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Chapter 21. Is it Easy to Be a Jew?

No, it’s not. I’ve known it since childhood. I knew it not through hearsay. I knew it through personal experience. But only now, after Mama’s death, did I understand the full extent of what it meant to be a Jew. And it didn’t come easily, though for quite different reasons. Now, no one insulted my ethnic (or religious) dignity. Now, I myself was learning how to behave with dignity – in accordance with rules and customs that the Jewish people have known since ancient times.

I had arrived at that decision – to be precise, the decision hit me, for I had no doubts about it – for two reasons.

The first reason – I felt and knew that Mama would want it that way now. Now and then, she would drop a “When I am gone…” She, who had grown up with Jewish traditions, would be pleased if her son expressed the grief of his loss the way it was ordered in religious laws. To do what Mama wanted me to do – how else could I have expressed my love for her?

The second reason – I felt the need of it. Was it the call of blood? Was it a hope of finding help and consolation? I didn’t know. Most likely it was both.

The first week of mourning, the one relatives spend at home, was over. The Shloshim, literally “30,” began. In other words, those 30 days when men didn’t shave or cut their hair, and, even though they went back to work, they prayed in a synagogue every morning and evening. Mourning for parents, including visits to the synagogue, lasted for a year.

I don’t want to pretend it was easy for me – I was alarmed, I was tense, and not because of changes in my everyday life. The forthcoming emotional changes were to be much more difficult.

To go to the synagogue twice a day, in the morning and evening, seven days a week for a whole year only for decorum, for the sake of being seen there, to go as a not-very-industrious student goes to school because he has to… and pretends to be listening while exchanging remarks with his classmates? No, that was not what I wanted. And I knew that it wouldn’t be that way. I knew that I would go to the synagogue with an open heart. But would my heart take in what I would hear there? Would it take it in truly so that it would become mine? That I didn’t know. My very limited experience didn’t console me with an answer.

I was very lucky to have Uncle Avner by my side during the first week of my new religious life. It’s always easier when a close relative is by your side. On top of that, Uncle knew Jewish rituals quite well and had always observed them. That could be said of all Central Asian Jews, particularly those from Bukhara. Unlike Jews who lived in Russia, the Jews of the Central Asian countries always respected ancient customs and religious tenets. No matter how poor a family was, they always tried to give their children at least some Jewish education, at least teach them to read Hebrew, to learn to pronounce words correctly. That’s how both my grandfathers, Hanan and Yusup, were raised. But it was only Grandpa Hanan who handed his worldview and knowledge down to his son, Uncle Avner. Unfortunately, Grandpa Yusup didn’t raise his children the same way.

"Don’t worry," my uncle reassured me on the way to the synagogue. "Don’t worry, it’s not difficult. You’ll get used to it in a week or two."

But I worried. And I had the feeling that I was entering the synagogue for the first time and saw everything differently.

There was a small area surrounded by wooden railings in the middle of the spacious hall, with the platform, bema, inside it. The Torah was read from that platform. The Torah was kept in the sacred ark, Aron Kadesh in Hebrew, covered with a heavy curtain, ptih, on which a crown and an inscription in Hebrew were embroidered. A few rows of benches for worshippers were arranged along the three sides of the hall. We sat down on one of them.

The praying had already begun. It was the time of the Jewish holidays, abundant in the fall. Praying in the synagogue during the holidays begins long before sunrise, at five in the morning. It was easy to tell us from everyone else by our unshaven faces as people observing mourning. That was most likely why one of the worshippers, a tall bespectacled young man approached us. He, like everyone else, was wearing a tallit, a large white shawl with black stripes. The tassels, tzitzit, hung from its four corners, the purpose of which was described in the Torah – after looking at them people would remember God’s commandments.

"How do you do, I am Sholom. Are you mourning?" The young man whispered. "I hope your deceased has a place in Heaven prepared."

After expressing his condolences, he offered to get prayer books for us from the shelf.

"Please, one for me in Hebrew, and one in Russian for my nephew," Uncle Avner requested.

I was holding a siddur, a prayer book in Hebrew with a transliteration, a text in Hebrew printed in Russian letters. It was a small, thick book with snow-white pages, thin as tissue paper.

"Here… Listen and follow," Uncle said after opening the siddur to the proper page.

