Choosing an Etrog Set Ain't Easy

By Susan Esther Barnes

Sukkot – the Jewish festival of the booths – doesn’t start until the evening of October 12, but already I’m seeing ads online for Etrog sets – the packages you can get with the four species required as part of the Sukkot holiday rituals.

The idea is, you get an etrog (a citrus fruit much like a lemon), a palm frond, a willow tree branch (with leaves) and a myrtle tree branch (with leaves). You hold them in your hands, wave them, and recite the appropriate blessings.

Presumably, if you live in Israel, the four necessary components would be pretty easy to get. It’s all stuff that naturally grows there (or did at one time – apparently when Israel was founded there weren’t a lot of etrog orchards left, but more have been planted since then).

There are some etrog orchards in the United States, but even if they could grow enough of the fruit to meet the demand of the entire North American Jewish market, many people prefer to support the State of Israel by buying their Etrog sets from there. Luckily for us in the diaspora, there are several websites to help us in this endeavor.

One might think that buying an Etrog set would be fairly straightforward, like buying many commodities online. Search a few websites that sell the item, check prices as well as shipping and handling charges, and buy from the one that offers the goods at the cheapest price without looking too dodgy.

A quick search, however, reveals prices anywhere from $35 to $129.99 (if you don’t count the cute but not kosher plushie set that sells for about $15). Yet the photos for all the sets on most sites, from the cheapest to the most expensive, is all the same photo. What’s up with that?

Well, you see, you could do the shaking of the four species using the cheapest kosher set available (you could even grow and pick your own for free), and you would be fulfilling the miztzvah (commandment).

But there’s this notion of “hiddur mitzvah,” which means “beautifying the commandment.” Rather than just doing the mitzvah, you can go the extra mile to do it in a more beautiful way, by having a more beautiful etrog, or a straighter palm frond, or more or fresher branches, etc.

So sure, you can get the basic set, but if you have extra cash to spend, you can trade up and pay 3 or 4 times as much, or more, to make it more beautiful. And I kind of understand that. Still, there is a part of me that can’t help but wonder, “How much did the ancient merchant’s guild have to pay to get that stuff added to the halacha (Jewish law) so they could make more money?”

I mean, really, who needs all this pressure to trade up for some fancier flora to wave around before it dies? Ok, so don’t insult God by using old, wilted, moldy branches and leaves, but all the components are God’s creations. It’s all good. Just buy the cheap set and, if you’re feeling guilty, donate the difference in cost to your local food bank. That would be a real hiddur mitzvah.

My Heart Live! On Screen!

By Susan Esther Barnes

When I was in college, I received a letter saying I had been randomly selected to participate in a medical study called Cardia which was being conducted in four cities in the US. The purpose of the study was to learn about how heart disease develops in young adults.

What they didn't tell us at the time, or perhaps I wasn't paying attention, was that if they could get ongoing funding, their intention was to keep track of us throughout our lives, testing us every few years, and seeing who among us was developing heart disease so they could compare their test results with those of us whose hearts are still going strong.

This explains why, recently, I found myself in the room pictured above, with the cool lions should lie down with lambs poster, getting an echocardiogram. Rather than just the boring test we've all seen that produces nothing more than a wavy line on a piece of paper, this test included the use of sound waves to show the structure and functioning of my heart on a computer screen.

So I got to lie there, looking at the different chambers in my heart pumping, and my heart valves opening and closing, in real time. They also do some cool color coding so I could see the speed and direction of the blood flow (just with sound waves, without pumping any yucky stuff into me), so I could actually see the blood flowing from my lungs into one chamber, the valve closing, and another valve opening while the chamber contracted and pushed the blood out into my body. Too cool.

Of course I started by describing the most fun part, and skipped over some other parts, like the four multi-page consent forms I had to sign, the multiple vials of blood they took, and the glucose tolerance test that includes drinking a bottle of sickly sweet orange drink which probably had about 8 million calories and left my stomach feeling angry for hours.

