Aton M. Holzer
The fifteenth of Av – among the most minor of minor festivals on the Jewish calendar – is marked in the diaspora primarily by the omission of the post-Amidah tahanun-supplications. In Israel, the day was reclaimed with the first Aliyah for the founding of Rishon Lezion in 1882, its grape-harvest festival thereafter, a date for kibbutz dances – recalling Biblical vineyard dances – beginning in the immediate pre-state era, and today is primarily marked as an Israeli answer to Valentine’s day, reflecting a Mishnaic (Ta’anit 4:8) digression on the nature of those dances.
The day, which is treated in precisely one Mishnah and one passage in the Talmudic corpus ( Ta’anit 30b-31a, secondarily cited in Bava Batra 121a), nonetheless plays an outsized role in that reference: it is given six possible etiologies, one more than the five provided for each of the fast days enumerated in the preceding Mishnayot, and thus appears to interpret the Mishnah as offering Tu Be-Av as an antidote of sorts to the great national day of mourning observed six days prior.
The passage makes an appearance once elsewhere in the late antique Rabbinic corpus — in Eikha Rabbah, Petihta 33 – which ends the passage with a dilation on one particular cause: the ceasing of the deaths of the Jews in the wilderness. The Bavli understands that this fact was ascertained by dint of the resumption of Divine communication with Moses (Devarim 2:16-17), which itself arguably deserves celebration. The version in the late antique Eretzyisraeli Midrash cites a different view:
Rabbi Avin and Rabbi Yohanan said: It is the day that the digging for those who died in the wilderness was halted. Rabbi Levi said: Every eve of the ninth of Av, Moses would dispatch a herald to the entire camp, saying: ‘Go out and dig,’ and they would go out and dig graves and sleep in them. In the morning, he would dispatch a herald saying: ‘Rise and separate the dead from the living,’ and they would stand and take themselves out. Fifteen thousand and more were subtracted, for a total of six hundred thousand. In the fortieth year, the last one, they did so and found themselves intact. They said: It appears that we were mistaken in our calculation, and they did the same on the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth. When the moon was full, they said: It appears that the Holy One blessed be He abrogated the decree from upon us, and they then rendered it a holiday.[1]
What does one make of this Aggadah?
It took me until 2024 to appreciate the sort of experience described in the Midrash, one which Israelis of my parents’ generation experienced in June of 1967: of laying down to sleep under the threat of night-time annihilation, of furious vengeance promised by a vicious foe, with immediate reprisal deferred by a day, then two, then three – then almost certainly on Monday, with the US President in the situation room – and then after the Wednesday Arab league meeting, then promised on social media for Thursday, then for certain on the ninth of Av… living and working with the obligatory steely resolve, but, admittedly, tinged with a dose of anxiety, if not existential dread. A friend in the U.S. asked if our show of sangfroid expresses Israelis’ bitahon, trust in God. Even composure needs to be interrogated, though. How can I be certain that my confidence is in God, and not in kohi ve-otzem yadi (my power and the strength of my hand) of the mighty IDF, or worse, the fickle New Rome across the pond? What of shema yigrom ha-het – maybe punishment is due, particularly in this inauspicious time, and anxiety is what piety demands? In any event, the emergence of the metaphoric Jewish full moon, defying the crescent, is surely worth more than a mere missed tahanun.
The crescendo of this experience came with the twelve-day Israel-Iran war only two months ago, unfortunately with casualties, albeit far fewer than we had feared. By a twist of fate, I was abroad for the entire war, worrying as my family woke each night to head down to the Mamad, to be delivered, thank God, to a new Middle East whose implications are continuing to unfold. (This event coincided not with the mourning period for Jerusalem, but the more recent vintage, mostly forgotten, fast of 20 Sivan, commemorating the martyrdom wrought on defenseless Jews of Blois and of Poland, later, by Khmielnitsky and his Cossacks – but the implications of that “coincidence” are for another time.)
