Perfume[dropcap] and spices — aroma and taste — are not topics usually associated with the Torah. Yet, there they are, adding atmospherics, permeating serious messages with, if you will, a bit of spice. Actually, they too bear serious messages, iridescent, shining through the surface, if you look.
Taste
[dropcap]Start with taste. The liberated Israelites have crossed the Reed Sea, where they sang to G-d in gratitude for their miraculous rescue. Quickly enough, life turned routine, even bitter. “For three days they traveled through the wilderness without finding water,” Exodus reports. “They came to Marah, but could not drink the waters at Marah because they were bitter..That is why they named the place Marah” (it means “bitter”). “The people complained to Moses and asked, ‘What are we to drink?’ Moses cried to the L-rd and the L-rd showed him a tree, which he threw into the water, and then the water became sweet.”
Flint, Michigan could certainly have used Moses’ tree. What was it? First, we should back up and ask: What made the waters bitter? Then, what made them sweet? What happened there?
Shira Leibowitz Schmidt threw out this question to her online network and received 43 responses. Scientific. Exasperated. Religious. Humorous. Exegetical. She learned a lot. She also had fun.
“Let’s take the meager clues the text provides and see if we can decipher the science on which this supposed miracle is based,” began the first response. “I’m inclined to think the water was polluted and bitter due to some mineral leaching. We need to look for such bodies of water in the northern Sinai. Moses then put into the waters of Marah a log that contained a naturally occurring chemical that in some way removed the source of the bitterness. To speculate at this point on precisely what happened (and so imprecisely reported) would be un- scientific.”
Thus spake the scientist, Prof. Zweifler.
Next up:
“Who cares, Mrs. Schmidt, what tree it was that Moses threw into the water? As ibn Ezra said a thousand years ago, ‘We don’t know what tree, only that it was pele (something wondrous). The miracle was a sign of the compact between G-d and His people, one of many, many such miracles.”
Thus spake the person of faith, Mr. Liever. The battle is joined.
The scientist responds:
“Mr. Liever is representative of the unenlightened, superstitious, unthinking crowd that has ruined the Zionist dream! . . . I’m sure it was no miracle — there is certainly a good scientific explanation for what happened.”
What unfolds is more layered and nuanced than the typical faith vs. reason debate, though it rears its head continuously.
For example: One sweetens the bitter with something else that is bitter, whose modern counterpart is a vaccination. Then this from Roald Hoffman, Schmidt’s coauthor of the book in which this email thread appears. Hoffman need not defend his credentials as a scientist. He won the Nobel Prize in chemistry! Yet, this scientist’s tone and perhaps his substance veers radically from Prof. Zweifler’s condemnation of “superstition.” The alternate choices of trees offered by the Talmudic rabbis to explain Moses’sweetening of the waters “are clear testimony to the fact that the imperative to understand the ways of G-d through nature is ancient and essential to Jewish religious study, not to speak of everyday life.”
Not so fast.
“My hydrologist daughter explain-ed that the water may have been brackish, as is our water in Albuquerque. . . . My educated daughter . . . hypothesized that if the tree were fibrous as potatoes are, then the wood might be capable of absorbing salts in slightly brackish water, making the water potable. My mother-in-law (she lives with us) said, ‘For this we sent her to Harvard?’”
E. Z. Going chimes in, quoting George Bernard Shaw:
“There is nothing that people will not believe nowadays if only it be presented to them as science, and nothing that they will not disbelieve if it be presented to them as religion. I myself began like that; and I am ending by receiving every scientific statement with dour suspicion whilst giving very respectful consideration to the inspiration and revelations of the prophets and poets.”
Quite a distance here since Prof. Zweifler’s confidence in a scientific explanation of the incident at Marah. But Prof. Zweifler has his firm convictions and followers. Roald Hoffman explains the science of “taste modifiers” — exactly how one taste is transformed into another — observing along the way that bitterness may be sensed in as little as one part in 2,000,000. As for Norman Goldberg, the bitter waters were due to magnesium sulfate, which, lo and behold, has been found in springs not far from Moses’ Exodus routes. Wolfgang E. Krumbein informs us that the seeds of the Moringa tree (Moringa peregrina) have long been used to clean the water of the Nile. Earlier, Roald Hoffman quoted a view that the waters of Marah were bitter due to contamination by iron, and ferruginous water is decidedly bitter!
And what is a miracle, anyway?
Bracha Alhanissim was on the Air France flight hijacked to Entebbe in 1976 and then miraculously rescued by Israel. But was it actually miraculous? Alhannissm cites the Code of Jewish Law that a miracle must involve a departure from the world’s natural course, and that if one revisits the place where one experienced a miracle, one must recite a prescribed blessing. Two decades later she found herself at Entebbe. Should she recite the blessing?
“My rabbi advised me that, while I must be thankful for deliverance, I shouldn’t confuse a real miracle with a dazzling rescue executed meticulously. Therefore I should refrain from reciting the blessing.”
Mr. Kurt Jester:
“Sometimes our network discussions get too serious. Do you mind if I sweeten things up with a riddle? After creating the world and a few miracles, the Holy One, Blessed be He, decided to try for something really hard. He applied for tenure at a major Ivy League university. Tenure was denied, for three reasons. What were they? Answers in Bibl-e-mail next week.”
