Pomegranates and New School Years Rabbi Dr Andrew Goldstein 7 September 2007

EREV SHABBAT Nitzvavim-Vayelech 25 Elul 5767

Rosh Hashanah will soon be upon us.  Doesn’t time fly?  (That’s if time can be said to fly).  And this week I realise I now have three grandchildren at school; not that I feel any older.

How long did it take you when you received this month’s Davar, to realise the front cover was covered in pomegranate seeds, and then to grasp what they were doing on this month’s front cover?  I have been doing a small survey of the motifs on this year’s and the last two years’ Rosh Hashanah cards, and I reckon that pomegranates are becoming more popular than apples & honey and shofars.  Once it was pious scenes or views of Jerusalem or doves of peace, now it is fishes or pomegranates.  And its not just New Year cards, but amongst the host of appeal letters I got leading up to Rosh Hashanah, all trying to think of a new wheeze to get my money, comes one from Norwood in the shape of a pomegranate.  

Why pomegranates (Punica granatum to horticulturists amongst you)?  It’s all to do with sympathetic magic.  We dip apple in honey and wish for a sweet year, a fish head (should you be so lucky) to hope that in the year you will be at the head and not the tail!  And a pomegranate, because it is said each fruit has in it 613 seeds, the number of mitzvot in the Torah, and surely we all wish to carry out all of the commandments in the year ahead.  Why pomegranates rather than the good old apple and honey?  Perhaps because with supermarkets selling ever more exotic fruits, it has become a little passé to feature a good old English Cox’s appleor maybe it has to do with an increasing fascination with mysticism, for mystics went into reading hidden messages in the work of God’s hands, and God certainly produced a good one when He created a pomegranate.

The Song of Songs has several references to the fruit, not as a simile of religious merit or wisdom, but of great beauty; addressing the bride, the lover says: “Your lips are like a crimson thread, your mouth is lovely, your brow behind your veil gleams like a split pomegranate” (S of S 4:3).  “Your limbs are an orchard of pomegranates”  (S of S 4:13).  I’ll leave you to work out the orchard, but as I was trying to fathom the split fruit I thought of this month’s Davar cover, with the seeds alive and glistening in their abundance.

Sadly the rabbis of old couldn’t dwell too long on pictures of beauty, be it in a woman or a fine fruit, because for them all such references must have deeper meanings.  Let me share but two.  “Rabbi Jonathan was going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and past by Mt Gerizim, the holy mountain of the Samaritans.  A  Samaritan stopped him and asked him where he was going.  “To pray at Jerusalem.”   “Why go all the way there, it would be better to pray at this mountain on which blessing was bestowed instead of that dung heap.”  Rabbi Jonathan: “In which way is your mountain more blessed?”  The Samaritan replied:  “Because it was not covered by water in the flood.”  Rabbi Jonathan could think of no riposte, he was dumb-struck.  But his ass driver said to him: “Master permit me to reply.  He asked the Samaritan, do you consider Mt Gerizim to be a high mountain or a low one?  If a high mountain, then doesn’t it say in Genesis 7:19 ‘all the high mountains were covered’, and if a low one, scripture gave it no mention at all: so much for your blessed hill.”  At that Rabbi .Jonathan dismounted the ass and let his driver ride, and praised him with a quote from Song of Songs “your brow is like a pomegranate split open”, using a pun on the Hebrew word for brow, which can mean “empty one”.  Rabbi Jonathan seemed to be saying: even an ass driver who is assumed to be empty of knowledge is  as full of pertinent replies as a pomegranate is full of seeds.  A back-handed compliment I know…but I would like to think it was meant as fulsome praise.  So often the rabbis pour scorn on the unlearned, and it is refreshing to come across a story that praised common sense and the wisdom of the labourer as being as valid as that of a learned scholar. 

As the High Holydays approach, maybe it’s a reminder that God and we should judge a person, not by their perceived academic success, or wealth, or status in society, but by their innate goodness and maybe common sense.

And the children at school?  Another midrash based on a verse from Song of Songs (6:11) “I went down into a nut garden”…this is interpreted as the world (a curious conclusion. is it saying the world is nuts)….”to look at the green plants” – these are Israel – “to see whether the vine had blossomed”  -  this is the synagogues and houses of study…..”and the pomegranates were in flower”…these are the young children who sit in class occupied with Torah, their faces shining, in row upon row, like the seeds of a pomegranate.

I think of the school children in their new uniforms as they start a new term, their faces bright with enthusiasm, and pray that as I look down at the rows upon rows of worshippers on the High Holydays, their faces will look like rows of pomegranate seeds and their enthusiasm for Judaism be renewed and the services move them to see how many of the 613 mitzvot they can perform in this coming year.