Trees, Grafting and Tu B'Shvat By Rabbi Anthony Manning

might be happy there and then to our extreme surprise the next year the tree next to the grapefruit tree suddenly came to life and produced two completely different kinds of fruit on one side there were grapefruits probably excited by its new neighbor the new grapefruit tree and on the other side there were tangerines and we were a little surprised at this we wonder if it was a Nace you know some miraculous sign uh the the the like the burning bush or something like that but we quickly realized that actually that's not the case that what we had in our garden that we did not know about was called a fruit salad tree and um I it is actually it's real name or a fruit bowl tree they sometimes call it and I want to talk a little bit about this today um there are a few shilas that come up with it it's very relevant to to to toat which is coming up to us on Thursday but it starts off with a topic uh with a with a s which is very relevant to war and a number of the key issues about this of War will impact on our fruit salad tree so let's have a look let's start with number [Music] one when you besiege a town for many many days and you're making War again you intend to capture it capture it do not cut cut down the trees and force an axe against them because you should be eating to you should be eating from that fruit tree you may not cut it down and the next phrase is an interesting phrase the Rashi understands it as a question we'll go with that for now because is is the tree a person people are at War the trees are not at War why are you taking out on the trees does the tree have to fight for you it's a fruit tree leave it eat from it appreciate it it's only trees where you know that they are definitely not a fruit tree that you can cut down and you'll you you you'll you'll destroy it you'll cut it down and you'll build your siege apparatus against the city that made war against you it's interesting there's a little subtlety there which is that you're not meant to be the ones making war against other people but when they make war against you then you have to respond it's actually a very subtle but important Point who was you'll capture that City you br at the end you'll capture the city but don't cut down the fruit trees now it's very interesting here for our purposes today that this introduc produces a very important difference between fruit bearing trees and non-fruit bearing trees they're identified separately in the pasuk now there is of course an entire discussion about bashit that you're not allowed to waste any resources that you don't need to waste and that's an entire sh which I'm not getting into today I know that everybody's grandmothers always say you can't leave the food on the plate it's about Tash you have to eat it you can't waste it that's just grandmothers want you to eat actually uh that's not really the if you feel it's going to uh you know harm you more by eating it then you don't have to eat it but there's a whole shilot about bashid when you can't cut down trees when you can't what you should do with food you what when Simas that have loads and loads of food left over do they have to try and give it to somebody or take it somewhere what if the cost of transporting it to needy families is actually more than the value of the food itself there there's an there's an enormous discussion to be had which we're not having at all today but we're focusing on the angle of as I say the fruit salad tree now because a tree which is a fruit salad tree has more than one fruit on it and in fact I brought you a little uh opening here from fruitsalad trees.com I didn't make that up it's there and number two a fruit salad tree is a tree that grows up to six different types of fruit all on the one tree they are multi-g grafted trees with different fruits from the same family we'll get back to that in a minute grafted together on the one tree all the fruits retain their own characteristic like Fray flavors appearance and ripening times although I must tell you the grapefruits on our fruit salad tree taste a little bit orangey and the oranges on our fruit salad tree taste a little bit grapefruity fruit salad trees can be grown in a pot or in the ground perfect for your balcony or backyard and are suitable for all climates okay I don't get any commission the you can you can go on a video I brought you at the bottom of how you can grow a tree with grapefruit lemon mandarin orange pomelo and limes all on the same tree the only downside is you need to go to New South Wales in Australia to pick it up I don't think that they deliver to Y sh I don't think so but you could check that on the website now I brought you well that's a good question now you're are you are you allow how alloud is this is Hala meaning these nice people in Australia are making these trees but what are the halakic issues so I brought you some halakic questions at the bottom uh would was it permitted to graft it we didn't graft it we got there and it it was there but whoever did this did they ask Aila were they told they were allowed to we'll get there in a minute can we eat the fruit that grows from it well the answer is yes but we'll see why can we make a on the fruit that's interesting if somebody did this somebody was not meant to do this can I now say oh can I make on that tree okay does it require different truma and meus I'm not going to get that into so much today uh into so much into that but we are going to look at this Source um uh properly uh so have a look over to page two the best place and this is a good