At last, after I concentrated, I heard the voice of the chazan who was reciting the prayer. Like the rest of us, the chazan was standing on the platform with his face toward the Aron Kadesh. But even if he had turned our way, we wouldn’t have seen it since his tallit covered him from head to foot.

I heard the voice of the chazan, and nothing could distract me from listening any longer. He was reading. No, it was difficult to call it reading. It was a real song. And what a song! It was prolonged and melodious. It grasped and fascinated you. It was filled with profound, powerful feeling that captivated one's soul. Strangely enough, even though I didn’t understand the words, their meaning somehow affected me. They blessed, glorified, honored, gave hope, begged for forgiveness. Now pain and penitence, now joy and exultation could be heard in them. My eyes perused the lines. However, it was not the words but the chazan’s voice that filled me with the prayer, and his voice continued to flow. The chazan was swaying to rhythm of the words, and the hem of his tallit stirred, swayed and gleamed like light waves. It suddenly seemed to me that he was standing not in the bema but on the bridge of a ship that was about to tear itself away from the smooth surface of the water and rise to the sky, to the One who was there… on the throne, visible… or invisible, incomprehensible, in space. How dare I imagine it this way? Well, one imagines Him the way one wants, the way one has been used to since childhood. And I… I felt Him… it was a connection between Him and me… and here was our ship that was flying, flying to Him. And everything we experienced, everything we thought about, asked, hoped for, everything our prayers were filled with – all that was flowing to Him.

I felt festive and full of light in my heart.

And the prayers could still be heard, and the voice of the chazan could be heard. I suddenly realized that he wasn’t reading, for his eyes were closed. Everything he was saying had been imprinted on his heart. Not only did he remember hundreds and hundreds of words, but he believed in their special meaning and special power. He believed that they were reaching the One to whom they were addressed. And he inspired us with his belief.

By the way, later I met this person, an emigrant from our parts. His name was Maksim. I had the opportunity to become more and more convinced of his piety and his wonderful abilities as a chazan.

I had many significant and profound impressions that day, and one of them, “the prayer that is read while standing,” remained in my memory. It was solemn yet quiet. The silence was broken only by the sound of pages turning. It was like the rustling of falling leaves you hear when walking across an autumn forest, without companions, all by yourself, alone with your thoughts.

And of course, Kaddish, the mourning Kaddish, the ancient prayer in Aramaic, over 2000 years old, remained in my mind.

In general, Kaddish, the prayer that is read every morning, afternoon and evening, is not associated with death. It extols the greatness of the Creator and ends with the hope that He will save the world in the future. Still, one of the versions of Kaddish (there are a few of them) is read to remember the deceased, and it is intended to help the soul of a deceased loved one. Even the wisest of sages don’t know why. This tradition is not as ancient as the everyday Kaddish prayer. It dates back to the Middle Ages. Perhaps it appeared thanks to the ability of Kaddish to heal emotional wounds. The reading of Kaddish as a mourning prayer is considered essential three times a day or at least every day for eleven months after a parent’s death. Why not a whole year of mourning? According to the Talmud, the souls of bad people suffer in Hell for twelve months. Those praying for their dear ones hope that their souls have evaded that lot, and they toss aside the twelfth month as a declaration of hope.

It was my first Kaddish. Perhaps, each succeeding one added something new, and all that merged together as happens when you listen to music that transforms your soul.

The worshippers were sitting. Only the mourners were standing. We pronounced the first words of the prayer along with the chazan, slowly and solemnly: “May the great Name of God be exalted and sanctified, throughout the world, which He has created according to His will…”

This prayer staggered me in the Russian translation with its poetic nature. In general, all Jewish prayers are like poems, odes addressed to God, Kaddish in particular. For instance, one of its phrases is worth hearing, it goes like this in Russian:

“May great peace, life, plenty, deliverance, consolation, freedom, healing, liberation, atonement, broad expanses, and salvation be sent from Heaven to all the people of His Yisroel. And say Amen!”

How solemn and comprehensive it is, what a powerful rhythm related to the diversity of life.

And Kaddish sounds like music from heaven when read in Aramaic.