Temporally speaking, the event of survival during the fortieth year in the desert is the first of the six reasons given for celebrating Tu Be-Av, and thus suggests it as an etiology for the choice of the precise date of the annual grape harvest festival – with ripening of grapes in the Levant occurring in mid-August[2] – marked by dances in the vineyards around the tabernacle in Shilo (Judges 21:19), which itself seems a likely catalyst from some of the other events associated with the fifteenth of Av in the Talmudic account. Vineyard dances around the central pilgrimage site would have been the logical place to inaugurate intertribal exogamy, the next event which Tu Be-Av celebrates, and later, the Bible itself records these vineyards as the locus of Benjamitic reintegration, à la Sabinae raptae, the marital abduction of Sabine women by Romulus’ men in the foundation myth of Rome.
But why celebrate the survival of expected doom with a wine festival?
- A Full-bodied Festival
After the threatened (and ultimately, in October, consummated) Iran attack of 2024 – threatened in early August, during the mourning period leading up to the ninth of Av, a week of re-living the Midrash Eikha, trading in gallows humor at my workplace, a hospital a mere block from HaKirya (IDF headquarters), the most symbolic military installation and a known target for our foes,[3] worrying nightly for my daughter in Herzliya, my son-in-law on his base in the South, our own family in Beit Shemesh, not spared in prior missile attacks, and friends the country over – the aromas and tastes of a particularly complex blend for Friday night Kiddush on Shabbat Hazon, after five days of privation, made the question seem to answer itself. But how to put this into words?
Wine enjoys a special place in Jewish ritual law. The wine-grape, alone among fruits, merits a special blessing for its primary product – borei peri ha-gafen – and a special category for its Berakha Ahrona, the al ha-gefen blessing. It is the focus of the invocations that convene and adjourn the Sabbath and festivals, for which the imperative of ‘remember’ is presumed to reference the memory-stirring properties of wine.[4] It is an Halakhic superfood.
Recent research bears out the late antique Rabbinic intuition. It has long been argued that the ideal wine, in the words of French chef and “Pope of Gastronomy” Paul Bocuse, “satisfies perfectly all five senses: vision by its color; smell by its bouquet; touch by its freshness; taste by its flavor; and hearing by its ‘glou-glou’.”[5] But in his Neuroenology, the late Yale neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd goes much further: he elucidates the highly complex sensory and motor pathways of wine ingestion and tasting, and further demonstrates that “creating the flavors of wine engages more of the brain than any other human experience,”[6] involving activation of central brain systems for memory, emotion, motivation, reward, and language.
The extraordinary embodied and “embrained” experience of wine is best understood by poets, not by scientists. Indeed, it did not go unnoticed by the greatest of ours: wine-poetry, playful, real, edgy but never transgressive,[7] was a favorite genre of the Andalusian poets. No less than R. Solomon Ibn Gabirol, the Ba’al ha-Azharot and author of Shomron Kol Titen, the haunting, wrenching, yearning coda to the Kinnot of both evening and morning of Tish’a Be-Av in the eastern Ashkenazic tradition, shared these thoughts on the fruit of the vine:
שְׂפַת מִזְרָק מְנַשֶּׁקֶת שְׂפָתִי / כְּשֶׁמֶשׁ זָרְחָה עַל כַּף עֲמִיתִי
בְּמֵימֵי הַגְּפָנִים בָּעֲרָה אֵשׁ / וְתֹאכְלֵנִי וְלֹא תֹאכַל לְסוּתִי
וְעוֹד לֹא רָאֲתָה עַיִן כְּמַרְאֵה / זְכוּכִית יַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם דְּמוּתִי
אֲשֶׁר בַּלָּט יְדַבֵּר לִי עֲסִיסוֹ: / חֲדַל, טֶרֶם יְבַעֶתְךָ שְׂאֵתִי
וְאֵיכָה תַעֲרֹךְ שֶׁמֶשׁ לְאוֹרִי / וְלִי יִתְרוֹן עֲלֵי שֶׁמֶשׁ כְּצֵאתִי
לְמַעַן כִּי גְוִיָּתָהּ עֲרֻמָּה / וְהַסַּפִּיר וְהַשֹּׁהַם כְּסוּתִי
וְאֵיךְ תַּשְׁוֶה דְבִָרִי הַמְּהֻלָּל / לְאִישׁ גָּזַל מְעַט מִתַּאֲוָתִי
שְׁתִינוּהוּ וְהַבָּרָק מְפַזֵּז / לְגָרֵשׁ הַאֲפֵלָה מִנְּוָתִי
יְפַזֵּר בַּעֲדָהּ תַּרְשִׁישׁ וְשֹׁהַם / וְיָפִיץ בַּאֲפָסֶיהָ שְׁנָתִי
וְיִתְפָּאֵר בְּפַח זָהָב עֲלֵי עָב / תְּלַקֵּט שַׁרְשְׁרוֹת זָהָב בְּבֵיתִי
וּמֵימֶיהָ כְּמֵי שֶׁלֶג שְׂנִיר אוֹ / כְּמוֹ שִׁירַת שְׁלֹמֹה הַקְּהָתִי.