opportunity to um bring this to your attention there is a fantastic website with lots and lots and lots of material in English as well as in Hebrew um from the M which actually there was one of the Rabon in there appropriately named Rabbi bloom um actually wrote uh for Terra tidbits maybe he still does I didn't notice it recently but he he still does so there's there's some very fascinating things that he writes in there um and you can find them online um their English domain name is I think a little bit misleading it's called torand do something.org doc.org now that's because it's a Tor but they just called it tand which sounds as it should be in Orlando or something like that um but it's not a an amusement par Mar it is a very very uh useful website and they write here number three the vast majority of fruit trees today are grafted most of them are grafted in a halachically permissible fashion I.E similar species Mino meaning there's lots you can do by grafting its own species with itself we'll see lots of grapes um and figs are grafted onto other grapes and figs and that's absolutely fine well others are not and they're different species and at times there is not a definite delineation of these categories sometimes it's an uncertain species a suff Mino what are we going to do there are various professional rationals involved in grafting nurser men want the treat to produce a specific fruit and select the S I think I'm pronouncing that correct accordingly the S is the bit that has the fruit on it it's the branch the stock also called The Root stock on the other hand is selected for its compatibility with soil conditions past repellent abilities quality and quantity of its yield season of its yield among other factors and actually this has been going on for thousands and thousands of years this is not a new technology there are all sorts of new technologies we'll talk about at the end genetic modification and all that stuff this is very new this is very old rather we've been doing this for thousands of years what you do is you select you want to grow fruit X but fruit X is very sensitive in this climate or to certain pests Etc so you graft it onto fruit y a stock a ro a sort of a small small uh tree stump of root of of of of Y and then you mix all the DNA and you get all the preservative protective qualities of the root stock but you manage to grow the Canan with the tree that you want so this is this has been going on um as long as people have been uh domesticating trees which is a very very long time and we'll see it's dealt with in the K itself have a look please with me in number four let's start off with some original sources so God says at the beginning we want there to be grass des and it has to be able to produce its own seeds Okay and eight pre oeino and Lino was introduced for the pre but not for the desha meaning God says Let There Be grasses and they just have to be able to propagate but let there be trees which produce their own fruit interesting why does it say that which the seed is in the fruit on the land the and what actually came out of the ground is without being asked to the grass as it were voluntarily said oh we'll stick to our own kind which we'll see in a minute how that works obviously I'm putting it in a in a simplistic way we'll see the H as we get out of it the eight and also there were fruit trees who which produced their seed according to their own species and God gives it a it'll carry on Etc the picks up on this use of Etc and on the of grafting in number five he says as follows there's in the fruit trees and us God made this world with an enormous amount of God gave us exactly what we need in the way that we need it in order to live in the world that we have and part of that was each species has to be um told that it produces its own species Braes just look at Braes there has to be there mustn't be a mixing of species because that will take away from them if they were meant to be I don't know apples grown on walnut trees then that would have happened at the beginning says the God didn't give a to all thesea trees that are all mixed together so we'll see is that is that is that binding is that a hashkafic point um it is Broad here on the Mitzvah of of not to graph trees but we'll see to what extent this becomes an actual halakic consideration we're really talking about the hashkafa and how far do you take this we talked about this a lot when we talked about you know Cutting Edge genetic modifications cultured meat the Israel just this last week we had a share on this recently right Israel was the first country in the world to give a uh a has as it were to permit from a health perspective meat which is grown from stem cells and we talked is it fesik is it kosha and how does it work etc do we do we say oh no no if God would have wanted cows to be grown from stem cells he would have made made them now you could argue well that's exactly what CS cows do they do grow from stem cells and and we're just kind of helping them along the way at what point do we say well this is too much you're playing God you're intervening overly in the Bria and at which point do you say we'll see a source in this in a minute no look God gave us a brain God gave us a technology God gave us the ability to work this out if we can work it out why can't we do it where are the boundaries that's actually a very interesting point which we'll examine and there's not a clear answer on this there are different voices in kazal some are pushing more don't play God there are boundaries and some are pushing more technology is not the forbidden fruit