To my question about why Kaddish is read in Aramaic, the Rabbi told me an interesting tale. “We extol God in Kaddish so powerfully and beautifully that Angels may envy and be hurt because there are no prayers that extol Angels so beautifully. But Angels cannot hear Kaddish because Aramaic is the only language they don’t understand.”

I am not sure whether Angels understand Aramaic, but it is really very difficult, and at the beginning I was very surprised that people remembered Kaddish by heart. But the beauty of the prayer, the way it sounded, captivated me more and more every time I heard it.

Yisgadal vyiskadash shmay rabbo… Bolmo deevro chirusay… Omen

When you listen to such beautiful words, the difficult language begins to become clear, and the words, which you already understand, escape your lips on their own.

By the way, great Medieval Talmudic scholars translated Kaddish from Aramaic into Hebrew so Angels could read it and listen to it for many centuries. And I hope that, contrary to the tale, they are not upset but admire it.

I am not going to make the work of my soul seem easier than it actually was. Lofty feelings did not always seize me in the synagogue. I would get distracted. I sometimes stopped feeling the beauty and meaning of the prayer. I would become irritated when one of the members of the congregation made noise and behaved as if he were not in the temple. Sometimes, awakened by an alarm clock at 4:00 a.m. (I could have gotten up an hour later but I wanted, while attending the synagogue, to have enough time to do everything I had done before Mama passed away), or on the way to the synagogue in the piercing pre-dawn winter wind that chilled me to the bone, I had gloomy thoughts. “Why and who needs it all? Is it necessary to perform hard and incomprehensible rituals to prove love for the beloved person? Can’t I appeal to God? Or to my mama who is always in my heart and to whom I appeal all the time and hear her voice?”

I couldn’t find an unambiguous answer. I had no right to denounce the faith and rituals of many centuries. I could have drifted away from them, but something restrained me every time I did so. Perhaps the strongest pull was the simple thought that I was subjecting myself to a trial for the sake of a person who had been so close to me. Whether it proved anything or not was secondary. The most important thing was that I wanted to subject myself to that trial, that after overcoming the moments of weakness, fatigue and irritation, I could tell myself “Everything is going the way it should.”

Yes, the way it should, and perhaps to a greater extent than I had expected at the beginning.

Turning to religion opened the world to me, a world about which I had known inexcusably little before. I mean the Jewish world, the history of the Jewish religion and culture. I still had a lot to learn, but what was important was that my interest in it had been awakened.

The first thing that awoke my interest was the Torah.

While attending the synagogue, it was impossible not to pay attention to Torah, not to feel it, see it, and think about its significance.

At the beginning, this interest was superficial. The Aron Kadesh, in other words, the sacred ark, covered with the beautiful cloth, was where the Torah was kept. The solemn ceremony took place a few times a week – names were called, and the members of the congregation called approached the Aron Kadesh. The Torah, dressed like a queen in blue velvet with a silver pattern, was removed from the ark and carried around the temple.

Everyone bowed to it with respect and adoration, blessed it, and tried to kiss at least its hem. At last it was brought to the bema. Its velvet attire, the case, was removed carefully and respectfully, and the sacred text appeared for all to see. It had been written with a quill in black ink on a scroll made from the hide of a ritually pure animal, usually a cow.

I could also see that old scroll, which had been brought by someone from Uzbekistan recently. An experienced scribe, a sopher, had toiled without ceasing, rewriting the Torah for a whole year. I could visualize, I could imagine a hunched-over old man with a kippa on his head, his gray beard, the parchment lit by the flickering light of candles… How many times had he reread the Torah before finishing his work? There shouldn’t be a single error in the text.

I saw the Torah close up that day. I had been called to read a prayer. My head covered by my tallit, I approached the bema, touched the Torah, pressed my fingers to my lips and said the prayer for the reading of the Torah. The congregation repeated it after me. And then the chazan began to read the day's excerpts from the Torah. He read singing, singing without improvising the melody. He was singing the special song that should be remembered by heart.

The reading was over. One of the members of the congregation lifted the Torah above his head so that everyone could see the text. All rose and said in Hebrew, “This is the Torah Moshe gave to the children of Israel according to God’s will."

My lessons in the history of the Jewish people began with this phrase.

