Jewlicious Crafts: Making a lulav ring

Not into prayer, fasting, or separating milk and meat? How about arts & crafts? Sukkot offers a bunch of fun craft projects, from building and decorating a Sukkah to creating a lulav bundle. Martha Stewart eat your heart out – we’ve been doing this for thousands of years.

To do this project you will need a lulav, and it should be long enough that you can safely sacrifice two leaves from the bottom for this project. The lowest leaves are removed, and split giving you four pieces to work with. If you can get your hands on a kind of scraggly lulav at a sukkah supply store (that they sometimes sell in “kids sets”, they will most likely let you take off leaves for free, or have some scraps around you can take.

So how in the world to make one of those rings that holds the lulav together and how many do you need to make? The Shulchan Aruch and various traditions handed down teach us that the lulav should be bound a minimum of three times. Some say this is three on the palm itself, and some include one of the bindings done around the base, holding the three species together. There are kabbalistic traditions that have 18 or more bindings, and they look pretty sweet too. Some folks use the basket that looks like a Chinese finger-torture gag, and some don’t. If you do use a Chinese Lulav Torture Basket, make sure that one our your rings goes around that basket to hold everything in place.

The rings are fastened first to the palm, then add the willow and myrtle, and fasten those too. Send us photos of your lulav and we’ll put up the most Jewlicious ones!

Now how do you put it all together? Check it our below the break!