and we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute RF cook tries to steer us through it a little bit number six he says nature is amazing and we sometimes don't appreciate this I think the two things we miss in the modern world a lot not everybody and that we we we we really lose out from missing is Starry Skies which we so rarely see and they used to see every night if you think about it people used to walk out and look up and see thousands and thousands of stars and now if you're lucky you can see the moon okay um and also Sunrise how many people watch the sunrise we tend to get up these days after the sun comes up we see the sun going down every single day which is a bit depressing we never see it going up so I actually think that if we kind of re I don't know how you deal with the you have to go live in the middle of the neev or something or in Arizona miton okay go live in miton it's lovely there actually um I don't know what you do for work I mean it's good place to retire maybe but um I I think we're missing out nature is really beautiful but in the place that it's meant to [Music] be um manifacturing when that comes along and that takes the place of nature manufacturing can destroy nature even though God did create the world for us to improve it and this is a very fundamental idea everything in the world was made there's a famous and in the if it's famous we'll make it more famous now discussion between turnus Rufus and reaba one of the many discussions put into the mouths of these two representatives of the Greek Romans and the Jews and tonus Rufus says if God loves briser so much why wasn't the baby created already with a briser and reaba quite famously responds everything in the world needs just a a human touch to perfect it and he goes through this food needs a bit of salt and this food needs a bit of sugar and this food needs a bit of this so human being needs a little like snip and and it's exactly what it's meant to be so on on the other hand um women by the way don't need a breed meass say the gor because they already have whatever the B chieves they already have that from birth which is very interesting so you can think about what that means I wouldn't go so far um and not with your husband sitting next to you but we'll we'll think about that okay so you have to perfect things you have to be very careful you have to make sure that when you're doing things you're just you're only going to make it better that's your gift when you when you mess up when you destroy what Nature's doing and you and you and you undermine it if you like you're actually stopping nature from working as this is very bad for your because you're meant to be in a harmony with nature and you're actually undermining nature I noticed on the news this morning there was a very rare spotting of a whale yes off the coast of Kaa um a thin whale or something it's the second largest creature in the world somehow found its way to Kaa I don't know if that's a good Simon or a bad Simon the whales are we have the support of the whales you know we'll take anyone's support that we can get um I can only imagine it was just like it just took a wrong turn somewhere which if you think about it in the Mediterranean must be fairly irritating that you were somewhere in the Atlantic and now you end up in Kaa I mean you got to go all the way back to jalta to get out again but I suppose it'll work it out okay so when you destroy nature that's terrible alkan therefore the Torah introduces limits and it says and he brings the don't we'll see this posic don't graft your your trees or or or crossbreed your animals rather we'll see the posic in a minute and I don't know if he's there's an intentional pun or irony there this is to root ins side your own mind and heart not to destroy nature I'm not saying we're uh you know politically correct environmentalists but environmentalism in principle is an important thing we mustn't destroy the world where you draw that line is of course difficult and that's what we're going to see right now two conflicting voices in kazal look at this fascinating description number seven DET says the gamorra where do we draw that line because it's not clear reos God intended to create a couple of things on AR shabas again mically we're not really talking about what God intended to do we're talking about the nature of these things in the world if you remember there were certain Creations that just slipped in on area of shabas before shabas certain things didn't even make it to that the but they weren't created at M shabas until after shabas shabas what happened to m shabas God helps mankind realize how to do this andish had like a an Insight like a like a a dgma an understanding of what's going on above God didn't create this but God has helped us and we can so what did he do he took two stones and he banged them against each other and he created fire this of course is why we have a half dollar candle based on this idea we have a half dollar candle because on M shabas we are making a statement that the world was given to mankind to be creative we are not just meant to say well if God had wanted fire to exist he would have created fires in our backyards we have to do that which by the way Rabbi saak Z often used to talk about the contrast between this midash and the Greek myth of Prometheus in the the Greek myth of Prometheus Prometheus steals fire from the gods he has to steal it from Heaven which sets up this this uh contrast and conflict between science and religion he talks about this I think in the great partnership for the Jewish people