Next week:
“1. No one has ever been able to repeat His experiment. 2. G-d has only one publication, and that was in a nonacademic, unrefereed venue. 3. His first two experimental subjects were expelled.”
Some of both the scientific and the religious crowd like Nahmanides’ take. This preeminent medieval scholar notes that the Hebrew vayoreihu (“And G-d showed Moses a tree”) can also mean “And G-d taught Moses” His way, that He sweetens the bitter with the bitter. The religiously inclined say: What happened at Marah was a miracle within a miracle. The scientifically inclined say: “G-d gave Moses a chemistry lesson.”
How does Shira Leibowitz Schmidt add this all up? After bringing in other Biblical examples of bitter water (sotah and Elisha), she gives the last word (besides the last, last words to herself and her coauthor) to Moshe Greenberg:
“To think that by showing the theoretical possibility of the events having occurred naturally one has enhanced the credibility of the Bible is vain, since what the Bible asserts is not merely that such events happened, but that they attest the providence of a supernatural G-d at work on behalf of his people . . . The more natural one makes these events, the more one undermines the Biblical depiction of them as evidence of G-d’s care of his people. That is why the nonscientist bridles at attempts by scientists to rationalize or naturify miracles. Such attempts, while undertaken in a spirit of piety, defeat the very purpose of the Bible in reporting them.”
For a very delightful and very informed exploration of science and religion, I heartily recommend I Schmidt and Hoffman’s Old Wine, New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition (W. H. Freeman and Company: New York, 1997).
Fragrance
In the middle of the Jacob and Esau story, an odd detail, easily unnoticeable, appears. Isaac notes that “the fragrance of my son [Esau] is like the fragrance of a field which the L-rd has blessed.” Of what importance is Esau’s fragrance?
The story of Isaac and his two sons, Jacob and Esau, is laden with conflict and continuity. The conflict was bitter and extended. Jacob won the birthright. Then Jacob won his father’s blessing with the help of his mother Rebeccah. When Esau learns he has lost the blessing, he cries out in anguish and begs his father for a blessing, too. Isaac obliges, but Jacob has received the real blessing. Esau receives a consolation prize. He is outraged. He intends to kill his brother after their father’s death, so Rebeccah instructs Jacob to flee, which he does, staying away for 22 years. Then, escaping from his trickster father-in-law Laban, Jacob seeks to return home. Is Esau still bent on killing him?
The reunion of the brothers goes surprisingly well, whereupon Jacob sets out to sustain the continuity of his people. By now he has sired 13 children, including the 12 tribes. The story of Jacob is really the inception of the long epic of the Jewish people.
A serious story indeed. I have skipped over many of its significant messages to arrive at the current topic: fragrance.
At a critical moment in the Jacob story, a seemingly trivial detail is noted. Jacob has dressed up as Esau and Isaac observes that “the voice is the voice of Jacob while the [hairy] hands are the hands of Esau” — since Rebeccah has covered Jacob’s arms with goat skin. Jacob feels like Esau. Isaac proceeds to bless Jacob, thinking he is Esau. As such, Isaac notes that “the fragrance of my son is like the fragrance of a field which the L-rd has blessed.”
Of what importance is Esau’s fragrance?
One might say that since Isaac had gone blind, his sense of smell intensified; but the focus here is on Isaac’s sons, not Isaac. One might say that Esau was a man of the field; however, this is already well established early in the history of the brothers. One might take the Torah as literature and say that the reference to Esau’s fragrance adds a smooth transition to the blessing, the gift, that Isaac proceeds to give (“May G-d give you of the dew of the heavens and the fatness of the earth”).
Or, one might say something else. One might say what the Zohar says. To understand its parable, we must first note that tanneries can be quite smelly. I owe this datum to Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, who cites the Talmud’s ruling that tanneries must be kept 50 cubits (about 92 feet) downwind from a town (Bava Batra 2:9). With this, we turn to the book’s citation of the Zohar:
“A parable: A man loved a woman. She lived in the tanner’s market. If she were not there, he would never enter the place. Since she is there, it appears to him as a market of spice peddlers, with all the world’s finest aromas in the air.”
Jacob’s arms were covered with goat skins. Remember, Isaac thought that Jacob was Esau. Washed goat skin smells really bad. But Isaac said, “the fragrance of my son is like the fragrance of a field that the L-rd has blessed.” Permit me now to add in one line from the Torah that I omitted above: Just before Isaac notes Esau’s fragrance, the Torah records, “Isaac drew close . . . and smelled the fragrance of his garments . . .” To us, the fragrance of these washed goat-skin garments would be very smelly. Offensive. But upon smelling (what he thought) were Esau’s garments, Isaac extends his beautiful blessing. This seemingly trivial detail of the fragrance of Isaac’s son’s garments tells us how much Isaac loved Esau. Isaac was like the man in the smelly tanner’s market who, because he was with the woman he loved, found himself in a market of spice peddlers with all the world’s finest aromas in the air.
It would be so easy to pass by the Torah’s brief reference to Isaac’s attention to the fragrance of Esau’s garments. In love, one does not pass by the smallest detail.
© IJN 2025
