My Two Scents

The relationship between the dimension of smell and religion is one that I especially have not given much thought to beyond some surface level analysis of uses of incense in certain traditions for example. I most certainly did not really think about what smells actually signified and did within religious activity. One of Green’s first few lines to chapter 4 of her book, The Righteous Aroma of Justice, “The rabbinic voices pick up the imagery of aroma…” (116) provides a very interesting insight or at least line of questioning in my mind for the role that smell plays in religion. The fact that aroma in, many but not all, religious traditions must index the sense of smell through text plays into how interconnected the sense is with most of the other scents. Imagery is what rabbinic literature must use to capture the essence of scent in their work and that reveals a lot about how people past and present conceptualize aromatic experience.

Smell really seems to be one of the hardest senses to convey and we have discussed this a lot. Our language can hardly capture the categories needed to describe them and we usually just resort to referencing other scents that we think our audience will understand. This reading and in our class in general has made me realize that it is not such a clear category and there is some major importance to people being able to command imagery of smell with such power. The rabbininc literature has my kudos, I am not even close to as good of a writer as that.