Smells and Bells

This semester has been a truly eye-opening experience for me. Throughout my 3 years here at Wheaton and all the religion classes, I have taken, while all super engaging and fun, this one truly gave me a more connected sense of everything. I think relaying the importance and significance of certain senses into different religions worldwide allows for a greater sense of understanding and community, rather than connecting more so on the premise of spirituality. Touching upon the basis of the senses we all share allows for a more universal connection regardless of the religious affiliation. For example, in Green's writing in chapter 3, she discusses the importance that certain perfumes and incense had in religious contexts, so much so that their fragrance was only to be used in the priestly castle. Incense holds a significant role in rabbinic literature, but it is also crucial to most rituals and prayers performed in the Hindu religion. Another example of this can also be seen in Abram...

 Deborah Green's book the Aroma of  Righteousness and the points she made on people liking smells that others hate reminded me of the fact that I hate flowery or citrusy smells when it comes to deodorant, but a lot of people do and then that made me think of how women are "supposed" to smell flowery and men are "supposed" to smell musky or manly and how that is so messed up one time. I remember one time when I was ten or eleven I couldn't find my deodorant so I used a stick of my Dad's and my Mom yelled at me for it. Who cares.  Why do we think this way! Who's idea was this! Why are we gendering smell! The point is we need more non-flowery smells for deodorant and that we as a society need to stop gendering smell 

I found the idea that women's use of aromatic items being seen as witchcraft, which is explained in the following quote, pretty sexist, but also thought provoking. “Perfume, for example, which is often associated with romance, sexuality, and tranquility, can be viewed quite positively when referring to God (with attendant images of mercy and memory) but may have strong negative associations (witchcraft and idolatry) when applied to women” (Green, 15). The fact that when rabbis would burn incense, it was seen as something being done to be closer to God, but if women were to burn incense, it would be assumed that it was for witchcraft bothers me. It states that rabbis have taught that if you walk past a town and smell and pleasant scent you should only say a blessing if you know that a majority of the inhabitants are Israelites, as you wouldn’t want to say a blessing over idolaters using incense for witchcraft or those using it for garment scenting. However, Rabbi Yossi states that e...

  Deborah Green's “ The Aroma of Righteousness” addresses the erotic and appealing nature of scents in the context of rabbinic texts in a very eye opening way and I was quite drawn to her statements on women and smell. It was and still is common practice for women to use perfumes in order to have an appealing smell to them, even a bit expected of them. The consequences of patriarchal societies are seen in all kinds of historical texts and in Greene writings you can really see the impact that this has on women and how they are depicted and seen in a religious context. Women are expected to smell good, though when that smell is recognized and thought to have a seductive pull, those women are now viewed as erotic temptations that test and wickedly trick mankind. It was surprising to see how such suggestive texts can be seen in religious contexts, but the ways that these are often used against women was not as shocking to me. This can be seen in current society just through beauty prod...

     In The Aroma of Righteousness, Deborah Green writes in depth about the associations of smells in rabbinic interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. One aspect I found particularly interesting was the concept that fragrance was and is used as an interpretive tool to communicate with God and show the love and sanctity between Israel and God. The interpretation part seemed key to me, especially since the experience and opinions of smells can be so polarizing. One person might love a particular smell and another might despise that same smell. I also really liked how Green mentions that part of the reason smell has been ignored in religious scholarship is because perfume and similar things are associated with women and femininity, and so, in our patriarchal society, “women’s issues” are often not talked about enough.      Another idea that we discussed in class was the possibility of multiple rabbinic interpretations being true at the same time. This seems very ...

     Yesterday our ice breaker question was "when has a smell made you immediately do something?" I was re-reading Deborah Green's conclusion today for my blog post, and I got to a part on page 3 where she began to describe the use of scented oils on the body and hair and massaging perfume on a person in a bathhouse, reading all these pleasant smells of anointment got me so immersed in the thought of the power of smell and imagining all the earthy floral perfume notes that I immediately opened a new tab and started looking at perfumes. Which in turn made me so frustrated because obviously I am now looking online for perfume and am unable to smell them, so how would I be able to choose! I new the smell in my mind that I wanted, but like Ackerman pointed out in Natural History of the Senses  smells can only be described by other smells, and what they are supposed to smell like or what they come from, so I remained unsatisfied, and perfume-less.     ...

