Talmudic Botany

The centerpiece of what I'm doing this year continues to be reading Talmud, the giant collection of ideas and instructions about how to live one's life more specifically described here as being a collection of discussions about

agriculture, astrology, biology, business, carpentry, chemistry, child-raising, cooking, cosmology, economics, engineering, finance, genetics, geology, happiness, history, kabbalah, law, linguistics, literature, marriage, mathematics, medicine, military science, music, philosophy, physics, planetology, psychology, social science, synergetics, theology, transportation and zoology.

My learning for the past month or so has been particularly focused on biology and agriculture. Most recently, we've been dealing with the question of what defines a tree, a question of some consequence in Judaism because we have a somewhat unique relationship with trees (and especially fruit-bearing trees) -- we give them special protections (both in wartime and in general), say special blessings of thanksgiving before eating their fruit and upon seeing them bloom, have a whole holiday dedicated to them, and see them as symbolic of a range of concerns. A tree is generally defined in Jewish tradition as a plant which lasts from year to year, but there are some plants whose status as a tree is slightly ambiguous; the one plant of uncertain status that my Talmud class has been particularly focused on is the caper-bush. One of the features of being in Israel today and studying texts about caper-bushes written in the land of Israel in the third century C.E. is that Israel is as full of caper-bushes today as it was then. In order to learn more about them, all my Talmud class had to do was to step outside the front doors of the Schechter building. I've enjoyed following the development of one of the caper-bushes right outside of Schechter: last week, as you can see in the first picture below, the caper buds that are a bit further developed beyond the way that we're accustomed to seeing them in jars in the supermarket; today, as shown in the second picture, the buds are opening up into flowers.