בֶּחָג בְּיַד אֶחָד צְלוֹחִית שֶׁל מַיִם הֲרֵי כָאן עֲשָׂרָה
On the festival of Sukkot, in one hand [of an additional priest] is a jug of water, and therefore there are ten [priests total here].
OK, word of the day for me is undoubtedly צְלוֹחִית/tz’lochit. First of all it is a Biblical Hapax Legomenon, which means it occurs once and only once in Hebrew Scripture, so basically it is a unicorn word!! It’s a nice feminine noun meaning a flask, bottle, or jug that has a wide body and a narrow neck. However it is rife with linguistic subtext! It could well be built from the root ס-נ-ן/s-n-n which means to shine, be bright, clear, or refined. These ideas are mapped onto the pseudo-homonym (I may have just made that idea up…Linguists out there, is there such a thing?) צ-נ-ן/tz-n-n which means to be cool or shiny. This root takes us to the feminine noun צִנְצֶ֣נֶת/tzin’tzenet which, according to Jastrow, means a glossy bottle but is also translated as a jar. This in turn is related to צַלַּֽחַת/tzalachat which is related to similar words in Arabic and Ethiopian, meaning a dish, bowl, or other vessel, and from there it is a short leap to our word of the day צְלוֹחִית/tz’lochit!! Holy diphthongs, Batman!!!
OK, full disclosure: I am a wine fanboy. I’m not a sommelier by any stretch of the imagination—that is a level of nerdom and budget that I could never dedicate—but I do have a passion for the fascinating flavors and history of Judaism’s sacred inebriant. And this textual snippet lifted up one of wine culture’s weirder conventions: the biblical names of large format wine bottles. So, you got your standard 750ml wine bottle, sometimes called a fifth. You’ve got your 1500ml bottles called Magnums, because they are, well, pretty big, and the 3000ml bottles are called, you got it, double magnums OR, get this, Jeroboams! The next size up is the now-defunct Rehoboam, followed by a Methuselah, then comes Salmamazar, Balthazar, Nebuchadnezzar, Solomon, and finally Melchizedek, which is basically a bottle the size of a bathtub!!! Drinkable Torah! I know it’s a leap, but I love that the Rabbis popped this little bottle detail in here!! If we are using a צְלוֹחִית/tz’lochit for water, I can’t wait to find out what vessel they are gonna use to bring in the wine!! Maybe we will find a clue to today’s wine bottle conventions!!
The Rabbis invoke Sukkot, the festival of festivals of the ancient Jewish world here. This is also what the Chashmoni (Hasmoneans, aka the Maccabees) did to justify establishing their own 8-day holiday, Chanukah. I am pulling the lens way back here, remembering that the tractate we are learning is all about how the Rabbis are going to take a barely mentioned, light on the details, one-day atonement ritual and turn it into a powerhouse and central part of post-Temple Judaism. The fact that they are pulling in other well-established and observed rites is, I think, a tactic for establishing legitimacy for their project. As our modern world is dealing with a potentially cataclysmic set of challenges, I am especially interested in the Rabbis strategy here–how they are both dropping anchors into the past while weaving a longer rope to let them rise into the future. Fascinating!! And effective!!! Let us go into this shabbat with open hearts and minds. Let us be always learning and adding our individual wisdom to the weaving. And let us be fully present and real in all we encounter. Rest well, dear ones!!!