The Torah, which was given to the Jews according to God’s will, is the first five books of the Bible, the most significant book in the history of mankind. It can be said with full confidence that the Bible opened for mankind the meaning of existence. It required people to ponder the basic questions of life. It gave them a moral code. It was absorbed by the whole world. The development of the entire modern culture, including Christian, Western culture, was based on it. This book was more important to the Jews than any treasure. It depicted the creation of the world, described the history of our forefathers, including the Exodus from Egypt. It contains 613 commandments – the basis of the latest Jewish law.

I am not going to "discover America” again. I will limit myself to the confession that I began to discover all the above for myself only recently, and I am glad about it beyond measure.

Chapter 22. Eastern Medicine Once Again

Quite a few pages of these writings are dedicated to Mukhitdin Umarov, a physician from Namangan who prolonged my mother's life for several years. When he came to New York to treat her, Mukhitdin Inamovich would help many other people, and he soon became widely known. That’s why Mukhitdin continued to visit his American patients after she passed away. My cousin Yura and I had done our best to encourage his visits for the tabib had become more than a friend for both of us. Probably the word "guru" is most appropriate here. We were smitten with the wisdom of this man of few words, the profundity of his knowledge, and his noble soul, manifested even in small things… in a word… with everything, including his appearance and manners. And I (as I’ve already written a few times) am drawn as by a magnet to people who embody lofty ideals. One could call me trusting, naïve – perhaps so, but I’m not sorry about it at all. Precisely such people have given me the happiest moments of my life, and Mukhitdin Umarov more than anyone else.

It was obvious that the same thing was happening to my cousin Yura. It was not surprising since we had been close since childhood.

The tabib would show up in New York twice a year for a short time, just for a week. We would spare neither time nor effort to inform his patients and organize everything for consultations before his arrival. We would rush to the airport long before his plane landed, craning our necks to spot the tabib in the crowd of arriving passengers. By the way, it was unnecessary to try to spot him for Mukhitdin stood out in a crowd like a being from a different world, unfamiliar with the rhythm of our planet. He walked unhurriedly; he was calm. The tabib never hurried, and his gaze was calmly directed right into your eyes, perhaps even hypnotizing. At least I sometimes had that sensation.

However, I exaggerate in writing about Mukhitdin’s perfect composure. I have seen him grief-stricken, quite grief-stricken a few times. Once I saw him sobbing uncontrollably as he hugged the son of his deceased friend Makhmoudjon. His only weakness might have been the dozens of excess cigarettes. Mukhitdin was an inveterate smoker.

So Mukhitdin would arrive. No matter how Yura and I dreamed of long conversations with him, Mukhitdin would dedicate almost all his time to his patients. We would set up appointments for over 100 people for it was necessary to help those who needed his help and to justify Mukhitdin’s trip financially. He would see patients in my office. He would show up at our place in the evening for dinner. The kids, who had been friends with him for a long time, would hug him. Danya would massage the doctor’s shoulders, huffing and puffing. Mukhitdin would laugh, cringing for he was ticklish, but it was he who had taught Danya to do massage. Even the shy Vika would hug and kiss him.

After the kids were off to bed, long awaited conversations would begin. About what? About everything – Eastern Medicine, relatives, Mukhitdin’s trips, and world events. Our Eastern physician understood politics like a professional. For example, when the United States invaded Iraq, allegedly because of biological weapons, Mukhitdin was the first to tell Yura and me, “Bush needs an excuse for the invasion. Iraq doesn’t have such weapons. Yes, Saddam Hussein is a bad ruler, but under him, the poorest person in Iraq earned enough to feed his family. And now? It’s economic ruin, starvation and civil war.” The tabib had visited Iraq before the war. He knew firsthand how many kilograms of rice, meat, potatoes and other foodstuffs the poor could afford. “Saddam Hussein infringed upon people’s rights? I won’t argue about that. And how many countries like that are there in the world? Doesn’t it happen in America?” the tabib grinned. “But no one invades America because of it.”

To tell the truth, the tabib didn’t quite come to love America, “the all-powerful and just.” And, in general, after travelling all over the world, he remained a patriot of his own impoverished country, which was far from a democracy.

"Ustoz, would you want to live in New York?" Yura and I would ask, hopefully.

But Mukhitdin would always give us the same answer, smiling and shaking his head. "I prefer my dusty, stuffy Namangan."

