The Four Plants Jews Wave on Sukkot Are Actually a Human Body

When you hold the four species together on Sukkot (סוכות), you are not holding plants. You are holding a body. The lulav (לולב, palm branch) is the spine. The etrog (אתרוג, citron) is the heart. The hadas (הדס, myrtle) is the eyes. The aravah (ערבה, willow) is the lips. When you bring them together and wave them in six directions, you are offering every organ of a complete human being to God. The Zohar (first circulated c. 1290 CE in Castile, 3,298 texts in our collection), the Tikkunei Zohar (a companion text of 70 mystical interpretations, 808 texts in our database), and the classical midrash all make this claim. The commandment in (Leviticus 23:40) to take these four species and rejoice for seven days is, in the kabbalistic reading, not a harvest ritual. It is an act of self-presentation. You are the offering.

The Body Map: Heart, Spine, Eyes, and Lips

The mapping is precise. Vayikra Rabbah 30:14 (compiled c. 5th century CE in the Land of Israel), one of the foundational midrashic collections in our Midrash Rabbah collection (2,921 texts), lays it out explicitly:

• The etrog (citron) resembles the heart: roughly the size and shape of a human heart, the seat of understanding and intention.
• The lulav (palm branch) resembles the spine: long, straight, rigid, the central column that holds the body upright.
• The hadas (myrtle) has small, oval leaves that resemble eyes. Three myrtle branches are used, corresponding to the two eyes and a spiritual "third eye" of insight.
• The aravah (willow) has elongated leaves that resemble lips. Two willow branches are used, corresponding to the two lips that form speech and prayer.

When you hold the lulav bundle in your right hand and the etrog in your left, you are holding a spine with eyes and lips in one hand, and a heart in the other. You bring them together. The body is assembled. You wave it forward, backward, right, left, up, down, offering every direction of the human body's capacity to God. The question this raises is not ancient: what would it mean to present your whole self, not just your prayers, as the offering? The Vayikra Rabbah draws the moral explicitly: "Just as these four species cannot fulfill the commandment unless they are all bound together, so Israel cannot be redeemed unless they hold together as one." The body parts represent not just an individual but a collective body, the body of the Jewish people.

What Do the Four Species Represent in Kabbalah?

The Tikkunei Zohar 57:20 (composed c. late 13th-early 14th century CE) takes the body metaphor and maps it onto the Sefirot (ספירות), the ten divine emanations through which God interacts with creation. In this kabbalistic reading, each species corresponds to a letter of the divine Name, the Tetragrammaton (יהוה, YHVH):

• The lulav corresponds to the letter Vav (ו), the spine of the divine Name, associated with Tiferet (תפארת, Beauty/Harmony), the central balancing Sefirah that channels divine energy downward.
• The three myrtles correspond to the first Heh (ה), associated with Binah (בינה, Understanding) and the three upper Sefirot governing divine thought.
• The two willows correspond to the final Heh (ה), associated with Malkhut (מלכות, Sovereignty/Shekhinah), God's presence as it manifests in the physical world.
• The etrog corresponds to the Yod (י), the smallest letter, associated with Chokhmah (חכמה, Wisdom), the initial spark of divine thought from which all creation flows.

When you hold the four species together, you are holding the Name of God. You are assembling the divine structure in your hands. And when you wave them in the six directions, you are extending God's Name and God's presence into every dimension of physical space. The The Ten Sefirot in our database explains the full Sefirotic system that underlies this mapping. The Zohar on Parashat Emor elaborates at length on how the Sukkot rituals mirror the inner dynamics of the divine realm.

Why Four Types of Jews?

Vayikra Rabbah 30:12 offers another famous interpretation that has nothing to do with body parts or Sefirot, and everything to do with human community. Each of the four species, the midrash says, represents a different type of Jew:

• The etrog has both taste and fragrance: it represents a person who has both Torah learning and good deeds.
• The lulav (date palm) has taste but no fragrance: a person who has Torah learning but no good deeds.
• The myrtle has fragrance but no taste: a person who has good deeds but no Torah learning.
• The willow has neither taste nor fragrance: a person who has neither Torah learning nor good deeds.