Rendered to English by the acclaimed poet and translator Peter Cole, [8]
The lip of the cup kissing mine in my friend’s hand was like the sun;
A fire burned in the vine’s water, devouring me but not my gown.
No eye had ever seen a finer mirror making a man in my image:
whose sweetness said to me, silently: “Stop, before you’re struck by my splendor.
How could you liken my light to the sun, whose might I surpass by far—
when its body is naked and bare, and mine is covered with gems?
How could you ever compare my flow to a man who steals my desire?”
We drank it and lightning flashed and drove the darkness out of my dwelling
and replaced it with crystal and onyx, dispersing my sleep through its rooms.
It gloried in gold above a cloud which gathered golden chains in my home,
and the rains were cold as the snow of Senir or Samuel the Levite’s poems.
In addition to assigning signifiers to the sensate enchantments of the chalice, the content of the poem demonstrates striking verisimilitude. As the verses progress, the wine seems to have its effect: the similes become more abstruse and unmoored from reality, and the translator admits difficulty in parsing their meaning. Most fittingly, the piece closes with a stunning show of impaired judgment: an abrupt, gratuitous frontal attack on the most powerful of his poet-colleagues, Granadan military commander Isma’il ibn Naghrillah (Shemu’el ha-Nagid), ibn Gabirol’s erstwhile patron. The verse is known to have caused its author an awful headache.[9]
In engaging all of the senses and all of the brain, wine stands alone, towering above other gastronomic experiences, in a class of its own, requiring its own blessing, meriting even an additional blessing – ha-tov ve-hameitiv – for a superior oenological experience. Its complex engagement of memory centers make it the proper adjuvant for zakhor, the imperative to remember the Sabbath and Festivals. And it is the perfect vehicle for fully reengaging our embodied selves, the great gift returned to us by God, as depicted in another Gabirolean[10] verse –
I entrust my spirit to His hand, when sleeping and when awake.
With my body my soul will stay; the Lord is with me, I need not fear[11]
— precisely when enduring a period in which this fear is quite warranted, when surviving through the night is by no means guaranteed.
2. Libations of Land
On June 13, 1972, in a Yiddish excursus on the weekly Torah portion at the conclusion of a Talmud shiur at the Morya synagogue in Manhattan, R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik offered an explanation for the juxtaposition of the Sin of the Spies with the commandment regarding libation-offerings:
What does “eretz okhelet yoshveha,” ‘a land that consumes its inhabitants’ (Numbers 13:32) mean? …[that] in order to make an ordinary livelihood, it is necessary to work all day. In many countries, such as America, a man can earn a good income and live luxuriously; he can do nothing at all and still make money. However, there are certain countries in which it is very difficult for men to earn enough to support themselves; not only must they labor day and night, but their wives and children must also work so that they may eke out a meager subsistence. Such a country is an eretz okhelet yoshveha. It is possible to exist in such a land, but it is impossible to live a full life in regard to one’s career hopes and ambitions — in that land, one cannot achieve what he can achieve in another land. This was the dibbat ha-aretz (slander of the Land): that the inhabitants of the land had to slave to make a living.