Mukhitdin couldn’t but see, understand and feel how hard life in Uzbekistan was. Many things outraged him. But let’s remember the lines from Alexander Blok’s poem, “Even the way you are now, my Russia, you are more dear to me than any other land.” Yes, he was a citizen of the world in his lifestyle, but deep in his heart, he remained an Uzbek, and on top of that, a believer, a pious Muslim. It was not accidental that his name in Uzbek meant “defender of the faith.” He made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, every year so he had long had the honorable title of Haji and could wear a green turban. Weren’t we, Yura and I, lucky to have such an extraordinary friend?

I cannot call myself an orthodox believer. But I understand that the Sacred Books – the Bible and the Koran – don't only tell us about what millions of people believed in and still believe, but rather they encompass profound philosophical views and determine the moral basis for human life.

It was the great Einstein who wrote, "A person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his abilities, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their super-personal value.” Obviously, my cousin and I felt it intuitively, and we treated the religious views of our scholarly Haji Mukhitdin with great respect, though I should repeat that he did not become our religious teacher. However, when it came to views on medicine and life, he became our Teacher with a capital “T.”

Medicine… During the days of the tabib’s visits, not only all our time but also our thoughts were filled with it. The doctor examined about 150 patients in a week. (I would like to inform readers who may be intimidated by this number that he sees over 100 patients a day in the Namangan Center.) We neglected our work and stayed by his side the whole time. We were amazed by how precisely the doctor determined a diagnosis by feeling a pulse, how confidently he prescribed treatment (mostly herbs), how often a treatment began to take effect after only a few doses. Though Mukhitdin could treat not only with herbs. I experienced that myself.

One day I felt I was falling ill – my head was heavy, my legs ached, and I had chills. “You have a bad cold,” the doctor said, after feeling my pulse. “Lie down on the floor.” I lay down on my stomach on the rug. He sat down next to me and… I can hardly describe what I felt when Mukhitdin massaged me. He began with my lower back. His fingers, obviously tender (a doctor-pulsologist takes good care of his fingers), first gave me the feeling of warmth. Then more and more energy began to stream into my body. But as the healer moved his fingers to my spine, those tender fingers turned to iron. They moved down my spine. Each vertebra, each nerve could feel them. It was impossible to tolerate – I wriggled and bellowed like a young bull. Mukhitdin chuckled, “Put up with it, put up with it. You’ll feel better soon.” Then a new torture began. After putting my left arm on my back, the tabib propped my shoulder up with his knee from below. My shoulder blade opened slightly like the valve of a mollusk. That was where, under my left shoulder blade, the doctor stuck his fingers. More pain, a massage performed inside there. After doing that, the doctor’s fingers went to my right shoulder blade. “Pleura… thorax… blood circulation…” the tabib mumbled, giving me brief explanations of his manipulations. “Well, do you still have chills?” Not at all! I felt healthy. I felt warm blood running through my arteries. I enjoyed the peace, but at that moment the tabib interrupted my pleasure, grabbed me by the skin in the middle of my forehead with his fingers and began to pull it until a crunching sound was heard. After all those procedures, it seemed quite bearable to be rubbed from head to foot with melted sheep’s fat overnight. After perspiring profusely overnight, I woke up in the morning as if born anew. Judging by the familiar symptoms, I would have stayed in bed with a cold for a week.

It’s needless to explain that Yura and I were absorbed in the mysterious world of non-traditional medicine while helping the doctor and attending his sessions with patients. We were more and more convinced of its broad opportunities, which were for some reason brushed aside by contemporary diagnosticians who worked with the help of machines and chemical substances.

Taking advantage of the doctor’s every free minute, we asked him numerous questions. I added a bookcase to our dining room, which also served as the living room and the library, and filled it with medical literature, beginning with ancient authors, such as Hippocrates and obviously Ibn Sina. The tabib taught us there, referring to one book or another. We naturally understood that those brief lessons would not turn us into physicians, but our desire to become physicians grew with each passing day. And we were happy as we began to understand certain things.

The doctor usually brought dried herbs from Namangan. He had chosen them at random for he didn’t know which of them he would need. It happened that he didn’t have the required ones. One time, the doctor brought the most essential herbs. “We’ll buy the rest of them here,” he said. Chinese traditional medicine is also called Eastern. Many people confuse it with Ibn Sina’s medicine, though herbal healing and the similarity of general notions are something that ties them together.