God says: "Let them all be bound together as one bundle, and they will atone for one another." The willow, the person with no learning and no deeds, is not discarded. It is bound together with the others. It is necessary. The bundle is incomplete without it. This is a radical statement about community. The holiest person and the least accomplished person are equally necessary for the commandment to be fulfilled. You cannot wave the four species with three. You need all four. The Midrash Rabbah applies this principle beyond the holiday. It becomes a theological argument for why every member of the community matters, regardless of their spiritual accomplishments.

The Six Directions and the Cosmic Sukkah

The waving ritual, called na'anu'im (נענועים), is performed during the recitation of Hallel (Psalms 113-118) on each day of Sukkot. The four species are waved in six directions: south, north, east, up, down, and west (the order varies by custom; the Ashkenazi order follows the Rema, Rabbi Moses Isserles, 1530-1572 CE, while Sephardi practice follows Rabbi Yosef Karo's Shulchan Arukh, published 1565 CE, Orach Chaim 651:9). Each direction corresponds to a Sefirah and to a dimension of divine sovereignty.

The kabbalistic reading, developed in the school of Rabbi Isaac Luria (the Ari, 1534-1572 CE, Safed), holds that the waving draws divine energy (shefa, שפע) from all six directions into the center, into the person holding the species, into the sukkah, into the world. The sukkah itself, in Lurianic thought, is a model of the cosmos. Its walls represent the Sefirot that contain and structure reality. Its s'khakh (סכך, the roof covering of natural materials) represents the boundary between the divine and human realms, permeable enough to see the stars through, which symbolizes the partial transparency between heaven and earth. The four species waved inside the sukkah extend God's presence outward from this cosmic model into the six directions of actual space.

The Feast of Sukkot in the World to Come in our database describes a tradition from Bava Batra 75a (Babylonian Talmud) in which God will make a sukkah for the righteous from the skin of Leviathan (לויתן), the primordial sea monster. Those who merit it will sit inside. Those who do not will sit in its shade. The sukkah, in this eschatological vision, becomes the final dwelling place of the righteous, a temporary booth that turns out to be eternal.

The Ushpizin: Seven Guests in the Sukkah

The Zohar on Parashat Emor introduces one of Sukkot's most beloved customs: the Ushpizin (אושפיזין, Aramaic for "guests"). Each night of the seven-day festival, a different biblical patriarch is invited into the sukkah as a spiritual guest. The seven guests are:

• Night 1: Abraham (associated with Chesed, Lovingkindness)
• Night 2: Isaac (associated with Gevurah, Judgment/Strength)
• Night 3: Jacob (associated with Tiferet, Beauty/Harmony)
• Night 4: Moses (associated with Netzach, Eternity/Victory)
• Night 5: Aaron (associated with Hod, Splendor/Humility)
• Night 6: Joseph (associated with Yesod, Foundation)
• Night 7: David (associated with Malkhut, Sovereignty)

The Zohar teaches that these seven souls actually descend from Gan Eden (the Garden of Eden) to dwell in the sukkah with the living. The sukkah becomes a meeting point between the living and the dead, between the earthly and the heavenly, between past and future. The temporary, fragile booth, open to the wind, covered with branches, barely a structure at all, becomes the holiest space in the world for seven days. The Zohar's Ushpizin tradition has been universally adopted across Jewish communities, Ashkenazi and Sephardi alike, and many families hang decorative charts listing the seven guests on the walls of their sukkah.

Explore the Sukkot Texts

Our database contains The Feast of Sukkot in the World to Come, The Body of Israel, and The Ten Sefirot, plus 808 texts from the Tikkunei Zohar that contain extensive Sukkot mysticism. For the body metaphor in broader Jewish thought, see The Body of God. Explore the Sefirotic system that maps onto the four species across our Kabbalah collection (3,298 texts). Search for Sukkot, search for lulav, or search for four species across our 18,000+ texts.