God wished to inform the nation that this was a lie. Thus, immediately following the account of the sin of the Spies, we find the portion of the minhat nesakhim, the meal-offering and its libations, which symbolizes not the existence of man, but his success; the offering served to thank God for fulfilling the man’s goals, dreams and aspirations. When is this offering to be brought? Ki tavo’u el eretz moshevoteikhem, upon entering the land. (Numbers 15:2). This proves that the land is not ‘a land that consumes its inhabitants,’ for if it was, man would find only frustration, and there would be no occasion to bring a libation-offering, which symbolizes success.[12]
By accounts of those close to him, with regard to the delights of the vine, Rav Soloveitchik had a stereotypical Litvak palate – he was partial to grape juice.[13] However, the idea that wine expresses the goals, dreams and aspirations of man on his land – a very particular piece of land, and what happens on that land – did not escape his notice. It is given sinews in an account of a confessed “terroiriste,” in his words – one who appreciated the terroir, the taste and flavor imparted to wine by the environment that produced it. This thinker is none other than the late Chief R. Jonathan Sacks’ philosophy mentor, Roger Scruton.
The ’this worldly’ nature of the heightened consciousness that comes to us through wine means that, in attempting to describe the knowledge that it imparts, we look for features of our actual world, features that might be, as it were, epitomized, commemorated and celebrated in its flavours. Hence the traditional perception of fine wine as the taste of a terroir – where that means not merely the soil, but the customs and ceremonies that sanctified it and put it, so to speak, in communion with the drinker. The use of theological language here is, I believe, no accident. Although wine tells no lies about a transcendental realm, it sanctifies the immanent reality, acquainting us with its hidden subjectivity, presenting it under the aspect of Brahman. That is why it is so effective a symbol of the incarnation. In savouring it we are knowing – by acquaintance, as it were – the history, geography and customs of a community.
Since ancient times, therefore, wines have been associated with definite places, and been accepted not so much as the taste of those places, as the flavour imparted to them by the enterprise of settlement. Wine of Byblos was one of the principal exports of the Phoenicians, and old Falernian was made legendary by Horace. Those who conjure with the magical names of Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Rhine and Moselle are not just showing off: they are deploying the best and most reliable description of a cherished taste, which is inseparable from the idea and the history of the settlement that produced it.[14]
Of course, this aspect could not feature in ibn Gabirol’s wine-poetry, his drink denuded of native soil, like the poet; it surfaces instead in Shomron Kol Titen: “Tiglath-Pileser consumed my fruit.”
The Israeli Professional Enology & Viticulture Organization (IPEVO) produced a map with fifteen distinct regions defined by topography, climate, and soils – ranging from volcanic tuff and basalt in the Golan down to loess desert soils in the Negev, with varying mixtures of Terra Rossa and Rendzina upon limestone on distinct regions in between.[15] Israelites did not invent winemaking – that distinction belongs to Eastern Anatolia and Transcaucasia,[16] roughly where the Bible has Noah set down his Ark and plant a vineyard (Genesis 9:20) – but the Levant became a center of ancient viticulture, and remained so until the Islamic conquest of 634 brought it to a halt. Biblical references to wine are legion, but reach their apogee in Song of Songs, in which, as R. Yaakov Medan explains,[17] the Jewish people are depicted as an embodied entity in the form of their settled land, replete with names and descriptions of its towns and many verdant (and desert) landscapes. Grapes, vineyards and wine are both features of the beloved and a potent symbol of the love between the couple (e.g. 7:3, 7:10, 8:2-3, et al.) which, to be sure, is superior to wine (1:2) – but wine is an apt metaphor.
Wine is a very human product of our land, but it is possible only with the hand of God, and so an apt metaphor for love in either direction. Several ancient cultures, from Ugarit to Mesopotamia to the Hittites, associated the transformation of must to wine – the fermentation process, in which liquid began to bubble and foam, almost magically – with the direct involvement of a deity; “dew transformed into foaming wine by El” (KTU 1.22 i 18b-20).[18] Similarly, in the Biblical text, Divine blessing is associated with wine-grapes (Isaiah 65:8). A sip of a good vintage of Castel Grand Vin should be enough to convince one that even the scientific discovery of Saccharomyces cerevisiae need not revise that assessment.
It is precisely the destruction and exile from the land that eclipsed the entire fifteenth of Av holiday complex – “Gone is the joy of our hearts; Our dancing (meholenu) is turned into mourning” – the fifteenth of Av and its associated festivities were rendered a season of mourning; not merely because destruction coincided with them calendrically, but because the mahol-dances of the vineyards, the grape harvest, the celebration of experiencing the land through its wine was rendered impossible by destruction and exile.
