With Smells We Smelt Light

Ore is metal locked inside rock, and heat alone will not release it. A fire hot enough to melt the whole mass gives you molten rock with the metal still scattered through it. What separates the two is a flux, a substance thrown into the furnace that binds the waste, floats it off as slag, and lets the metal run down clean.

The fire supplies the energy. The flux supplies the separation. Neither one does the other’s work.

Light is not supposed to be refinable

It has no body to hold anything foreign and there is no slag to draw off it, which is why the whole vocabulary of purification gets applied to metal, to water and to people, and never to the thing on the table.

The Torah does not share the assumption. The first operation performed on light anywhere in the Torah is a separation, and it is performed on the second verse of light’s existence.

וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ

And God separated between the light and the darkness. Bereishit 1:4

Light was made, seen to be good, and then divided. Separation is the entire content of refining, since a furnace does nothing else. The first day records a refining performed on אוֹר itself before anything else in creation existed, which settles whether the material admits of the operation.

A furnace with its agent missing

The fuel is refined on the way in, and the Torah says so about the lamp of the Mishkan.

שֶׁמֶן זַיִת זָךְ כָּתִית לַמָּאוֹר

Pure beaten olive oil, for the light. Shemot 27:20

Refined material going in, and a wick standing in it gives fire and raw light. Nothing in that arrangement separates anything further, because a furnace charged with fuel and no agent gives heat and stops there. What the household kept is the fire. What it lost is the thing thrown in beside the fire, and the prophet names that by name.

וְאֶצְרֹף כַּבֹּר סִיגָיִךְ וְאָסִירָה כָּל בְּדִילָיִךְ

I will smelt away your dross as with lye, and remove all your alloy. Yeshayahu 1:25

The verb is צרף, smelting, and the object is סִיג, the dross that rises to the top of a melt. כַּבֹּר is with lye, the alkali that binds the waste and carries it out, so the agent is stated in the verse alongside the fire. The thing being smelted is a people, which answers the question of what is actually in the crucible when a lamp burns on a table. The ore is the household.

וְיָשַׁב מְצָרֵף וּמְטַהֵר כֶּסֶף

He shall sit refining and purifying silver. Malachi 3:3

Refining and purifying are one operation carrying two names. The sons of Levi are put through it in that verse so that they can bring an offering afterwards, which makes the offering the purpose of the refining rather than its reward.

כֶּסֶף צָרוּף בַּעֲלִיל לָאָרֶץ, מְזֻקָּק שִׁבְעָתָיִם

Silver smelted in a crucible of earth, purified sevenfold. Tehillim 12:7

Seven times through, and the psalm holding that verse is titled לַמְנַצֵּחַ עַל הַשְּׁמִינִית, for the eighth. What walks out on the eighth is no longer the same material.

Israel already runs the operation weekly

At the close of Shabbat a cup is poured, a spice box is opened, a flame is raised, and the blessing said over all of it is the blessing of separation. Two of the three open with the participle of creating: בּוֹרֵא מִינֵי בְשָׂמִים over the spices, בּוֹרֵא מְאוֹרֵי הָאֵשׁ over the light (Mishnah Berachot 8:5).

הַמַּבְדִּיל בֵּין קֹדֶשׁ לְחֹל, בֵּין אוֹר לְחֹשֶׁךְ

Who separates between holy and ordinary, between light and darkness. The blessing of Havdalah

Fire and scent held up together within one hand’s reach, and the words spoken over them are the words of Bereishit 1:4. The rite that ends Shabbat is a separation carried out with a flame and an aromatic, which is a furnace with its agent in it, run on a table, weekly, by everybody.

The reason the spices stand at the close is given plainly.

נְשָׁמָה יְתֵירָה נוֹתֵן הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא בָּאָדָם עֶרֶב שַׁבָּת, וּלְמוֹצָאֵי שַׁבָּת נוֹטְלִין אוֹתָהּ

The Holy One gives a person an extra soul on the eve of Shabbat, and at its close it is taken back. Reish Lakish, Beitzah 16a

The legislated response to a soul leaving a body is a smell, once a week, at every table (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 297:1). The halacha set the smell at the exit. The claim of this book is that the same apparatus stands at the other end of Shabbat with its agent missing: a flame lit at the entrance, and nothing aromatic set beside it.

The word English fused

Smelt is the verb for taking metal out of rock, and smelt is also the past tense of smell. He smelt it, meaning he had already taken it in. The two arrived from different places, one Germanic and kin to melt, the other from a verb nobody has been able to trace, and they landed on the same four letters anyway.

The accident is worth recording rather than arguing from. It states the thing exactly. What has been smelled has been smelted.

With smells we smelt אוֹר.

The full argument runs through Kol Tehom, free to read in English and in Hebrew. The oils are here.

Keep reading

• Reiach  the one sense that came through Eden unbroken
• Shabbat, the Weekly Appointment  listed first among the appointed times, before Pesach
• The Home as Mishkan  Berachot 55a moves the altar to the table

The map shows how all of it connects.