Parashat Tetzaveh - Making Sense of Scents and Incense

What we can learn from the Temple’s ‘eternal incense’ By Rabbi Shana Chandler Leon
Incense has been used to cast away illness and evil energies, to drive out pests and plagues (Numbers 16), and create a sort of “smokescreen” for the presence of God in the holiest recesses of the Temple. On a practical note, it may have masked the unpleasant odors of the Temple sacrifices and the earthiness of the people who congregated there. The recipe, elaborated upon from Exodus and through the Talmud, was complex and exact. Only a master perfumer could mix it, and deviations from it (or inclusions of forbidden ingredients) could result in the death penalty. It was an item of enormous religious import.

The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour by David Michael Stoddart

A Hindu Perspective
There are sixteen steps in the Hindu pooja ritual. Dhoop is one of the sixteen ways of offering worship to a deity, known asshodshopchar puja. The fumes of Agarbatti purify the environment, thus creating a holy atmosphere.
They kill the bacteria viruses & other microbes. Camphor or Karpooram is a part of every aarti, puja, or house warming. It is, in fact, the first step in the Hindu tradition towards training the mind to center, as nothing can be achieved unless the mind is focused.
The aroma of Camphor helps your mind to stay calm and lets you concentrate and reduce stress while meditating and worshipping the Lord. It also makes your surrounding clean by removing odour. It also creates a clean environment to perform the rituals.
Agarbattis act as an insect repellent and helps to kill the bacteria viruses and other microorganisms. The ambience becomes reverent as the aroma eliminates negative energy from the environment.
Camphor represents our unmanifested desires. So also if we were to take refuge in the Lord, these desires will get burnt out. At the end of the aarti, we place the hands over the flame and touch our eyes and top of the head. It means that may the light that illumined the Lord light up my vision, may my thoughts be pure and beautiful.

Scents of Connection by Meira Wolkenfeld
The Talmudic statement above (B. Ber 43b) characterizes scent as spiritual but not physical sustenance. This could be because scent is impossible to see or touch and is associated with essence. However, I’d like to suggest that scent can also be seen as holy because it evokes feelings of relationship. When Isaac smells the everyday scent of Esav’s clothing, he experiences holiness in the familiar scent of his son, which arouses love and inspires blessing.

"The Garden of Eden is the Holy of Holies and the Dwelling of the Lord" by Rachel Elior
The plants mentioned in Exodus in connection with the incense and the holy anointing oil were certainly not available during Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness of Sinai. And, in fact, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan expressly states that the ingredients of the incense brought by the princes of the tribes as donation to the Tabernacle came from the Garden of Eden. The Hebrew word usually translated “princes” (nesi’im) can also mean “clouds,” and Pseudo-Jonathan therefore states: “And the heavenly clouds returned and went to the Garden of Eden, taking from there the choice fragrance and the olive oil for illumination and the pure persimmon for anointing oil and for the fragrant incense.” ... These plants grow in India and Ceylon, in southern Arabia—the biblical Sheba—and in Ethiopia and Somalia. The incense plants are not included among the plants botanically identified as those of the Land of Israel, and they could have arrived there only from spice mountains in distant lands —or, in the priestly perspective, from the Garden of Eden, which crosses the boundary between heavenly and earthly in matters associated with the sacred, with eternal, sacred cycles, and with the beginning of creation and eternal flow of life rooted in Garden of Eden. The biblical tradition does not explicitly tell us where the ingredients of the incense come from, so the spices seen by Enoch on his heavenly journey as he looks eastward, and the spices mentioned in the Song of Songs, can serve to suggest that there is a heavenly, Edenic source for the incense plants found in the far reaches of the earth.

What we can learn from the Temple’s ‘eternal incense’ By Rabbi Shana Chandler Leon
We have only a vestige of the incense in Jewish life today, suggesting very subtly what inhaling that extraordinary blend must have entailed. As Shabbat departs, the Havdalah ceremony offers the gift of breathing in the fragrance of the besamim, the spices. In that moment of suspension between two worlds, the blessed aroma of cinnamon and cloves symbolizes what the Kabbalists called the neshamah yeterah (additional soul) that each of us possesses on Shabbat, our day of fullness and completion. We take it in, hold it for a moment, and let it go for another week.
The incense in the ancient Temple was also a neshamah yeterah, lending depth and added soulfulness to the sacred rituals and the holy space where our ancestors worshiped and gathered. Its scent is but a memory, but may its eternal messages of inclusion, holiness, purity, mercy and hope continue to burn tamid, for all time.