Wine was torn from our land, but we took our viticulture with us. Haym Soloveitchik argues that Jews engaged in viticulture, and even cornered the wine market almost immediately after they crossed the Alps[19] – roughly during the same period as consolidation of Islamic rule over the Holy Land. There is perhaps an unexplored linkage here with Daniel Boyarin’s “traveling homeland” of the Jewish people, and it is interesting that during the Nine Days, when we deprive ourselves of wine to recall our loss of the Land, we permit it for the celebration of Talmud tractate completion, the siyum masekhet.
Tu Be-Av 1882 was a temporal watershed. Something new but quite old was reborn with the establishment by Baron Edmond de Rothschild – then owner of Bordeaux’s Château Lafite Rothschild – of the wineries at Rishon LeZion and Zichron Yaacov, where my paternal great-grandfather Samuel Holzer stomped grapes in a four-year interlude between escaping conscription in Galicia and seeking Stateside medical treatment for his brother’s malaria, a more usual gift of the land in those dreary days.
In 1890, when the Carmel winery produced wine in the Holy Land after more than a millennium, the blessing-variant ‘al ha-aretz ve-al peri gafnah – on the Land and its wine – was retrieved from liturgical oblivion. The grapes were and are mostly descendants of those that Tosafist forebears tended in northern climes – Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, and various whites (although some varieties survived the Caliphs, mostly as table grapes, such as Dabouki, Hamdani, Jandali and the reds Baladi Asmar and Bittuni)[20] – but the experience of terroir was restored to the Jewish people. There are now some three hundred Israeli wineries. In the recent collection on alcohol and religion entitled Holy Waters, an anthropologist describes how the strongest sense of oenological concretization of repatriation and re-indigenization continues among vintners of Judea and Samaria in particular – Amos, Beit El, Har Bracha, Tura, Drimia, Gat Shomron, Tom – who “live… and act… out [the temporality of redemption] as narrative, biography, and history.”[21]
And alongside Judean Cabernets, there are other sorts of hybrids. In my own Beit Shemesh, the Corona Minyan I attended was hosted by R. Geoff Rochwarger, a talmid hakham who invested in a local vineyard, Katlav, after he first made Aliyah, out of an idealistic sense of connecting to the land through the unique mitzvot that it proffers. A few years later, with the appreciation and understanding of wine from that venture, he became partners with wine luminary Jeff Morgan in the ultra-premier boutique Covenant winery, which produces in both California and Israel, thus being first to straddle that temporal watershed, with grapes and world-class expertise from the golah thriving in the Holy Land, even while continuing to produce in the diaspora – not unlike the situation of world Jewry today.
The Israelites of the wilderness were freed from territorial limbo on the fifteenth of Av; that moment, those who remained knew that they would enter the Holy Land. And so it is a fitting festival for them – and for us, who each day can savor that land because we are already embodied in it, and it embodied in us, in an eternal relationship with our Partner in winemaking.
3. Dissolving Dissonance
There is a bug, which turns out to be a feature, of wine: intoxication. With Jewish migration eastward to non-wine-producing parts of Europe, Poland and Lithuania, wine was out of reach for most even for ritual purposes, replaced by steeped unfermented raisin “wine” and other concoctions;[22] while taverns did have wine available – the Ba’al Shem Tov himself is reported to have sourced some for his wife’s inn, and served it to his Hasidim[23] – to a great extent, the drink of Jews became ‘wine of the locale,’ hamar medinah – rye-based, unaged neutral spirit – vodka.[24] The stimulation of all senses and tastes of terroir may have been lost, but the mind-altering nature of the substance was conditionally embraced by Hassidic masters – as Vadim Putzu notes in his entry in Holy Waters, it served as a means to avodah be-gashmiyut, raising the fallen sparks; as a devotional dilettante’s quick-and-easy path to devekut, mystical union; or as a path to petihat ha-lev, ‘opening of the heart,’ to the acquisition of mohin, the supernal emanations of the sefirotic pleroma — “an enhancement of one’s intellectual and spiritual faculties.”[25]
Scruton describes the effect as follows.