there is no myth of Prometheus God enables us to create fire there is no conflict between science and Torah Torah is from God our brains are from God and therefore they shouldn't uh they shouldn't conflict with each other so that's the first thing he created and he brings two animals the and he brings puts them together a horse and a donkey we'll see and he creates a mule now according to this is there anything wrong with that doesn't sound like it sounds like this is this is the in file this are these ideas that God gave to mankind to create fire to cross animals it sounds like a very positive thing on the other hand we have an unusual number eight look at the number eight the this is at the end of where it's going through all of the kings of Edom there's a little posk in there just hiding away the following are the sons of these were andash talks about why there's a there rather who and this is the very same guy this anaid he discovered the Yim in the midbar when he was when he was uh pasturing I don't know what you do with donkeys hering the donkeys of his father ton and Rashi points out that c is the father of Anna and also the brother of Anna which sets up a whole incestuous sort of goings on with the family which is not for now but what are these y what's going on why does it say in the middle of saer braches that these two people Anna and uh and Aya are the ones who discovered the Yim you could blink and you'll miss this PK and it's just you know you lost concentration for a second and you missed it look at number nine Yami picks this up the same two things that we mentioned in seven fire and cross breathing they weren't created during the six days of creation but there was a thought to create them so how did come about he quotes this what are these it's a mule a suit a horse and a donkey what did these people do they took a female donkey and they M it with a male horse and they brought and they produced a mule what did God say to this now before we saw this was part of uh you know God gave the ideas here no so God says to them you you've messed with nature you've produced a monster you've produced this mule which was never meant to be you're doing that I'm going to bring against you thing which is also dangerous what did God do he brought some kind of female snake the and he brought a male toad to mate with the snake I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right and a poisonous lizard came out as the result of that very interesting Yi so that doesn't seem to be a very positive spin on the the idea of grafting and creating new things how do you reconcile the two why is it okay the the story of Adam and the fire but it's apparently not okay with the story of Anan an and and uh and his brother of a and a I brought you on page three some ideas as to why you might be able to put them together it could be it could be that it was all about intentions meaning the idea of Anna and Aya being produced by this very inappropriate incestuous relationship means that they are they themselves are the product of a bad mixture and their intentions are not good their intentions are not to to B to uh to to improve mankind but they're there kind of cross those boundaries they are people who cross boundaries therefore maybe your intention is um is all important what your intentions are when you're uh trying to work out what these boundaries are maybe that's what it's talking about I brought you RAV desla in the footnotes it's quite famous tuval Ken back in braus it says he was famous for making metal and and that's usually seen negatively in terms of Weaponry why is he associated with rep so raesa says it wasn't that he did the wrong thing cuz you need sharp metal equipment in the world is that he didn't Safeguard the technology he he didn't take care that it spread and he was making I don't know farm machinery but then all of a sudden somebody found out the system and they were making uh weapons and and Spears Etc so there's there's there a lot of very relevant ideas going on for the world that we live in today technology safeguarding technology Etc however we now need to go into the world of because my fruit salad tree is not going to respond to a midrash it needs and actually I must tell you since I first looked into this 5 years ago I I've slightly changed my mind on this and I might need to ask a Shila about my fruit salad tree which we'll see in a minute so let's start from the very beginning in in terms of the I'm look at number 10 so there is a Prohibition in the Torah against Kim what is Kim number 10 guard my laws don't crossbreed your animals to make do not um sew your field with and here's the famous one and do not um create do not wear do not put on you which is actually interesting it doesn't say where it doesn't put put on you which maybe maybe even applies to sheets and and things like that do not put on you any mixture of um a beged Kim shatas which we know later in the Kash to be wool and linen um this is becoming actually more of a problem not less of a problem because um linen used to be very expensive and they used to use a lot of artificial fibers instead and there's been a bit of a return to natural fibers which means that there's uh linen coming more into our clothing most clothing doesn't have Linen in it you know a shirt this shirt doesn't have any Linen in it um it's cotton it doesn't have any wool or any linen many clothes are just not a problem at all but there is an issue I had a the buttons came off my wool um Overcoat or some of the buttons did and uh somebody uh in my family offered to sew them on and they