“Sweet Fruit”

In 2020, as the Pandemic was just hurling towards us in unimaginable ways and the high holy days had just passed, I found myself wanting to celebrate Sukkot. I was living in (and still live in) Nashville, TN where I had not quite found a community of Jews to celebrate festivals with in the ways that feel aligned for me. However, I had three friends. We called each other the “Jewitches” and still remain on a text chain with said title despite us all living in different cities now. This Sukkot, we decided to gather onto my large front porch as we listened to Batya Levine, Beverly Glenn Copland and others as we all simultaneously made art, bottled flower essences, wrote poems, danced, or just sat in each others’ beloved presences bewildered by the world and how it brought us together in that moment in time. That moment in sacred time of gathering in the Fall, when the air turns cooler and the sun sits lower. When you can start to smell the drying of the leaves, and there is a relief from the summer heat, and a relief from the high holiday haze and hustle, and you can just rest in the harvest. It wasn’t a halakhically (legal according to the Talmud) sanctified sukkah, but it protected us and held us safely outside, allowing us to be close to one another, unlike the rest of our days that called for social distancing and avoiding close contact. There was no lulav, no etrog, no myrtle (plants used ritually to wave under a sukkah to ask for rain) or waving in the directions. But this was perhaps the most magical Sukkot in all my days.

During this time, I wound up watercoloring a juicy pomegranate based on an actual pomegranate that someone had brought over. I titled the painting matok p’ri, meaning, “sweet fruit.”