The Pitom

When Harlan and I were young, we did not fully understand that we were celebrating Sukkot. We were preschoolers in Sunday religious school, then first graders and second graders.

When Harlan and I were young, we did not fully understand that we were celebrating Sukkot.

Sukkot was simply something we did every year.

Only in hindsight can we see that our parents did it before us, and their parents did it before them.

**L’dor vador—from generation to generation.**

We were too young to know we were preserving Jewish tradition. We thought we were making crafts and eating dinner on the temple patio.

There was an annual Parents’ Night when we would attend services and then walk out onto the rarely used patio, which had been transformed into the religious school’s sukkah.

For one week, temporary walls and a roof of branches turned that ordinary patio into sacred space.

A sukkah is built as a temporary shelter. Its roof, called s’chach, is made from natural materials such as branches, reeds or bamboo. It must provide more shade than sunlight, but ideally leave enough open space to see the larger stars.

Sukkot teaches us to appreciate the harvest, step outside our permanent homes and remember that protection does not always come from permanent walls.

But as children, we were far more interested in grabbing our parents’ hands and pulling them around the corner to the pegboard displaying our latest creations: picture posters, cord-and-bead necklaces, leaves decoupaged onto paper and our childhood versions of Chagall stained-glass windows.

We did not yet understand l’dor vador.

**We were already living it.**

As we grew older, Sukkot moved from something the temple prepared for us into something our family attempted to build in our own backyard.

Harlan was in seventh grade and serving on the board of Kadima, his junior-high Jewish youth group. The group was coming to our house during one of the later days of the week-long harvest celebration.

That meant we needed our own family lulav and etrog.

The lulav combines palm, myrtle and willow branches. The etrog is a fragrant yellow citron that resembles a large, bumpy lemon.

All etrogim are beautiful, but Dad’s family tradition placed special importance on the tiny stem at the top—the **pitom**.

Some people are fanatical about inspecting and choosing just the right etrog.

The pitom is delicate. If an etrog grows naturally without one, it can still be completely kosher. But if a pitom-bearing etrog is damaged after it has been harvested, its ritual status and value can change dramatically.

In our family, the instruction was much simpler:

**Protect the pitom.**

Do not knock it.

Do not drop it.

Do not be the person who turns a beautiful and expensive etrog into a family shanda.

Harlan wanted everything to be perfect for his Kadima friends. He was nervous—like a host preparing for company and inspecting every last detail.

Being only in fifth grade, I was not yet old enough to join Kadima, so Harlan excluded me.

I remember feeling betrayed by my big brother.

Then, only a few minutes later, karma arrived.

Apparently, **karma had no minimum-age requirement.**

Harlan came inside distressed.

He had dropped the etrog, and the pitom had fallen off.

Nobody had been in the room when it happened. The only account of what happened had to come from Harlan himself.

He could have returned the etrog to its box, waited for someone else to discover the damage or claimed the pitom was already loose.

Instead, he came inside and told Mom and Dad what he had done.

The fifth-grade younger brother in me felt vindicated.

I had just been excluded from the party, and now the seventh-grade host who wanted everything perfect had broken the one thing everyone had been warned to protect.

I was sorry the pitom broke, and I was sorry Harlan was upset—but I was not so spiritually advanced that I missed the satisfaction of karma’s arrival.

In his effort to make everything perfect, Harlan had broken the symbol of perfection.

Looking back now, that is not the most important part of the story.

**Harlan broke the etrog, but he protected the truth.**

Nobody saw him, yet he told our parents anyway.

A damaged etrog could be replaced.

A brother willing to tell the truth when nobody was watching was much harder to find.

“The pitom fell off” became one of those Yaffe family memories that grew into a metaphor. Like “I can see the mailbox,” it began as a literal family accident and came to mean something more.

Sometimes we handle something so carefully that we become the person who breaks it.

Sometimes our effort to create perfection causes the damage we were trying to prevent.

Sometimes the smallest and most fragile part carries more value than anyone notices—until it is gone.

And sometimes what first looks broken reveals something valuable that was there all along.

We thought the lesson was that the perfect etrog must remain untouched.

Maybe the larger lesson was that **perfection was never the unbroken fruit.**

Perfection was a family building a sukkah in the backyard.

It was parents passing down what their parents had taught them.

It was two brothers growing up inside a tradition before they were old enough to understand it.

It was Harlan admitting the truth.

And it is this story still being told, **l’dor vador, from generation to generation.**

May we appreciate the harvest planted by those who came before us.

May we protect what is fragile without becoming paralyzed by the fear of breaking it.

May we remember that a scar does not erase the value of the whole.

And may Harlan’s memory continue to meet us beneath the open sky.

**Peace, Love & Equality For All!**

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,

Hal and Peggy Jo