On the upside, though, the lab staff was great, and kept me well distracted while they were taking my blood. Which is a good thing, because if they let me brood on what they're doing, my blood pressure drops, and in past years they've had to stroke my arm to try to squeeze enough blood out into the tubes. And we won't talk about the one year when they assaulted me with smelling salts.

This year they didn't do anything like they had in the past to try to raise our blood pressure to see how high it would go. The most effective method they have of doing this is the treadmill test, which keeps raising the angle and speed until you cry "Uncle!"

One year they tried to make us play the (not so old at the time) "Breakout" video game (basically using a "paddle" to make a bouncing "ball" break a "wall"), but so many of us were so bad at the game we lost before they had time to take our blood pressure. Another time, they had us hold our arm in a bucket of icewater for 60 seconds. It may not sound like a big deal, but you try it some time. It was so painful a bunch of the study participants threatened to never come back, and they had to promise us they would never do it again.

As they like to remind us from time to time, the longer the study goes on, the more precious and irreplaceable we are. There is no other group they can draw from that has this same pool of data from the last 25 years.



Yes, at the risk of dating myself, as the T-shirt says, this study has been going on for 25 years now. But they're not always testing the same things. For instance, the heart function test I mentioned above tested for some factors that are now known to be indicators of heart disease, but included some new measurements they think might be predictive, and are gathering data on now.

This year, for the first time (that I recall), they did a congnitive test, which included asking me to listen to a long list of random words and then repeat back as many of them as I could remember. They did this a few times with the same list of words, and then did it once with a second list of words. Then they got all tricky on me asked me to go back and say as many words as I could from the first list without me saying any of the words on the second list.

Lucky me, it turns out that I qualify for a brain MRI test they also want to do, so I get to go do that and a CTI scan of my heart next month.

It's all a bit inconvenient, but it's a mitzvah, I do get to see some cool test results, and I feel good about contributing to medical knowledge that could help future generations live longer (and has already resulted in a bunch of publications). Plus, I can't say enough about how professional, helpful and friendly all the Cardia staff are.

So stay healthy, and the next time you read about a study that shows a new way to predict or prevent heart disease, think of me!

Delivering a Fresh Batch of Hope

By Susan Esther Barnes

I actually wrote the following story over a month ago, but I didn't want to post it until after it was published in our synagogue's newsletter. All I did was take out a few names in the interests of privacy.
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These days, teenagers lead busy, complicated lives. What with homework to finish, social and athletic activities to participate in, and numerous text messages to send, it seems they have time for little else. Why is it, then, that every Tuesday night Monica can be found baking cookies she won’t even get to eat?

Monica and her mother, Jessica, have always enjoyed spending time together in the kitchen. When Monica was preparing for her bat mitzvah last year, she was able to use her cooking skills when her class made a meal for the men staying at our synagogue as part of the temporary rotating winter shelter. “The best part was hanging out with the guys after they ate,” Monica exclaims, “I learned a lot of things from them that I wouldn’t have assumed. One of them even spoke Hebrew!”

Monica’s Torah portion, T’zav, was about making sacrifices, so for her mitzvah project she decided to sacrifice some of her time and energy each week by baking cookies for the men she had met at the homeless shelter. Now that it’s more than a year later and her obligation to do a mitzvah project is long past, Monica has faithfully continued to bake for the men every week again this winter.

“She does it all,” says Jessica, “All I do is drive her there to drop it off.” Asked why they do this every week, she says, “Everyone wants to do good stuff, but sometimes it’s hard to know what to do. At the synagogue they make it easy to do things for other people.”

Jessica also finds meaning in a term Rabbis Lezak and Kushner use, “hiddur mitzvah,” or “beautiful mitzvah,” which is about not only doing a mitzvah but doing it in a beautiful way. As Rabbi Kushner explains, “It is the difference between doing kiddush with a paper cup or doing kiddush with a cup a child made or someone gave to you.”

As Jessica describes it, “For me giving is purposeful and fulfilling. If someone took the time to help me and my family, it would give us a tiny bit of hope. You can’t live in your own head, in your own bubble. You can’t wait for someone else to do it.” And so, week after week, Jessica drives Monica to the synagogue to do a hiddur mitzvah; to drop off a freshly baked batch of hope.