Cardamom - Cinnamon - Cloves

If you don't know what besamim smells like, well, the literal translation is just spices. Usually cardamom or cinnamon or cloves, or some combination of the three. You put them in a little decorated box and pass them around to smell at the end of Shabbat. The smells seep deep into your veins, into the little bar-mitzvah recesses where all this began– canyons and crevices and tumbling piles of orange-red autumn leaves, reflective and refreshed. They rustle around the hollow synagogue spaces of your past, rolling through the forgotten semitones like a tilting marble-maze toy.

People underestimate smells, you think, even though we've all been collecting them since we were little. You go into the forests, an hour down the coast or something, and the trees speak to you, if you can be bothered to listen– small doses of exotic chemicals, volatile and flickering. The arboreal fragrances form quiet whispers, half-fever rumblings of wasps and worms and fruit and humans. Don't say you've never been changed, even a little, down in the woods, smelling the soft eucalypt oils and vaguely erotic whisperings of flowers, smelling snippets of psalms and torah portions in the heavy wet dirt that follows the rain.

There is one fragrance in particular you've been collecting– curating, marinating– for a while now. You scrape ruminations off the bark that coats your exterior, roasting them slowly and carefully, taking the oven tray out occasionally to toss the memories around until they are fully ripe and filling the air with the history baked into them. You store these spices in a little decorated besamim box in your bedroom, and every day you spread a little bit of it on the doorposts of your house, a sacrifice for angels and a cementing of perception. The smell lingers in your house, always there to remind you– of old polished wood, of musty bible paper, of teenage boy shampoo and toasted bagels.