said oh I have a special thread for buttons which is extra strong and it's made from linen and I said okay let's give that one a Miss it's not getting into the Shila is that really a problem is is it mixed together this is not a sheer about shad we would we truth is if we have a Shear about shatas we really need to do a road trip to a Shatner laboratory and actually see the because you know there's a lot that goes on there but these are Kim number 11 R Kim K or k means to hold back to restrain hence Keller the prison RAV her's this is this is rav's genius he looks for word connections and says what is the connection between a Kella prison and K whenever I raised these kind of D at my shabas table my son who is actually knows atmology and grammar much better than me and is bital academic more than me he tells me how oh that doesn't work because he comes from here and this one comes from here and that one comes from that I said don't spoil myoro you know it's ravers is says it works let ravers talk about it transferred to organic creatures Kella designates creatures who in accordance with God's laws of lumu which we saw hold back they hold back their powers of reproduction from every creature that is not their species and they don't mate with them now K means creatures who are so different to each other that nature makes them hold back from each other but as nevertheless the but nevertheless the Dual suffix IIM doesn't indicate just two but always two that belong together a pair y That's not just you have two arms you have two arms that match each other so r y are not two feet and two hands but a pair of feet or hands belonging to together so we believe that Kim also means going together so that you've got you've got this two this this conflicting inner meaning on the one hand K means something that's like kept separate and Kim means you've paired them you've made them together and he says that's exactly it so the word Kim itself already contains the complete idea of an unnatural pairing you've taken a k which is daa meant to be separate and you've made it into a Kim which is a pair of them they they are Kim close to one another by nature and man has made them into Kim has brought them together in spite of their naturally not belonging together interesting idea there are six types of I listed them on the middle of Page Three wearing shatas which we talked about crossbreeding two animal species we'll talk about what is a species using two animal species to haul or work together which we don't tend to come across these days but if you like uh I don't know Carriage uh you know racing or whatever make sure you just have horses or not mix the different animals together grafting different tree species and a subcategory of this prohibition is planting one species on top of or inside another species five planting crop species in a Vineyard by the way one to four applying kits you're not allowed to crossbreed animals in Kats you're not allowed to graft trees in kits so they apply across the world five applies more in Israel there's a Torah prohibition whereas Inon which is planting crop species in a Vineyard this applies to any nonwoody edible plants such as vegetables beans grain poppy seed Etc this is more common than you might think we have a a grape vine in our back Garden which also barash came to life you see you have to you have to talk to your trees and uh look King Charles talks to trees how about how how bad can it be I'm not following that line of conversation I talk to the trees but they don't listen to me so my trees do listen to me they don't they just don't answer back it's when the trees answer back you know you have to seek he help okay um but um the the we have a grape vine in the back Garden which bashem produces now enormous amounts of beautiful grapes which we make into grape juice which we freeze schm it had a bonanza it prod produced about four times the normal amount we were giving them to all of the neighbors it was really remarkable it's very tempting we have like a a bed underneath it we could plant some strawberries there you know it' be very nice AA you prohibit the strawberries you prohibit The Grapes you just made a big balagan you can plant daffodils you can plant flowers you can plant you can plant another tree you can have a lemon tree right next to the grape tree or an orange tree right next but you can't plant clay Karen which are non-woody edible plants beans vegetables Etc um underneath the grape vine and also number six planting two crop species together or near one another that only applies in Isel this is Clay Z if you're going to plant edible plants on the ground together you have to make sure they're separated and there's an entire m anyone who's ever gone through mishas and if you go to a a shiver house and people are signing up for learning mishas Kim is is always available you know it's always there for you because nobody nobody wants to get into the nanot technology in the mishas of exactly which are the Kilim you need a picture book honestly and there are very good picture books and uh that does does the trick okay so there are the six types of Kim Let's have a look specifically at the issue of the trees number 12 you can't crossbreed your animals you can't um crossbreed your your plants just like the prohibition on animals is cross mating them cross breeding them meaning the posic doesn't explicitly refer to grafting it doesn't explicitly say that but the gor learns that that is a terror prohibition just like the animals that go together so to you can't mate the trees together by the way you can cross