…And I would go further and say that we idle and sensual creatures, whose attempts at sainthood begin each morning and have fizzled out by late afternoon, can nevertheless gain some apprehension of the atman[26] by taking a glass of wine in the evening, and so perceiving a path to the inwardness of things. To take that path requires sacrifice and renunciation; and you certainly cannot achieve the goal of philosophy merely by swallowing a drug, whatever people might have thought in those early enthusiasms for mescalin and LSD.
However, wine shines a light along that path, and the beam it casts reaches far into the inner darkness, highlighting the puzzling forms of things with a glow of subjectivity. Wine, properly drunk, transfigures the world at which you look, illuminating that which is precisely most mysterious in the contingent beings surrounding you, which is the fact that they are – and also that they might not have been. The contingency of each thing glows in its aspect, and for a moment you are aware that individuality and identity are the outward forms taken by a single inner fire, and that this fire is also you.[27]
Like a near-death experience, wine has a way of blunting the differences that don’t matter, the neurotic heuristics that structure the thoughtworld of anxious people when they are abstemious. The Iranologist Touraj Daryaee notes[28] that the Achaemenids – and the Sasanids after them – used wine in moderation when discussing important matters, to enhance awareness and consciousness and “and reject torment.” (As per Herodotus, they would review decisions the next day to be sure they hadn’t gone beyond moderation, a step apparently skipped in Esther 1:21 and 7:9 – in which a king’s immoderation worked decidedly in our favor.) This policy served the largest empire in ancient history in good stead for over two hundred years.
In Halakhah, this ‘social glue’ born of smoothing edges is reflected in the idea that wine creates kevi’ut, a cohesive social group for drinking purposes, similar to bread in the context of a meal. The Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:8) describes how this effect – and its root, bibulous transfiguration – was applied to mate selection.
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said: There were no days as joyous for the Jewish people as the fifteenth of Av and as Yom Kippur, as on them the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in white clothes, which each woman borrowed from another. Why were they borrowed? They did this so as not to embarrass one who did not have her own white garments. All the garments that the women borrowed require immersion, as those who previously wore them might have been ritually impure. And the daughters of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards. And what would they say? Young man, please lift up your eyes and see what you choose for yourself for a wife. Do not set your eyes toward beauty, but set your eyes toward a good family, as the verse states: “Grace is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised” (Proverbs 31:30), and it further says: “Give her the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.” (Proverbs 31:31).
Taken too far, of course, wine can blunt differences that do matter, like cursed Haman and blessed Mordechai – viz. Lot and his daughters. But the properly effective use of wine is categorically different from this; in the words of G. K. Chesterson, “There is a mystical substance, and it can give monstrous pleasures or call down monstrous punishments. [It is a] mistake… [to] regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.”[29]
So the day of awakening to life became the day when meaningless differences would be cast aside, when the tribes would marry one another without regard to family of origin, social status, bank statement or physiognomy, when feuds would be set aside, and when everyone – wealthy and poor – would have reason to rejoice, whether with wine, or, for even the poorest, wood – Tu B’Av was also the festival for bringing wood-offerings to the sanctuary. When the threat of desert annihilation receded, not merely Tu Be-Av but all of the commemorative holidays – all with moderate wine consumption and the problematization of individuality and identity – would assume something of that role.
You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter, your male and female slave, the [family of the] Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow in your communities… and you shall have nothing but joy. (Deuteronomy 16:14-15)
As we awoke to a new fifteenth of Av, with the triumph of terroir over terror, is it too much to hope that God bless us with vinous conviviality: to overcome that narcissism of small differences, and, with that fire that burns in the vine’s water, perceive that inner fire that is also within all of us?
כִּי אַתָּה ה’ בָּאֵשׁ הִצַּתָּהּ, וּבָאֵשׁ אַתָּה עָתִיד לִבְנוֹתָהּ.
“For You, God, have set it aflame, and it is with fire that You will, in the future, rebuild it.”[30] (Tish’a B’Av Nahem prayer)
May it be so, speedily in our time. Until then, l’chaim.
[1] Translations from Sefaria unless otherwise noted.
