Rimonim

ט"ו חשון, תשס"ז

On Friday, I bought myself a shabbat treat: a rimon. I had seen them here every once in a while, in the fancier supermarkets, for what I consider to be astronomical prices, and moved along. I didn't even have one on Rosh Hashana. But I finally gave in this weekend. As with many things these days, how much I like the fruit intrinsically comes second to the associations I have with eating it.

Before last year, I thought eating a rimon wasn't worth the annoyance. Why would anyone want to bother with a fruit that had to be eaten one drop of juice at a time? Then I went to Israel and discovered that people don't spit out the seeds one by one...they eat them. Pomegranate kernels are tossed into salads, served alone in bowls as a complement to other desserts, and when a whole one is pulled open, some people will break off a piece of the spongy yellow padding, peel any skin away from the clinging red gems, and take a mouthful right from the source.

Having had this revelation, I resolved -- and quickly succeeded -- to get used to chewing and swallowing what I had previously regarded as inedible, and got right down to the business of enjoying rimonim. They're colorful, tart and sweet, and (to me, at least) they are the most exotic of that collection of produce known as the sheva minim -- the seven agricultural species specifically identified in the Torah text with the Land of Israel. (D'varim 8:8)

I have always found rimon trees to be exciting. I'm no botanist -- there are only a few plants I can identify by the shape of their leaves or the color of their stems or trunks. Fruit trees in general are exciting, therefore, because seeing one in season automatically informs me. But spotting a rimon hanging off a branch is a different grade of excitement altogether, because it tells me I'm in Israel. Yes, I know they are grown elsewhere. In fact, the one I ate yesterday had "USA" on its label -- but I've never seen a pomegranate tree anywhere else but Israel, and furthermore I'm willing to bet they grow here only in commercial groves, not along the street in people's yards.

So I find rimonim to be exciting. All through last fall and much of the winter, I enjoyed them, and then missed them when they disappeared from the shuk and our local produce stores. Not being acquainted with their seasonal schedule, by late spring I assumed, regretfully, that I'd see no more (of the Israeli kind, at least) until my next trip to eretz hakodesh. But at the end of June, maybe a week before my departure, I was privileged with this: