A min, a sectarian or heretic, came to Rabbi Kahana with a pointed question. Jewish law permits a husband and wife to lie in the same bed even when she is niddah, in her menstrual impurity, as long as they do not touch. Is this not reckless? Is fire not certain to catch dry stubble?
Rabbi Kahana answered, No. Among Israelites there is no such fear. The Jewish people have enough discipline, enough reverence, enough yirat shamayim, fear of heaven, that a husband and wife can share the same bed in restraint. The fire does not catch.
Resh Lakish overheard and agreed. He phrased it memorably. Every Jew is full of pious deeds like a pomegranate is full of seeds. Meaning: even the most ordinary-looking Jew, even the one you assume is empty of Torah, carries within him hundreds of small acts of faithfulness, restraints, kindnesses, observances. Split him open like a pomegranate and the seeds spill out everywhere.
Rabbi Zeira held the same view. The sectarian's suspicion, that Jewish self-control was a fiction, was rejected by three of the leading sages of the third and fourth centuries CE. The rabbinic position was confident, maybe even too confident, in the moral capacity of the ordinary Jew.
The pomegranate image stuck. It became a standard Jewish metaphor for hidden piety. The fruit looks plain on the outside, but inside it holds, by tradition, six hundred and thirteen seeds, the exact number of the mitzvot of the Torah. This exchange from Chagigah 27a, preserved in The Exempla of the Rabbis (Gaster, 1924), teaches that the seeds of holiness are there in every Jew, even the ones you would not expect.