The Spice That Smelled Bad

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 36.

We're deep in the Korbanos now, and today we get to one of my favorite lines in the entire morning davening. It comes from the Ketoret - the incense that was offered in the Beis HaMikdash every single day, morning and afternoon. The Torah, in Parshas Ki Sisa, lists the spices that went into it. And one of them is something called chelbenah - galbanum.

Here's the thing about chelbenah. On its own? It stinks. The Gemara says it straight out: reichah ra - it has a foul smell. By itself it is bitter, unpleasant, the kind of thing you'd want nowhere near a beautiful blend of spices.

And yet - u'mna'ah hakasuv im samm'nei haketores - the Torah deliberately counted it among the spices of the incense. Not as an afterthought. Not as a tolerated extra. It is one of the eleven. Take it out, and the ketoret is pasul - invalid. The whole offering is incomplete without the one ingredient that smells bad.

Sit with that for a second.

Now here's where Chazal take it, and it's breathtaking. The Gemara in Kereisos, daf vav - page six - says: from here we learn that any communal fast that does not include the sinners of Israel is not a real fast. V'chol taanis she'ein bah mipo'shei Yisrael einah taanis. If the Jews who've gone off the path aren't standing there with us - the fast doesn't count. Because, says the Gemara, look at the chelbenah. The one that smells bad. The Torah put it in the mix.

Think about what that means. When the community gathers - to fast, to cry out, to stand before Hashem - the Rabbis don't say "let's get the tzaddikim together." They say: it's not complete until the ones everybody else wrote off are in the room too. The community is not whole when it's only the people who smell sweet. The chelbenah belongs.

And here's the part that gets me. It's not that we put up with the chelbenah. It's not "okay, fine, let them come." The ketoret doesn't reach its full fragrance without it. There's something in that bitter spice that, mixed with the other ten, makes the whole thing rise. Remove it and you don't get a milder incense - you get an invalid one.

The Chassidic masters live in this idea. The Alter Rebbe in Tanya teaches that every single Jew has a neshama, a piece of G-d Himself, that can never be stained no matter what the person has done. Never. The outside can smell like chelbenah - the inside is pure spice.

And the Lubavitcher Rebbe built his whole life on this. He used to say there's no such thing as a Jew you can give up on. Every single one is irreplaceable - not replaceable by ten others, irreplaceable. Like the chelbenah: you can have the ten beautiful spices, but without that one, the ketoret never goes up. The Rebbe sent his shluchim to the corners of the earth precisely for the Jew who thought he didn't belong in the blend. Especially for him.

So here's what I want you to carry out of today. The next time you look at another Jew and think, "that one's too far gone" - remember the chelbenah. Remember that Hashem, who could have made the world's most perfect incense out of only sweet spices, chose instead to require the one that smells bad. Because a community without all of its members isn't a smaller community. It's not a community at all.

Tomorrow: we stay in the ketoret, and we look at the exact measurements - the precise weights of every spice - and what they teach us about holiness and exactness.