Rabbi Janet Marder

May 23, 2007 - Shavuot Yizkor 5767

 Pomegranate Tree

            One morning this week we received, from a kind friend, the gift of a pomegranate tree. I always accept such gifts with trepidation, because I am not much good with plants – in fact, my presence alone sometimes seems to make them wilt and wither into death. But Shelly has a more skillful hand, so I am hopeful that this tree will have a long and happy life.

            Pomegranate trees, as it happens, sometimes live longer than a hundred years. They are, according to the guidebook I read, small in stature, with sturdy roots and knotted, gnarly trunks, bright green leaves and spectacular flowers of brilliant orange-red.

            Most remarkable, as we know, is the fruit of the pomegranate: fleshy, crimson, thick-skinned, complex; the inside packed with rows of transparent sacs that are ruby-red as jewels, sweet, tart and juicy.

            Pomegranates were woven on the borders of the robes of Israelite priests; bronze pomegranates decorated Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem ; the lovers in the Song of Songs sip luscious pomegranate juice in a fragrant garden. They are symbols in many cultures of fertility, abundance and good luck. In our Jewish tradition, pomegranates stand for righteousness and virtue, and are therefore a traditional food for Rosh Hashana.

            But the pomegranate will never be a pious fruit, in my eyes. Big, round, bursting with juice, staining the fingers a deep and passionate color, the pomegranate vibrates with the life force. The modern Hebrew poet T. Carmi  evoked that force in his poem called “El Harimon – To the Pomegranate Tree”:

“I said green

to your branches bowing in the wind,

and red – red – red

 to your fruit shining like dew.

I called light to your moist, dark and stubborn root.”

            The bowing branches and the shining fruit that is red, red, red – in Hebrew, “adom, adom, adom” evoke the words of our Kedusha prayer: kadosh, kadosh, kadosh – holy, holy, holy. The pomegranate tree, stubbornly anchored to its root, bringing bright fruit out of the dark earth, speaks of the holiness of life.        

            Today is a day to speak of trees and flowers and fruit, for they are the very substance of our pilgrimage festivals – each one a feast of the harvest, a celebration of the earth’s abundance. Sukkot, at the autumn harvest, comes at the season of ripe grapes, apples, pears and pumpkins.  Pesach arrives at the time of the spring harvest, when new barley is on the stalk and fresh buds are on the trees. And today, on Shavuot, we gather when the fields of grain are golden and we stand on the cusp of summer.

            It is striking that our Yizkor services of remembrance and grief are planted in the midst of these pilgrimage festivals. Our Sages created an odd juxtaposition – asking us to rejoice in the fertility of the land while we cry for those we have lost. Or perhaps it is not so strange, for we learn from the land about the cycle of birth and flowering, darkness and death.

            Our text for Shavuot is the book of Ruth – a modest little book, just four chapters long; a book that circles quietly, meditatively, around the experience of death and the lessons of the harvest.

            The book begins in emptiness. The land is barren; Bethlehem , where our tale is set, Beit Lechem, the house of bread, is struck by famine. A Jewish family leaves for a better place, as migrants have always set out, hoping to leave poverty behind.

            But for Naomi and her husband, Elimelech, the journey to Moab only brings a greater impoverishment: Elimelech dies in this foreign land. The widowed Naomi, rousing herself from grief, helps arrange marriages for their two sons to Moabite women, but after a few years the sons, too, are dead, leaving no children behind them. The national calamity – a land without food – is mirrored in a family without seed.

            Naomi feels old and bitter and dried up. Those she loved most are gone. There will be no more sons in her womb; she has no more hope for the future. But the rest of the book of Ruth will quietly prove her wrong. Naomi will find, as countless widows have also found, that she can stand up and take charge of her life, because she has to.

            Though in her misery she pushes people away, she finds that some will not be pushed away. There is a young woman who is stubbornly, persistently determined to love her – a girl who sees in Naomi not a spent and withered old woman, but her future. Returning to Bethlehem with Ruth at her side, Naomi tells the townswomen who greet her, “Do not call me Naomi (sweetness); call me Mara (bitterness), for God has made my lot very bitter; I went away full and the Lord has brought me back empty.” 

            Naomi is no cardboard heroine; she is realistic in her self-absorption, so focused on her own wretchedness that she fails to notice she is neither empty nor alone, for Ruth is a loving, constant presence in her life. At this moment Naomi speaks her own truth; she is angry and depressed about what she has suffered. But the hollow ache she feels inside has already begun to ease, even as she pours forth her despair. For the first chapter ends on a gentle note of hope: “They arrived in Bethlehem at the beginning of the barley harvest.” The harvest has begun, and with it comes a promise: those who are impoverished and hungry will be fed; those who are empty will be filled.

            The story unfolds its magic in the three chapters that remain. There is a romance, a provocative night-time seduction scene on the threshing floor, a powerfully symbolic moment when Boaz (whose name means “strength within”) pours abundant seed into Ruth’s skirt; followed, in the course of time, by a happy marriage. But more exciting, more powerful and beautiful than the romance between Ruth and Boaz is the gradual restoration of Naomi. She is a woman rescued from loneliness, isolation and apathy; given back her sense of purpose in life, awakened to hope.

            Our story begins in darkness and death. By the end it is suffused with light: the golden light of the sun at harvest time, the shining gold of grain in the fields, the radiant light of loving kindness that Ruth and Boaz and Naomi lavish on one another. It is the light of trust and respect that glows in the eyes of people who care for one another; the light of life itself, for new life stubbornly forces its way into all of their hearts, as a baby as born at the climax of the tale -- a new child for Naomi to cradle and love.

            The book of Ruth, modest and succinct in its style, is a miracle tale nonetheless. It is the miracle of darkness and death redeemed by the light of love. It is the miracle we yearn for, those of us who cry for someone we can’t bear to be without. We long to be renewed, as the earth is renewed. As barren fields bear seed again and withered trees grow fresh green leaves, we dream of coming back to life, leaving pain behind, arriving at a different, peaceful season of our life when memory does not hurt. We hope that we, like Naomi, can be healed by love.

            We speak of grain and fruit and flowers on this day because of what they have to teach us: that life is never static, that all that blossoms one day withers and goes back to the earth, that even in the midst of death, new life is always stirring.

            We speak of those we’ve loved and lost today; we sit in peaceful silence to remember them; we honor them by cherishing the world they left behind: sweet tastes and soft breezes and sunlit days that now belong to us. Ahead of us are summer mornings to wake up to, each one pregnant with possibilities of friendship or love, moments of happiness and beauty. And right before our eyes is the picture of a pomegranate tree – its stubborn roots, its passionate red globes shining like dew, bursting with juicy seeds. Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh:  holy, holy, holy is the gift of this life that still is ours.