Thirty Fruits Against Adam's Bite and One Bad Swallow

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The Table Set Against the First Bite

Wind came under the door and pushed the lamp flames sideways. Thirty fruits lay on the table in three ranks of ten. Nearest the window, the ones a mouth swallows whole, grape and fig and pomegranate. Behind them the ones that hide a stone, olive and date and cherry. Farthest, in a bowl, walnut and almond and pistachio, shut inside shells nobody eats.

The teacher pressed both palms flat on the wood. "One bite emptied the orchard," he said. "Thirty will start the argument the other way."

The youngest man there had walked four hours through winter mud, and his stomach was loud. He stopped at a fruit he could not name. Brown. Wrinkled. Soft at the crown, the size of a plum that had given up.

"Uzerad," the teacher said without turning his head. "Medlar. It has to rot a little before it turns sweet. Do not skip it."

What Adam Left in Every Orchard

They poured the first cup and the teacher lifted a fig so the lamp shone through its skin.

"Adam ate in a hurry and said nothing over it," he said. "The sweetness went into him. The spark stayed behind in the fruit. Every orchard on this earth has been carrying what he dropped."

An angel had been set over every growing thing, he told them, and behind each angel a rung of the sefirot (divine emanations), so no fig ripened without something above it leaning down to watch. A blessing said with the mind on the right Name went into the fruit like a blade into a crack. The spark came loose. It climbed.

"And a blessing mumbled at the ceiling?" the man beside him asked.

"Then you have eaten fruit," the teacher said. "The angel over it stands there with empty hands and waits out another winter."

The Medlar He Swallowed Without Thinking

They began at the near rank and went slowly. Grape, and the room answered amen into the steam off the cups. Fig. Pomegranate, broken so the seeds spilled red across the board.

The youngest was starving by the time the bowl reached the medlar. He took it in the middle of somebody else's sentence, bit down, tasted the sweetness of a fruit that ripens by rotting, and swallowed. Two brown stones ended up in his palm. His mouth was still working when he understood what he had done.

The teacher stopped talking. Nobody reached for the wine.

"Say it over the next medlar," the teacher said.

"There is one medlar."

The teacher looked at the gap in the rank. "There is one," he agreed, and said nothing more about it.

He put the stones in his coat and kept his fist closed around them the rest of the night. Above the roof a thin thing stood with nothing to carry up.

The Quince, the Hackberry, and the Name of Seventy-Two

The teacher recited the medlar's order anyway, the way a man reads a will after the money is spent. Before that fruit a mouth holds the second teaching of the sixth chapter of Berakhot and the first of Demai, the tractate for doubtfully tithed produce, and fastens on the letters HYVH.

Then he took a quince, too hard to eat raw, cooked in honey that afternoon. For the quince, the third teaching of that chapter, the third of Ma'aserot, and the letters AHVH.

Hackberries came next, small and gritty. The teacher held one between two fingers.

"Seventy-two," he said. "The Name that came out of the sea when the pillar moved behind Israel and the water stood up on both sides. Hold that over this berry."

The young man held it. The berry was the size of nothing.

Jujubes after that, dry as old dates, with the sixth teaching and the letters YAHDVNHY. Twelve fruits. Nineteen. Twenty-four. The wine had gone from white to rose. Outside, a dog gave up barking.

The Walnut Cracked Open at the Thirtieth Blessing

Last came the shells. The teacher set a walnut on its seam and struck it once with the flat of a knife handle.

It fell open in four parts.

"I went down to my walnut garden," he said. "That garden went out from Eden, and it is the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence), the Presence at the bottom of the rungs, in Malkhut. The nut inside it is the chariot Ezekiel saw, standing under her, wheeled and eyed and burning. Four rivers went out of Eden. Count the quarters."

They counted. The room smelled of honey and cracked shell and wet wool.

"The shell is bitter and nobody eats it," the teacher said. "It is still holding the fruit."

The thirtieth fruit went to the young man. The teacher pressed a walnut into his hand, closed the fingers over it, and would not let go until the blessing had been said whole and slow with the mind on the Name. His voice came out wrong at the start. He said it again, and the second time it held.

Nobody clapped. The teacher reached for the almonds.

The Stones He Buried in Frozen Ground

Before dawn he walked out to the orchard, where the almonds were pushing white against black branches on the fifteenth of Shevat, the day the sap turns and the year of the trees starts over.

He dug with the knife handle because the ground was too hard for fingers, put both stones in, pushed the dirt back, and held the letters HYVH in his mind the whole time, which is not a blessing over eating, and he knew it. The spark he had swallowed without a word was still down there, waiting on a tree that would take years and a mouth that would not be his.

He wiped his thumb on his coat. The stain stayed brown. Behind him the lamps burned over thirty empty places on a table, and above the orchard a thin thing that had waited since Adam settled in to wait longer.