The Satsuma
The satsuma is my favorite smell of winter, it’s so bright and fragrant that it cuts through the bleakest part of the year. Whenever I smell it I remember the giant bowl we put out for our annual Chanukah party. Every time I peel one and hear that snap I can hear the chatter of all our family friends at the party they all look forward to every year.
I loved winter as a child. I look around me now I see a dull grey sky, I feel the weight of a bulky coat and the strange disorientation of not being able to tell the difference between 5pm and 8. I can never remember if the same thing happened to the night the previous year — yet I can still remember how it would get dark while I was still in afterschool, and how the sun would set over the playground, how the splash of pinks and blues would fill the emptiness around the shouts of my classmates.
We have lost many loved ones and our Chanukah guest list has dwindled. I have lived through more seasons and I find it harder to get excited over the return of any of them. Life has become increasingly stressful, and it can feel like more and more of a burden to feel at all…let alone to feel alive.
I know now that Winter is the time of year associated with death, but every time I open a satsuma, I know some part of me will always associate the season with joy.
In Judaism we have a prayer we say to express gratitude for special occasions, both the brand new (i.e. during a B’nai Mitzvah), or to acknowledge the return of an annual one (i.e. during Rosh Hashanah).
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְיָ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הַעוֹלָם שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּוְ הִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה
Baruch atah Adonai Elohenu melekh ha’olam, shehecheyanu, vekiymanu, vehigi’anu lazman hazeh.
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe (or…y’know…whatever) who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.
We also say this prayer when we eat the first fruit of the season.
The news grows more bleak every day — this weekend Donald Trump stood in front of a room full of Jews, summoning a timeless force of hatred from the swamp he calls a heart. I hear that the Jews in the room laughed, but I hear everyone around me cry out in ancient terror, crying out in a voice that can never grow hoarse.
I cannot find that voice within myself right now. Somedays I cannot find my individual voice at all. I answer slowly through broken sentences, stumbling with questions as simple as “did you run the dishwasher.”
But still I can see bright orange, I can feel rough bumpy skin tickling my fingertips, and I can hear an ancient prayer in my ears.
This tiny little citrus tells me that winter is here, and that the darkest point of the year still marks the passage of time.
But the satsuma is not bright enough to drown out the sorrow around us at the moment. There is no orange quite blinding enough. Please do not misunderstand me: I am not trying to tell you to focus on the good in the world.
I hate being told to focus on the good. I don’t think I could do it if I tried. With the terror that has been wrought on my body there are times where my ability to focus is not even under my control. To try at any moment to get myself to focus on just the good would be a form of violence. The amount of energy I would have to focus on that poor fruit would be so powerful it would burst into flames, Hell — the whole world might burst into flames.
I’m just gonna say it: Sometimes gratitude is Stupid.
And yet, when I smell the satsuma, I feel an imprint of a happy memory among the memories that snap my brain out of place, costing me days of my life. Without the pain, it would just be another fruit.
I recently learned that the words of the Shehecheyanu are found in the Talmud — A book that still guides us 1,500 years later. A religion in time, says Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, not in space. A religion marked so deeply by the memories of pain, and hurt, that they reverberate throughout our whole liturgy. And yet, right in the middle of the book that lays it all out, we have a tiny prayer that we say to bless the fruits of winter. A prayer that reminds us we are still here to say it.
So here we are in the heart of winter. There is darkness all around us, and though we may think back on whether it was just as dark a year ago...the wondering itself reminds us that there is anything to wonder at all.
And so, my friends, I have only one question for you:
What has granted you life, sustained you, and brought you to this day? Where is your Satsuma?
