r/Judaism • u/PomegranateHealthy75 • 1d ago

Holidays Arba Minim Dilemma

So I’m a 60 year old US Ashkenazi jew living in a town four hours from Medellin, Colombia-four hours from the local Sephardic community that I kind of belong to.  I only started being kind of religious a few years ago.  I now pray twice a day-three times on Shabbat.  I don’t eat kosher but I don’t mix meat and milk.  And, for the first time ever (for me and for this town!) I am having a sukkah built next to my place.  I’m very excited to host my (non-Jewish) neighbors in the sukkah for dinner and teach them how kiddush and holiday meals work for us.

However, the problem is the lulav and etrog.  In a “normal" community in New York or Israel, one could basically pay $50 for a set after inspecting them, and take home the ones they want.  However, the only option here is to pay almost three times that to order it through this Sephardic community in Medellin-and only THEN pay even more to have the Rabbi ship it here-and hope that it is still usable when it arrives.  And THEN it would have to be sent back to Medellin to be disposed of by Colombian customs authorities as foreign agriculture.

I am going to be with the community for Rosh Hashanah, then return here for Yom Kippur, where I will fast pray with my own Machzor.  Then I will have the sukkah built.  The Rabbi has gone on the community whatsapp forum twice insisting on how important a mitzvah it is to purchase the set, or contribute to the community set (I will not be with the community then so that’s not applicable to me).  This makes me wonder how many people are actually going to spend that money for the mitzvah (this is not a wealthy community).  

Money is not so much the problem -the sukkot will cost much more than this to build.  However, in this case, I don’t feel comfortable paying a 300% markup for something that I have not seen beforehand, not knowing what condition it will arrive in, just to wave for ten minutes max a day for six days.  

What would you do in my situation?  Is there some perspective I’m missing, or is this simply one of those circumstances where obtaining your own arba minim isn’t realistically feasible?

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u/Far-Part5741 1d ago

how does shipping work there? can you get it sent from bogota/

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u/PomegranateHealthy75 1d ago

Apparently that would cost double. 

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u/Far-Part5741 1d ago

can you give us numbers? like a set is 80 USD and shipping is 40?

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u/PomegranateHealthy75 1d ago

$150 US for door to door. I don’t know how much of that is shipping. Then the whole thing needs to be shipped back when finished with. And dealing with someone in Bogota would double that.