Nisan 5786: Touch Grass
Bags of za'atar of all sizes have been my lifeline to the land of Israel for thirty years. I first brought some back to my family in 1999 after my first trip there, and suddenly I was making hummus and serving it to friends at parties, adorned with the spice mixture I had fallen in love with my junior year of high school. In my years of living and studying in Jerusalem, I bought plastic satchels from loud hawkers in Machaneh Yehudah, tiny dime bags from vendors in the Muslim quarter, and enthusiastically pounded and mixed my own at Neot Kedumim, the Biblical botanical garden just outside the city. If I was in the States and someone asked "Can I bring anything back for you?," it was za'atar, as fresh as possible. It's been nine years since I was last in the land, and I have exactly two tablespoons left that I'm holding as preciously as that Maccabee who discovered one last cruse of oil. How can I make this last for as long as possible?
Za'atar accompanied me as I crossed back and forth—between Israel and the United States, between Jewish spaces and Arab and Muslim spaces—a native plant that became a kind of relational totem in liminal space. And it raised a question for me: are there plants in Jewish life that help us cross these kinds of thresholds—between places, between communities, between states of being? Ezov, the hyssop that forms the base of za'atar, appears again and again at precisely these moments of transition.
Before going further, it's worth pausing on what ezov actually is—because centuries of mistranslation have obscured it. The confusion began in medieval Europe, when translators encountered the Hebrew ezov and, without access to its original ecological context, mapped it onto a similar-looking European plant, Hyssopus officinalis. This error persisted through the King James Bible and beyond. Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, and earlier Jewish commentators consistently identified ezov as Origanum syriacum — Syrian oregano, the wild aromatic that blankets the hillsides of the Levant and forms the heart of za'atar. It is a perennial shrub, drought-tolerant and undemanding, preferring rocky limestone crevices and poor white soil. It is a plant of walls and margins, asking almost nothing from the earth that holds it. The fact that this humble, fragrant, nearly ubiquitous herb sits at the center of so much Jewish ritual life is not incidental. Ezov has been teaching something all along.
While deep knowledge of and engagement with plants happens continually throughout the beginning of the Torah, the first plant that the Jewish people are enjoined to work with as free people, on the brink of the Exodus, is ezov. After plans for the first Passover meal are described, Moshe tells the elders:
On this night of many embodied metaphors, the well-known image of blood across the lintel serves as the visual cue that animates the process by which this holiday is known — the destructive force passing over the houses of the Israelites. Yet the Torah lingers on a quieter detail: the specific plant used to apply that blood. The ezov is not incidental. Commentators such as Ibn Ezra and Shadal note that it is a low, fibrous, almost unremarkable plant, growing in cracks and margins, its fine hairy strands uniquely capable of gathering and holding liquid — a natural brush, perfectly designed for the task. What is placed in the hands of the Israelites at this charged moment is a plant of humility.
The blood is powerful, even dangerous — but it is mediated through something small, permeable, and unassuming. The passage from slavery into freedom is not a release from power but its assumption — a taking-up of power in alignment with something larger than conquest or domination. To become a free people requires learning how to hold and exercise power with care — with something like the qualities of the plant itself: porous, low, receptive. The Jews fleeing for their safety must immediately begin to unlearn the 400 years of violent brutality they had witnessed and absorbed.
The rabbis connected this to a counterintuitive spiritual logic that runs throughout the tradition. The matzah eaten at the seder is called Lechem Oni — the bread of poverty, the bread of humility — because it contains nothing but flour and water, leavened by nothing, inflated by nothing. Both the matzah and the ezov teach that it is precisely through being emptied out, pressed down, reduced to essentials, that a vessel becomes capable of receiving something new. Four hundred years of enslavement had flattened the Israelites. Rather than bypassing that devastation on the way to freedom, the Torah asks them to pick up the plant that embodies it — and use it.
The Mei Shiloach, the Ishbitzer Rebbe writing in Poland in the middle of the 19th century, pressed the question further. The Talmud specifies that the ezov must be ezov stam — plain, unmodified — and not Greek ezov, kohl ezov, desert ezov, or Roman ezov. The Mei Shiloach reads these legal exclusions as a spiritual taxonomy: a catalog of all the ways humility can fail while still wearing its name.
