One of the more fun aspects of Rosh Hashanah is eating the special foods, “significant omens” as it is translated in one of my books.
There is an almost universal custom amongst Jews to dip a piece of apple in honey and ask God to grant us a “sweet New Year.” Although the apple has had good PR over the years, it is by no means the only significant omen. In fact, my machzor (Rosh Hashanah prayer book) lists a total of nine foods to be eaten as omens.
One of these special foods is the pomegranate. Before we eat the seeds of a pomegranate we will say “May it be Your will ... that our merits increase as the seeds of a pomegranate.”
The pomegranate is mentioned five times in the Torah, the most famous being its last appearance:
Devarim Chapter 8
7 For the Lord your God is bringing you to a good land, a land with brooks of water, fountains and depths, that emerge in valleys and mountains,
8 a land of wheat and barley, vines and figs and pomegranates, a land of oil producing olives and honey,
9 a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, you will lack nothing in it, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose mountains you will hew copper.
We see the pomegranate mentioned in verse 8 along with six other foods. This group is known collectively as the “seven species that the land of Israel is blessed with.” Since none of the other of the “seven species” made the cut to be significant omens, we have to look else where for a source that the seeds of the pomegranate are related to our merits.
In the Gemara massechet Berachot (57a) we find the following:
If one sees pomegranates in a dream,
if they are little ones, his business will be fruitful like a pomegranate;
if big ones, his business will increase like a pomegranate.
If they are split open:
if he is a scholar, he may hope to learn more Torah , as it says: I would cause you to drink of spiced wine, of the juice of my pomegranate;
if he is unlearned, he may hope to perform precepts, as it says: Your temples are like a pomegranate split open. What is meant by “Your temples” [rakothek]? Even the illiterate [rekanim] among you are full of precepts like a pomegranate.
Some have wanted to make a natural connection: Even the most unlearned Jew is full of precepts (commandments), there are 613 commandments, therefore there must be 613 seeds in a pomegranate.
So, how many seeds are in a pomegranate? It just so happens, one intrepid soul has done some research. His name is Alexander Haubold and his website Aqua Phoenix contains the following comments about pomegranates:
What has nature blessed us with - the pomegranate is a very unstructured structured fruit. It contains multiple compartments, each tightly packing seeds around a sponge-like center, in some more or less random formation.
Sources are in disagreement about how many seeds a pomegranate holds. Some sources fix the number to exactly 613, some allow for an error of +/- 200, yet others believe that all pomegranates have the exact same number of seeds. It is certainly possible to disprove the first and third of these.
Our intrepid researcher dissected a number of pomegranates and counted the seeds. He reports his results in a table (only part of which I've included here):
Country Sample Size avg #seeds
US 150 680
Singapore 2 459
Iran 37 338
Spain 2 709
Turkey 12 576
Brazil 3 809
All 206 613
(I have had no success in producing an actual table with the numbers in neat columns. Therefore, I've provided a very minimal data set. The full results and many other calculations are on Dr. Haubold's website.)
So there you have it, according Dr. Haubold, he found an average of 613 seeds in his sample of 206 fruits. Are his results accurate? I don't know, and I certainly don't have the patience to duplicate his research!
Shanah tova. May we all have a sweet and healthy new year. May all of our merits increase like the seeds of a pomegranate, no matter how many that may be!
