Friday, March 29, 2024 -
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Nuts

Many have the custom not to eat nuts on Rosh Hashanah. The source is that nuts can cause a dry, scratchy throat, and the rabbis wanted to avoid the possibility of someone coughing during shofar blowing.

The specific nut mentioned is an egoz, a hazelnut, whose numerical value is 17 (aleph=1, gimel=3, vav=6, zayin=7). The often-cited reason for this custom is that the numerical value of egoz is equal to that of chet, or sin. So in order to stay away from sins, we avoid nuts. It’s the flip side of eating a pomegranate, its multitude of seeds an omen for a year filled with good deeds.

But wait a minute. Some of you may have noticed that the numerical value of chet is not equal to that of egoz. Sin, or chet, is comprised of three letters: chet=8, tet=9, aleph=1. That’s 18, not 17! But even the merest hint of a sin — a single digit — is something we want to stay away from during the Day of Judgement. So, no nuts.

Other scholars had a different take: The gematria, or numerical value, of sin is sin. Why not just stay away from sins? Why bother with the nuts?

This is a noble and authentic approach, but we humans have a hard time facing things head on, so we come up with all kinds of circuitous workarounds. After all, it’s a lot easier to avoid eating nuts than to avoid committing a sin. So, no hazelnuts, and we’ll call sin quits, eh?

The holiday season is over, but I was reminded of this human impulse as I read about “Clean Speech Colorado”. A reason we probably enjoy gossiping so much is that it’s a lot easier to talk about other people’s problems than to face our own — and ourselves. As much as we know that the best way to avoid lashon hara is — as the scholars may say — to avoid lashon hara, how do we, with all of our human foibles, accomplish that?

I’m looking forward to finding out.

Hat tip to Rabbi Daniel Rapp of EDOS for the investigation of egoz.

Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected]



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IJN Assistant Publisher | [email protected]


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