pollinate that's fine if you put a couple of trees near each other and the bees just you know transfer pollen nothing wrong with that at all and in fact you can get honey which has flavors of like orange blossom and there's nothing wrong with that let the bees do that they don't they don't have a problem with that but if you're going to take a a a sign and put it into a stock that you can't do just like the prohibition on animal um uh breeding cross breeding applies across the world so too the prohibition on breeding uh on grafting trees applies all over the world and the rambam pass cons this way number 13 let's look at a little number 13 crossbreeding trees that's included in the prohibition of how does this work if you graft a tree into a tree you take a an apple Branch rug and you put it in an srug by the way the word tap by the time of the ramban probably means an apple like we have an apple but at the time ofal it doesn't mean an apple the word tapak just like the word Apple in English often was used for lots of different generic kind of fruits uh hence uh you know French Pomer Earth apples or they're not apples so the word but he he means an apple or or you graft an estrog into an apple that's toah prohibition you get so too if you graft a vegetable into a tree or or a tree into a vegetable it's a teror Prohibition by the way non-fruit trees are considered in as all one species all non-fruit trees so you can't graft a fruit tree with a non-fruit tree but you can graft any non-fruit tree with any other non-fruit tree because they're all considered the same species it's an important Point bringing out there and the r says number 14 the and here's my fruit salad problem and if you you're not allowed to graft it but if somebody else grafted it and you find in your garden you have to pull it out the in but if you kept it a like it it's not a Torah prohibition but it's a rabbinic Prohibition you can't have this stuff in your garden somebody made it in a prohibited way you got to get rid of it are you going to say isn't there it's her prohibition to pull trees out not in this case Bashas doesn't apply when you're doing it for a constructive halakic reason here I have a haki problem with this tree in my garden I have to pull it out so far it's not looking great for my fruit Sal tree I didn't graft it but someone else did and it's in my garden number 15 says you're not allowed to keep in your garden anything which is made from and here's the interesting point the fruit that comes from the tree m is permitted to anybody even if you're the one that grafted it you're the one that went against the Torah and grafted the tree you should have done that you can't keep it but if if if it got kept by someone else or whatever it is you can always eat the fruit this is why we don't have a major cashous nightmare every time we go fruit shopping init if this if this Hal wasn't the case we would have a real problem because if the fruit of a grafted fruit tree was indeed prohibited there's almost nothing we could eat almost all fruit is the product of grafted trees today apples are only crunchy because they've got got nut DNA in them normal apples you ever eaten the kind of very mushy Apple no one wants to eat mushy apples you can cook with them but but but you need nuts in your apples so thank God we don't have to ask these questions when we go to uh you know Trader Joe's or whatever we go or Tesco uh whatever your particular place is um in Israel of course shopping for fruit is a major cancerous issue but not because of this it's because of tras and meas I'm sure they do yeah yeah yeah absolutely lots of fruit is imported but we can eat the fruit the problem is Thea brings up already in the 1800s Jews were beginning to buy up fruit orchards all over Europe je beginning to get into finance a bit more and one of the things that they were doing is they invested you are good investors they invested in fruit orchards and sofa is brought here I'm not going to read in inside in 16 he's brought by the by the P CH the says I I don't understand all these from balaba in my community many of them have own Orchards which have grafted trees how do they allow that it's prohibited you have to uproot them even in I don't understand it and here you have an interesting methodological issue where the FR Community does something which is apparently AA but good strong FR people do it and clearly they don't have an issue with it the the poin will almost always find a way to show that it can't really be AA you can't have something which the entire religious community doesn't have a problem with which is then you turn around and tell them you're all doing Aus I there are some rabbis that do that uh like almost for a living and find find find new problems that everybody thought he was fine and now it's not fine but that's not the way of certain it's not the way here of the says well it could be maybe there's a het to keep them in maybe it's only the rambam that says that also the the r maybe we don't pass which is very interesting because we don't always pass like the the is 95% of the time becomes the bottom line halachically but not always there are areas there's a there's a there's a cha of rosna he says I don't understand the basak of school system so I don't get it they're teaching their girls KES and it says in the you shouldn't teach women forget about gor they're not teaching them they're teaching them and they're teaching them and they're learning ran and and they're learning say I don't understand it it's it's a has a a CH that the whole bov school system is is radically