted by the whole room. Yaseret Yemet Shuvah are the loudest ten days of the Jewish year. The 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 10 days, so that he will be daka min hadaka. And Yom Kippur is the fire. Scrub, soak, grind, burn. Elul, Rosh Hashanah, the 10 days, Yom Kippur. I told you the temple is describing this season the whole time. It wasn't only the spice that was prepared. The opening Mishnah of Yom Ha, 7 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, 2 handfuls of twice-ground powder in the other. Past the curtain alone. וִכִּנָס אַנָן הַכִּתֹּרֶת אֶת הַכִּפֹּרֶת. And the cloud of the incense covered the Kapporet. And he does not die. Everything we've talked about— the lie, 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 Avitina's 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 them, They brought in expert perfumers from Alexandria. The Alexandrians compounded the spices well enough, but their smoke scattered. Only Bet of Tinas knew the herb. The sages brought the family back. Anyone can buy the ingredients. The 11 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 seller 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? The fourth verb: burn. The Gemara in Brachot asks, out of nowhere, in the middle of the laws of blessings on fragrance: "איזהו דבר שהנשמה נכנית ממנו?" והגוף נחיינה ממנו. What is the thing that the soul enjoys and the body gets nothing from? הווה אומר, זה הריח. It's the 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 Hazal say so. So when the Torah gives the holiest moment of the year to smell, it is choosing the one sense In which the human being can receive without taking. In the one room where nothing in the world belongs, the offering is the one thing this world cannot keep. And look at the 2 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 10 days of 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, 20-odd kilometers away, and 1,000 meters down. The women of Yericho 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 a temple episode. One of the four spices the Torah itself names is galbanah, 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 Kritot, in the name of Rav Shimon Hasida, draws a conclusion that has nothing to do with incense and everything to do with the next few weeks. כל תענית שאין בה מפושע ישראל אינה תענית. Any fast that does not include the sinners of Israel is not a fast, because hellbana smells bad, and the Torah put it in the Ketoret. The blend requires its harshest members. Not tolerates, requires. Leaving out the Chalbanah and the compounder is liable for his life. The 11 are not 10 good ones and one bad; they are 11. 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 matirim litpalel im havaryanim. 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 helbana back in the blend. Now, I owe you two debts from chapter one. This is the fire. The honey—a spoonful would have made the katorat 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. מבנה הכבוד. 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 Amim Noraim tempt us towards shortcuts: the fast filah, the vidui on autopilot, the apology that gets the job done. And the Ketoret says from 2,000 years away, that isn't nothing, but it isn't the recipe. Do it be kavod. Do it the expensive way. Import the barrel. One last thing, and I am 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 tzipporin. It did not 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 ayin kafresin at the time of the temple didn't make the seporin fragrant; it made the seporin 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 had said it. A wine that was never tasted, preparing a fragrance only the soul could use. Let's bring it to the table. 3 things I'm taking to the table on Rosh Hashanah night from a wine nobody ever drank. 1. 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 7 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. 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 helbana. The smoke doesn't rise without them, and somewhere in that room, to someone, the helbana is you. Two small things I'd like you to actually do. Tomorrow morning, between korbanot and hodu, you'll reach the words yain kavrisin, and when you do, hold that breath and think about the barrel that vanished so that the spice could rise. And then keep going. And on 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 midline 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. Yain kafresin, zin talata, dekabin talata. ואם אין לו יין כבריסין, מביא המר היבריין. עתיק מלך סתומית רובע, מעלה עשן כלשהו. רבי נתן הבבלי אומר, אף כיפת הירדן כלשהו. ואם נתן בה דבש, פסלה. ואם היסר אחד, מכל זמניך היה מיתה. ויד תנא בר כפרה, אילו היה נותן בה כרטוב של דבש, אין אדם יכול לעמוד בבני ריחה. ולמה אין מריבין בדבש, בבני שהתורה אמרה, כי כל שעור וכל דבש לא תקטירו ממנו אישה להשם. And Bar Kapara further taught, had he put a כורטוב of honey into it, no person could stand before its fragrance. And why did 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 lie that made it beautiful and the wine that made it fierce, the free thing they refused. B'nei 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, 10 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 kativa v'chatima tova, tizku l'shanim rabot umtukot, shana tova umtuka, and as always, l'chaim. And one last ask: please share this with one person who says "petumketoret." Every morning. This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of the Kosher Terroir. 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