Greek ezov is the humility of the strategist: I defer to you because arrogance would cost me your cooperation. Kohl ezov is the humility of the performer: I have noticed that people esteem this quality, and so I have painted myself in its colors. Desert ezov is the humility of the hollow: I have nothing to be proud of, and so I don't bother. Roman ezov is perhaps the most insidious: I possess great pride, but I calibrate my modesty for the room, displaying humility only before those who matter.
Each of these carries a qualifying name — a modifier that reveals the self-interest concealed underneath. True humility, ezov stam, belongs to the person whom the Holy Blessed One has graced with genuine gifts and qualities, and who simply does not become proud from them. There is no strategy, no performance, no deficit, no audience. The ezov that grows from the wall asks nothing of the wall. It simply grows there, and it is fragrant.
This is the plant the Israelites were handed on the night of the Exodus — and the implicit instruction to examine and integrate what kind of ezov they were holding. Stam. Simplicity. Nothing clever.
The Toldot Yaakov Yosef, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, one of the Baal Shem Tov's closest disciples, presses even further into the word agudah — bundle. Why does Moses specify not just ezov but a bunch of ezov? Because the bundle is the point. The bitter exile came about through baseless hatred, through each person lifting themselves above the other. The remedy is for each person to lower themselves like ezov — and only then can they be gathered into one. You cannot make a bundle of cedars, each one taller than the next. The humble ezov, gathered together, is what makes redemption possible. Humility is not only a personal spiritual pursuit but the prerequisite for collective liberation.
Ezov does not only appear at the beginning of Jewish sacred time. It surfaces again and again wherever the tradition needs to address what happens when a person, or a people, becomes too large for their own skin.
In Vayikra, the purification ritual for tzara'at — the mysterious affliction that strikes the skin, the walls of houses, the fabric of garments, and which the rabbis consistently associated with the sin of prideful speech — requires both a cedar branch and a sprig of ezov, bound together with scarlet thread. The Midrash Tanchuma makes the diagnosis explicit: a person is struck because they have lifted themselves up like a cedar, and they are healed when they bring themselves down like the ezov. The cure is reorientation — a return to the ground. David understood this in his kishkes. After his catastrophic abuse of power — the taking of Batsheva, the killing of Uriah — he does not ask to be restored to greatness. He asks, in Tehillim 51, to be purged with ezov. The man who was anointed king, who commanded armies, who built an empire, reaches for the thing that grows from a crack in a wall and says: make me like this again.
This is the recurring offer ezov makes across Jewish sacred time. You have been given real gifts, real power, real inheritance — and none of it requires you to inflate. The plant that holds the most liquid is the one with the finest, most porous strands. The vessel that receives the most is the one that makes the most room.
It is striking that in contemporary psychedelic and neo-shamanic culture — particularly the Northern California variety that has come to shape so much of the broader field — the ceremonial use of white sage, sweetgrass, tobacco, and cedar is utterly commonplace. These traditions can be learned and appreciated; at their best, engaging with another people's plant wisdom becomes an opportunity for genuine relationship-building and reciprocity. For Jewish psychonauts, burning ezov brings the practitioner into direct sensory contact with the accumulated experience of their ancestors traversing these same liminal passages — the crossing from anguish to openness, from impurity to clarity, from constriction to breath. The smoke carries a memory older than any ceremony we might borrow, and it is ours.
Which brings me back to my two tablespoons.
I have been treating them like a relic, a last connection to a land I miss with an ache I can't always name. Ezov was never meant to be hoarded. It was meant to be bundled, dipped, and swept across thresholds. It was meant to be shared at the moment of crossing. This year I am putting ezov on the seder plate. I am bringing it with me into ceremony, into the rooms where my community gathers to navigate a moment that is asking everything of us — asking us to hold power and powerlessness, pride and grief, love of our people and honest reckoning with what is done in our name. These are precisely the thresholds ezov was made for.
The Jewish people have a plant teacher who has been with us since the first night of our freedom. It grows wild on the hills we come from. It is in the spice mixture on every table. We need its wisdom now more than ever. Pick it up and touch grass.