One day, Yura and I went to buy herbs at Chinatown pharmacies.

New York as is known is a multi-cultural city. Each ethnic group, like a swarm of bees, lives in its “beehive.” There is African-American Harlem, Little Italy, Hispanic Corona, Indian Jackson Heights, a few Chinatowns – in Manhattan and other boroughs of New York. There are also Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean neighborhoods. Russian-speaking Little Odessa came into being in Brighton Beach. My countrymen, the Bukhara Jews, were densely settled on many streets in Queens. In my opinion, Manhattan's Chinatown remains the most colorful, not losing its ethnic appearance in this motley community. There are thousands of small stores and shops with red and gold signs, houses with curved roofs, pedestrians with high cheekbones and slanted eyes everywhere. You don’t often hear English spoken here and not everyone understands it… That brings to mind a joke – an old woman from Russia who lived in Brighton Beach is indignant as she visits a store. “We’ve been here for six years, but they still don’t speak Russian!” The Chinese in Chinatown feel at home without “us” and “them.”

As we expected difficulties in communication in Chinatown, we brought along a botanical dictionary, but little good came of it. As we pointed to the name of an herb, a pharmacist answered us something, or was he asking us something? We didn’t know which. Next time we brought the doctor along. He, like me, didn’t know Chinese, nor did he speak English, but that didn’t impede him. The pharmacist put samples of dry and ground herbs and seeds on the counter. Mukhitdin knew almost all of them, and if any of them were unfamiliar, he sniffed and even tasted them.

American drug stores sell all sorts of goods, including medicines. There are real pharmacies in Chinatown. We liked one of them in particular where the science of Eastern medicine reigned. Herbs, seeds, and fruits were arranged in hundreds of cedar boxes with stickers on the shelves. Pharmacists in white overalls understood us immediately; they knew English well.

By the way, an interesting incident happened in that pharmacy. While Yura and I packed the herbs into bags, the doctor watched the pharmacist who was mixing herbs according to a prescription. The prescription was naturally written in Chinese characters. “Judging by your friend’s attention to what I’m doing, he has a good understanding of herbs,” the pharmacist noted. We translated it to Mukhitdin. He chuckled and said that the pharmacist was putting together a combination of herbs for an asthma patient with a cold.

“Your friend must be a physician! Pulse diagnostics!” the pharmacist exclaimed. And he complained, looking at the tabib, “I have a mysterious pain in my side.” We translated. Mukhitdin nodded and took the pharmacist’s wrist. After feeling his pulse for a few moments, aided by gestures, he began to explain to us in Russian the reason for the pain. I don’t remember his explanation, but obviously, after we translated it into English, the diagnosis seemed so convincing to the pharmacist that he ran to bring the owner of the pharmacy to introduce the tabib to him, and they both tried to persuade Mukhitdin to work at the pharmacy as a doctor’s assistant… Strange people!

The basement of my house was stuffed with herbs by the time of the tabib’s departure. Yura and I had to turn this storage place into a pharmacy – to put all the herbs in cans, attach stickers, writing not only the names of the herbs but also their qualities. That was a hard job. The difficulty began with the names of the herbs. Not all the herbs had Latin names. Some of the herbs brought by Mukhitdin only have Uzbek names, such as kupeishak, devnechak, tomirdori… Some have folk names. For example, Adonis is called either goritsvet, starodubka, or chernogorka in different parts of Russia. And it’s called baichechek in Asia. Senna leaves are also called Alexandrian leaf or pointed-leaf cassia… We had to record all the names.

The tabib asked us to write down the qualities of all the herbs according to "The Canon" of Ibn Sina and in light of contemporary notions. Out of ignorance, I first thought that it wouldn’t be difficult. I had a copy of "The Canon." I would buy the encyclopedia of curative herbs, and I would do it. I got depressed after opening a few encyclopedias, for I didn’t find many of the plants, fruits and seeds from our pharmacy in their pages. I rushed to Mukhitdin to find out what was wrong. It turned out that plants used in folk healing that hadn’t undergone clinical tests were not considered curative officially and had not been included in the list of 300,000 plants that had Latin names. So, it was Mukhitdin, our walking encyclopedia, who told me about the qualities of those herbs.