non-observant you you have to come here to hear that right you never thought that before and of course we don't ping like that the said that the B bov system was fine and you you can't turn around and say that the whole baso system has forgotten about the clearly there's a there po that say that we don't like that by the way the many of them they don't teach the girls they just teach them like Bala and stories Etc and therefore you see in this case as well the I brought you in 16 and 17 the is the is the uh almost always wherever he can find a reason to justify a Min that he says it must be that they're relying on something and they can keep the Trees of course they're talking about is always going to be that much more difficult so let's let's let's keep going and see if we can save my tree okay look at number page five here's a turn up for the books is grafting trees one of the CH mitz no no that was a very quick answer and it was the correct answer except there may be more than Chev in the Chev Mitzvah okay it's like the Ten Commandments there are there definitely more than 10 Mitzvah in the Ten Commandments which is why the Torah doesn't ever call them The Ten Commandments it calls on the ETC so the Sim the CH mitz is not so clearly seven look at number 18 T says seven mitzvas are applied to non-jews what are they they have to have a c system page five Source 18 because hasem they're not allowed to curse God aara idolatry Gil certain sexual prohibitions they're not allowed to murder the they're not allowed to steal or eat limb from a living animal which by the way was very standard practice if you're in a country without very much money and you have a cow and you can only eat so much meat so it was pretty standard they would just chop the leg off the cow because why would they waste the whole cow they don't have enough people to eat all the meat of the cow it'll go off they couldn't freeze it they couldn't always cure it so they just chop eat like a leg off at a time until eventually like the cow they had no choice the ter says you can't do that obviously non-jews are also not allowed he adds another one to castrate animals which is also a very relevant question if you buy a dog and you want the dog to be neutered um how do you go about that it's not enough just to go to a non-jewish vet maybe it's not okay adds another one you're not allowed to be a wizard or a witch um my wife used to work with a witch a White Witch uh who claimed to be a Wiccan witch um the awkward part was she was the head of of HR in The Firm which you didn't want to get on her bad side because it would be awkward so it it was it was a constant source of interesting conversations I'm not sure she was a m in the halic sense and as a personality she was delightful but um she may well uh have crossed that line and here's what's important for us they're not allowed to to do they are allowed to wear shatas they're allowed to sew the seeds but the two things they're not allowed to do are crossbreed the animals which you see from that whole discussion with Anna and a right they weren't Jewish so clearly was an issue it's obviously following this opinion and also putting the stock into the tree why why the difference so the gr brings in 19 because the command to the trees was always Le God commanded if you remember right the beginning of the year God included that civo you must produce according to your species whereas the grasses he didn't command it it just happened that way so you see says the gr from here that um non-jews are included Adam and the original creation as part of that and in fact the r Pas is that way number 20 according to to the received cabala here doesn't mean mysticism it means according to the tradition or law a non-jew is not allowed to crossbreed an animal and they're not allowed to graft trees which actually broadens this Shila C can I go to a non-jewish nursery I mean in terms of tree nursery and and and buy trees from them when they weren't allowed to do that as non-jews can you ask a non-jew to do that or is that Li the Jew has a Prohibition of Li I'm not allow to encourage non-jews or Jews to do something that they are not allowed to do so I can give a non-jew non- kosher food because they don't have to keep kosher but I can't give them two trees to graft because maybe they're not allowed to graft trees so this uh opens up some interesting issues Rabbi Yow kaganov I brought you a reference at the bottom to an article he has there he's quite mmir um and he even says there's a problem for non-jews to ask non-jews which is you can read his article as to how that works um which becomes uh more of a more of a Shila when you're looking at it okay fine so now the The $64,000 Question what is the same Min I have a tree in my back Garden which has grapefruits and and uh clementinas you call them clementinas clementinas yeah whatever on the on the tree so is that a problem so look at what the uh T's website says here Source 21 not all trees are grafted generally thick trees pomegranate trees and date palms are not grafted while it is true that most trees are are grafted among those that are mostly grafted with the same species and this is permitted examples of trees that are gred grafted in a permissible way include grap Vines olive trees carab trees and mango trees an example of a tree that is almost certainly grafted in a prohibited fashion is the pear tree 90% of pear trees in Israel today are grafted onto Quint root stocks Quint is a kind of apple there are fruit some fruit trees that are sometimes grafted onto forbidden root strocks such as