Thread by @wordpaley

Just spent an uncomfortably long time choosing an esrog for the first time in a while (my dad usually gets handed one at random from my hometown shul). Is there a way to do it that’s not neurotic and/or selfish? Why do *I* deserve the nicest-looking/most mehudar esrog, not you?

I actually much prefer when I don’t get to choose—it feels like G!d chooses for me and then it becomes an exercise in acceptance of both my esrog and myself, blemishes and all. And when I choose I feel obligated to choose halakhic hiddur over physical beauty, which is weird.

why does the Talmud conceive of hiddur, which loosely translates to beauty, as comprising a set of rigid, “objective” characteristics, other than because the law by definition must aspire to some form of objectivity? why not leave beauty in the eye of the esrog-beholder?

Going back to my esrog-soul parallel, this idea of hiddur makes me feel like the Talmud also thinks there are certain objective qualities that make souls beautiful. Which is nice and all until the Talmud leaves souls out because it was redacted about 1500 years ago.

What does make me feel better, though, is that the Rabbis derive the obligation of doing rituals beautifully (hiddur) and emulating G!d’s mercy and generosity FROM THE SAME VERSE (Shabbos 133b; verse is Exodus 15:2). Because the Rabbis’ idea of beauty is being good to each other.

That being the case, maybe the Rabbis decided on an objective standard of beauty for the esrog BECAUSE any subjective definition would end up getting people hurt. Allow me to explain.

Imagine looking over in shul and seeing your pal holding a esrog so bright yellow it’s practically glowing. I know I wouldn’t like that. And to add insult to injury, he is doing the mitzvah BETTER than you. But that’s just because he’s rich or knows a boutique esrog microfarmer.

The point being: yes beauty would be in the eye of the beholder, if all us beholders lived alone on top of a mountain. But the reality is we live together. So as subjective as we think beauty is, it ends up becoming a collaborative mush of all of our individual ideas of beauty.

And because we suck at living together, rich and loud people’s ideas of beauty become the largest parts of that mush. Think about who decides what’s in fashion this fall, or which NFT is worth $69 million. Guess who gets hurt by that? Yep, the little folks like us.

If the Rabbis let people decide which esrog is most beautiful, the exact same thing would happen. The rich people would convince us all that the most beautiful esrog is impeccable, iridescent, symmetrical. Some of us would fight over the leftovers. Others wouldn’t bother trying.

In this scenario, G!d would love our mitzvah no matter what esrog we ended up with. But the very idea that some people’s ideas of beauty are more important than others, that some people are “more equal than others”, is antithetical to the mitzvah and the Rabbi’s idea of beauty.

One of the Midrashic reasons for the mitzvah is bringing different kinds of Jews together. With a shared but equally distributed concept of beauty, we can focus on what’s similar about our experiences, not what’s different. And neurotically looking for bletlach.

Chag sameach!