What's a nard, and what does it smell like?
What a google search revealed a nard to be Starting on Valentine’s Day, we started reading The Aroma of Righteousness by Deborah Green, explores the imagery of fragrance in rabbinic literature. Two months later, we had Dr. Rachel Herz from Brown give a lecture on her work unraveling the neural processes of olfaction and gustation. The readings and lecture gave the class a well-rounded understanding at how scent is employed in ritual for invoking emotion. As mentioned earlier, our sense of smell is the most memorable due to its proximity to the pre-frontal cortex. Although research behind this phenomenon is relatively recent, practitioners of religion understand the influence of associating scents with divine concepts. In her introduction, Green mentions how we lack a vocabulary to describe our sense of smell, and refer to such using simile, metaphor or simply naming the scent. The explanation for such is that the olfactory bulb is located so “far down” that the circuitry co...