[2] Carey Ellen Walsh, The fruit of the vine: viticulture in ancient Israel (Brill, 2000), 185-186.
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20120606173431/http://israeldefense.com/?CategoryID=484&ArticleID=941
[4] This is based on one reading of the Gemara (Pesahim 106a) that derives the need for wine from the verse, “Remember the Sabbath day to sanctify it.”
[5] Gordon M. Shepherd, Neurogastronomy: how the brain creates flavor and why it matters (Columbia University Press, 2011), 145.
[6] Gordon M. Shepherd, Neuroenology: how the brain creates the taste of wine (Columbia University Press, 2016), 2.
[7] Raymond P. Scheindlin, “The Wine-Drinking Party in Medieval Hebrew Poetry.” Passed around by a Crescent (Ergon-Verlag, 2022), 275-290.
[8] Solomon Ibn Gabirol. Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Peter Cole, transl. (Princeton University Press, 2001), 75.
[9] Ibid., 234.
[10] Warren Zev Harvey, “Did Ibn Gabirol Write Adon ʿOlam?” [Hebrew], Tarbiẕ 88:1 (2020) 57-72.
[11] Translation from the 2018 RCA Siddur Avodat HaLev, 417.
[12] Translated and transcribed from an audio recording with the assistance of R. Emanuel Holzer, of blessed memory, in June, 1994.
[13] R. David Holzer, personal communication.
[14] Roger Scruton, I drink therefore I am: A philosopher’s guide to wine (A&C Black, 2009), 134-135.
[15] Julia Harding, Jancis Robinson, and Tara Q. Thomas, eds. The Oxford Companion to Wine (Oxford University Press, 2023), 2361-2363 (ebook).
[16] Stefan K. Estreicher, “The beginning of wine and viticulture,” Physica Status Solidi C 14:7 (2017): 1700008.
[17] Archived at https://www.hatanakh.com/lessons/%D7%94%D7%95%D7%9B%D7%97%D7%AA-%D7%A7%D7%93%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%AA-%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A8-%D7%94%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D and accessed on August 11, 2024.
[18] Rebekah Welton, “Yahweh the Wrathful Vintner: Blood and Wine-making Metaphors in Isaiah 49:26a and 63:6.” Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 4:3 (2022), 19-41.
[19] Haym Soloveitchik, “Halakhah, Taboo, and the Origin of Jewish Moneylending in Germany.” Collected Essays: Volume I (Liverpool University Press, 2013), 224–236.
[20] Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible 3rd Edition (Workman Publishing, 2022), 1457-1470 (ebook).
[21] Ian McGonigle, “’Again you will plant vineyards’: Prophecy, Jewish Settlement, and Temporal Dissonance in the Occupied West Bank,” in Ryan Lemasters and Stephen Covell, eds., Holy Waters (Routledge, 2024), 33-57.
[22] Jonathan D. Sarna, “Passover Raisin Wine, The American Temperance Movement, and Mordecai Noah: The Origins, Meaning, And Wider Significance Of A Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Religious Practice.” Hebrew Union College Annual (1988): 269-288.
[23] See Moshe Idel, “ ‘The Besht Passed His Hand over His Face’: On the Beshṭ’s Influence on His Followers—Some Remarks,” in After Spirituality: Studies in Mystical Traditions, eds. Philip Wexler and Jonathan Garb (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 89–106. I am indebted to Prof. Vadim Putzu for this reference.
[24] Glenn Dynner, Yankel’s tavern: Jews, liquor, and life in the kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014), 20.
[25] Vadim Putzu, “Cultural Enology: What Wine Can Teach Us about Religion (And About Jewish Kabbalah and Hasidism in Particular)” in Lemasters and Covell, eds., Holy Waters , 58-76, 63.
[26] The “self of being” in the Hindu Upanishads (c. 800-300 BCE).
[27] Scruton, I drink therefore I am, 115.
[28] Touraj Daryaee, “Herodotus on drinking wine in the Achaemenid world: Greek and Persian perceptions,” Iranian languages and culture. Essays in honor of Gernot Ludwig Windfuhr (2012), 38-43.
[29] Gilbert Keith Chesterson, George Bernard Shaw (John Lane, 1910), 55.
[30] Translation is my own.
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