I've taken probably too many classes on death (2), but specifically I took Prof. Henry's class on the history of death, in which we talked for a while about medieval Christian relics. Interestingly, bodies of saints were supposed to have a good scent, smelling like spices or flowers even long, long after death.                                                The difference between the medieval Christianity and rabbinic Judaism immediately stood out to me. Both claim death is tied to smell, but the associations and rationales are completely different. This line from Green stood out to me particularly:   "And fragrance is also intimately tied to death-- perhaps as a representation of what we desire in that finality-- that death too will be fleeting, tempora...

 While it isn't the only prominent example of smells in Jewish texts, one that logically made many appearances was the smell of the priestly offerings, both the offerings of animals or other sacrifices, and the burning of special incense. It's no wonder that this was considered an important smell during the time period that these texts was written. Until the destruction of the second temple sacrifice was essential to the way that the Jewish people worshiped. It's a theme of great importance throughout the Tanach and the commentary texts that followed. However in a modern context, smell is less prevalent of a sense in Jewish worship. It's not completely absent, aromatic spices are a major part of the Havdallah ritual for example, and probably others I just don't know about, but the burnt offering is no longer a part of Jewish life, which seems like it might take the central importance of smell out in some way too. An example of a Havadallah spice box from 19th centur...

Image from IMDb I had to make a second post because Green’s text reminded me of a pop culture reference. The second point I would like to bring up is in response to the midrash that we interpreted on Tuesday. Green wrote that “odor, whether pleasing or foul, enters almost every aspect of our lives- its subtle pervasiveness affects our attitudes and judgments toward both the mundane and the sacred.” This quote reminded me of the movie “Parasite” where the rich Mr. Park comes to hate his housekeeper/driver simply because his scent is one of poor people. Green wrote about how fragrance provides a lens through which to view hierarchy, social constructions, and theological motifs, like those in the Bible, and it also affords the same lens for viewing the families in this movie. As Mr. Park begins to notice the unsettling and distasteful aromas of the Kims, the audience also becomes hypersensitive to their presence, and the Parks’ privileged position leaves them feeling entitled to dictate w...

Photo of the three essential oils that I used the most this week (L to R): Uplift (sweet orange), Calmness (geranium, vetiver, grapefruit), Asleep (lavender) I was unsure what to write about this week because, to be honest, I had a rough week. My uncle Fred passed away, and I couldn’t go to the funeral or wake, so I had to grieve in isolation away from my family which was difficult. The best thing that I did for myself this week was concentrate on “self-care,” as one does when they are sad, and part of my self-care was putting on my essential oil diffuser in my room to change my mood. You might be able to tell where this is going.  When I was being consoled by my friend this week, I told her about this recent self-care practice of mine, and she took out her collection of essential oils to let me smell them and borrow one. For ones like lavender and sage, I realized that I didn’t need to open them to smell them because I could already imagine the scent, probably because I have them ...

Lately, the more I read about smell, the more enigmatic it seems too me, "Most of us cannot smell a fragrance of an orange by mentally concentrating on the idea of an orange" When I Initially read this statement, I tried to think of an orange and though in my mind, I know that its a fresh, sweet yet citrus smell, I know that I like the smell, but in that moment the orange in my mind, didn't have the smell. It makes me thing of the fleeting, impermanent yet highly impressionable nature of smell. It is able to stick in memory and trigger biological processes without us consciously processing it. Green talks about how its pervasiveness overwhelms our body when we inhale certain scents, but I also think its pervasiveness overwhelms our existence as a society.  The heavy description of Women though these opulent smells is testament of this idea. The way women smelt and the scents they used, as well as the scents used for worship being categorically different from the rest, are...

       Green spends quite a bit of time talking about Rabbinic tradition revolving around the perfuming and smells of women. To summarize what I understood of the readings, women perfuming themselves was popular, especially in the context of things like fumigating clothing and personal smells. However, the smells of women were of high debate, as there were various levels of respectability and rules regarding what smells could be used or how various individuals react to that smell. This also has to do with the role of the seductress in Rabbinic tradition, and something about that struck in me and I realized, after thinking of it, that typically attractive or seductive women are usually associated with smells.             I think primarily of women from the golden age of Hollywood, shown lounging in photoshoots with a cigarette and smoke, giving the cameras lust-filled looks. The animated pink “perfume” that waft...

