45
About fifty feet from the terebinth, I planted a carob tree. One day it will be as big as the terebinth, and these two giants will rub their branches together and compare crowns.
At the other end of the house I planted another carob, and I am happy to report that both are doing well, and I am waiting for them to grow tall and spread wide their branches. The natural shape of the carob is that of a massive bush whose trunk is concealed by the many dense branches which fork right out of the base of the trunk. But anyone who has ever hiked in Israel knows the carob that grows on pasture grounds. Its lower branches are pruned by the teeth of cows. The canopy of the tree begins where a cow with outstretched neck ends, so it is possible to sit in the carob’s pleasant shade.
Another attribute of the carob is that it does not shed its leaves. In the summer it offers complete shade, and in winter it gives effective protection from rain. This tree induces a sense of home in me, a roof over my head, and since I do not have a herd of cows in my garden, I prune the carob myself into the shape of a large awning.
Oddly enough, the carob is not mentioned in the Bible. Some claim, however, that the word herev, “sword,” in the final words of Isaiah 1:19–20, actually refers to heruv, meaning “carob”: “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword.” Using this interpretation, the carob is regarded as meager and inferior food. And some say that the honey mentioned in the Bible does not only refer to the honey produced by bees but also to that produced by carob trees. Indeed, high-quality carob, the plump and juicy kind, oozes honey when split open, and these are the most delicious of fruits.
An even more interesting interpretation is that gerah, the biblical unit of weight, is actually a carob seed. The ancients noticed that each carob seed was of the exact same weight, and thus served as a reliable and convenient way of weighing gold and precious stones. In point of fact, there are linguists who claim that the term “karat” derived from this Hebrew word.
As for the tree itself—the carob is dioecious, meaning it produces both male and female plants. This matter need not disturb anyone, but the carob blossoms have a distinctive smell of human semen that spreads through the air. Some time ago, when I lived in Jerusalem, I found myself more than once walking or pedaling up Marcus Street in Talbieh. Large carob trees grew on either side of this street, and in the autumn months the males, whose blossoms are more abundant than those of the female, would give off an unmistakable odor. Not all passersby understand where all this living beauty comes from, and more than once I have witnessed an amusing spectacle: passersby pass by with different expressions on their upturned faces, each one according to his or her own life experiences and personal inclinations: Who would have believed it…Perhaps in the Katamon district of Jerusalem, but here in upper-class Talbieh?!
When I decided to plant carob in the garden, I planned ahead or, more precisely, because of the aforementioned odor, I resolved to plant female carobs rather than male ones. It is one thing to walk past a male carob at the prime of its life and to smile, and another thing altogether to plant one in your own garden and to live under the sublime and constant shadow of masculinity, autumn after autumn, year after year. Life presents enough humiliations. There is no need to bring more of them home.
The second thought I had was a regretful one, that I would not get to see those carobs at the pinnacle of their size and glory. But it was a fleeting thought and I overcame it easily. This is the way of the world, and just as there are those who preceded me in many other things, I was not the first to think this. The tale of our friend Honi the Circle Drawer, the bringer down of rain I mentioned previously, is well known. One day, he saw a man planting a carob tree. He asked how long it would take for the carob to bear fruit, and the man answered that it would take seventy years. He asked him if he would live that long and whether he would eat of the carob’s fruit. The man answered: “Just as my forefathers planted trees for me, I am planting trees for my children.” The rest of the story is common knowledge: Honi fell asleep for seventy years and when he awoke he saw the grandson of the planter eating the carob fruit. This nice story also has an instructive element to it, but it is established on an error: there is no need to wait seventy years for the carob to bear fruit. The tree will give copious quantities of fruit just a few years after being planted.
The third thought was where to plant it, a decision that needed good judgment and long-term planning. The carob is a large, wide tree; its foliage is dense and evergreen, creating full and constant shade underneath. It withholds light from its neighbors and prevents other plants from growing around it. It also roots deep into the earth and is difficult to transplant elsewhere unlike, for example, the olive tree.
After all these thoughts I planted my two carob trees each in its own place. They continue to develop nicely. I prune them in such a way that one can sit in their shade and, since they produce fruit, it is clear that the pollen of a male carob reaches them. It is albeit not as good a quality as I described above, but from time to time I taste it, and if a passerby stretches out a hand to pick one, I do not rebuke him. Let him eat, there is enough for everyone, and whatever falls to the ground will fertilize the soil. In this way the carob returns to the land that which it took.
While writing about female and male carobs, I recall a nice folktale about female and male dates that I read as a boy in The Book of Legends by Haim Nahmun Bialik and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky. The palm tree is also dioecious, having both male and female trees. Their growers are accustomed to extracting the pollen from the male palm and dusting it onto the flowers of the female in order to increase the degree of fertilization. The folktale I read is about a female date living in the Galilee area in a place known as Hamtam—perhaps the hot springs of Tiberias—who failed to produce fruit. A date expert by the name of Palmer saw her and said, “ ‘A male date she sees from Jericho and yearns for him in her heart.’ They went and brought from him to graft her—and right away she produced fruit.”
This sentence, “a male date she sees from Jericho and yearns for him in her heart” had a magical effect on me. First of all, I was happy to discover something that resembled Greek mythology in a Hebrew text. But the folktale itself, about a passionate female date and a beloved male date who are split apart by seventy miles, is evocative and beautiful because literature usually attributes such romantic passion to males, and also because the attributes of plants are highlighted here, chained by their roots to the ground.
There are three hearts in this story, and all three are beating wildly: the female date, who cannot unite with the distant male friend she yearns for in her heart, and perhaps the male date as well, as his heart senses her love from afar, and Palmer, who also has a warm and wise heart, who knows that plants feel not only hunger and thirst and heat and cold, light and dark, dryness and humidity, and the passing of hours and of seasons, but also love and passion, loneliness and yearning. All three are joined by the reader’s heart, which fills with excitement as he or she reads.
And as for the grafting that is recounted there—it likely does not describe what we call the act of grafting as it is known today, but the hanging of a male inflorescence between those of a female, a practice that was well known in those days. The reader, who looks for a nice story in every connection of one word to another, derives a satisfaction that is more literary than botanic or agricultural, and that, too, is important.