Ackerman and Green both make the same claims about the importance of scent in our daily lives, depicting our difficulty in describing smells to others without making a reference to something else, and arguing that studying smell is just as important in understanding culture as studying sociology and anthropology. As a natural scientist, I was skeptical about Green’s arguments—how could smell, something unable to be measured or quantified, be as important as objective, scientific theory? But as I read further, I began to resonate with this argument; scent’s subjective nature means that we cannot recover past articles of it. Our difficulty in describing them makes understanding their connotations difficult, especially when the only archaeological evidence we have are containers and jars for perfumes and topical oils. What did certain scents mean to ancient civilizations? Are there any patterns between how we react to smells and how they reacted to those same smells? Answering these quest...

  “The suggestion of wafting aroma, emotional arousal, and the allure of the exotic” (Green 64). For some reason, the only thing this intro section reminded me of was that trope in cartoons where a character starts floating towards a freshly made baked good, like in this clip. Joking aside, scent really is everywhere in the Bible and rabbinic literature, with the example that stuck out to me being a callback to an Old Testament class I took last semester: offerings to God were burnt not so that He could taste them, but because the odor was pleasing to Him. The confusion of different terms all relating to scents and incense helps solidify this: there wouldn’t be so many different words for the same thing unless it was important enough to deserve precise categorization. Interesting to see that the instructions for making and anointing with sacred oil indirectly confirms that the ancient Israelites were making and anointing themselves with other oils. Also interesting to see ...

Smell is like a love hate relationship for us... It is a sensation that we, as human, can absolutely love or hate. Sometimes we want to always smell the scent of that amazing food, or love to be around someone who has an amazing smell to them. However, sometimes we cannot stand scents, like if we are driving behind a trash truck, or that kid that sat the side of you in your history class your senior year of high school who had the worst smell of BO, and you wanted to put on a face mask... Throughout the book, The  Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature, written by Deborah Green, she explores the ways that rabbis’ reading of biblical texts along with intimate experiences with scents allows for further and better interpretations of the text. This is such a important aspect of religion because scents and aromas can play so much more a larger roll than we think. For instance, part of the Wiccan ritual, sacred scents can actually awaken the sen...

At the risk of sounding hubristic, human beings are imbued with a portion of divine power in the kitchen. We manipulate the elements of fire, air, and water to transform one thing into another. We feel like ancient herbalists when we fine tune the spicing of our dishes, and we usually do it to satisfy ourselves and other humans, not to glorify God. It's impossible to not think of burnt offerings when you're grilling and the flames jump to lick at the delectable meat, and smoke rises up to the heavens (or your fume hood). Cain and Abel offering their sacrifices Gustav Dore, 1866 It could be said that that which is pleasing to the tastes of man is often pleasing to God. In Judaism, he loves oxen, sheep, and goat, and enjoys the covenant which produces "the “soothing odor”  of sacrifice" (Green, 117). In Lucumi  religion, the Oricha, like us, have their  favorite foods, and exceptions. What one Oricha may find pleasing, another might find repugnant. Simila...

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 sens...

Scent is, by far, the most nebulous of our senses. It's the most detached from any physical properties, it's kind of just... there. I think that, because of this, it's also the most symbolically versatile of any of our senses. The rabbis in The Aroma of Righteousness  recognized this fact, and used it in countless ways to show the relationship between god and humanity. The best and worst of our sensory experiences are, I believe, rooted in scent. Despite scent not being tied directly to any physical characteristic, it seems to reveal something about the source of the smell. We say that we've picked up the scent of something when we're locking in on where it is, or that something smells rotten about a thing we distrust. Scent seems to be tied to the essential nature of things; if I had to come up with synonymous words for an object's aroma, I might say it's vibe, or aura, or feeling. Smell is a sense that goes straight to our subconscious and lets us know thi...

As I am reflecting on this past semester I have been finding myself thinking of the things that I miss about being on campus. I miss being around my friends, even when it would be finals week because doing all this work on my own is very productive but not that fun. At least at Wheaton, I could take a break and take a walk down to Bagels and Cream. I also miss walking around just looking at all the beautiful nature all around campus. I was just talking to my mom about the smell of the flowers on campus this time of year. I just loved walking around and smelling them as well as seeing the blossoms on the trees and "snowing" on the ground. In Green's book The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature  she talks about how some smells can be relaxing or comforting. I think the smells of campus around this time of year are so comforting when studying for finals. I like being able to go for a walk between assignments and really get to enjoy t...