plums peaches nectarines a apricots citrus fruit is grafted onto the same species or onto root stocks that are sopic Mino and here we come to an interesting question because no one in the time of kazal had ever seen a citrus tree citrus trees are from China East Asia and australasia I'm not sure exactly when they came into the the Jewish orbit but you can see from the name that we gave the orange that it was not something we'd ever really come across before even the English word orange is a funny name to give a fruit I assume that the color came first and the tree came second I'm not 100% sure about that which is that they've never seen this before they called it orange what is an orange in Hebrew tapuz is a compound word it's got a chup chi in it it's a there is no natural Hebrew word for an orange it's a golden apple is a citrus fruit ah you've asked a very good question if if Rus C fruit and they only came later How could an ESR be a Mitzvah in the Torah that's a good question I don't know I have to think about that I mean I I can't guess maybe you could say that they had some rras trees but they didn't have the others yeah yeah exact some people say we're Citrus interesting but is just from the word which means something that that blows up it could really mean like almost anything okay so you want to say that they did have citrus trees which would solve your eral question as well and but we still don't see them delineated in the mission yes really okay so maybe I'm just wrong on this Citrus thing from East Asia that's what I read maybe they maybe it's broader than that beauty very very yeah but there also don't forget that is a midash and therefore the midash is speaking the language of the midash and the the people who wrote the midash may have known about pomelo that doesn't mean that they were in ancient Egypt they M maybe some midashim earlier some midashim later the midashim always kind of put their own cultural references into the uh someone said it's a little bit like fer on the roof lail that if you ever read the original story of fer on the roof it's nothing like the movie Fiddler on the Roof the movie Fiddler On The Roof is all about 1950s America it's nothing to do with 1890s bisto um but anyway that's a different thing so what do the same mean so look let's quickly look we got five or six minutes let's look at number 22v the missionary list certain things wolves and dogs and dogs the um the wild dogs and uh and foxes goats and deers gazel and Lambs the the horse and the mule the mule and the donkey even though they're quite related CU mules come from donkeys nevertheless and the donkey and a wild donkey they look like the same family you can't always go by what it looks like and the ramban pask this that there were many fruits that look similar that you think oh they must be related to each other whereas in fact they're not related to each other they are different minim what do we do with a citrus so I brought you a here R kki Rim keski wrote a big set of which is basically like the mishna bre but on those areas of which agricultural he he wrote a very detailed commentary and he brings down here number 24 the Leon the theit the Tapo yes there is a big question about them are they one men or are they not one men meaning apples and plums are two menim absolutely clear and the missioner lists different things but oranges and lemons I'm not going to start with the bells of St Clemens but oranges and lemons are they the same men or are they not the same men big suff and therefore what comes out with my fruit salad tree my citrus fruit salad tree um is that uh it's a soft as to whether you were allowed to graft it which means that the person who grafted it probably didn't ask a Shila I don't know who did it or they ask a nonu to do it maybe which may be okay I have a question can I keep it so it sounds like I can keep it it's a sop because the Mitzvah of keeping the trees a draon on soponon Lula so I don't know if I have to rip it out so I shouldn't rip it out and also there's a Prohibition against ripping out ter tree fruit trees if you're not meant to rip them out the problem is that the the say that's fine if you can't tell but if you've Mish got like grapefruits on this side and oranges on this side is there anything more Kim than that okay so I've kind of got to go back to sc one a little bit and see what to do what about actually making a bro on them I brought you a Chua of raos Feinstein and he says you know something better not to make a Shu on a grafted tree that was grafted incorrectly find another fruit make a broer on that don't make beer on that either um you're better off making something else and then I brought you all sorts of scary modern day GM nightmares that we're living through Arctic fish jeans which are put into tomatoes to make them um more uh resistant to frost corn with jellyfish jeans and again none of these are technically K they're just GM we have to work out where to draw the line tobacco with lettuce jeans popular trees with genes that break down pollutants bananas with hepatitis genes which inoculate people who eat the bananis against hepatitis interesting huh cabbage with scorpion genes that produce just enough Venom to keep off the caterpillars but won't do you any harm I I don't I can't vouch for that you know rice with human genes which produce bacteria FY and compounds found in breast milk and saliva Etc so again none of these are technically C they're GM modifications but we have to think about we said at the beginning whether we're with Crossing Lines of uh of different kinds if not halachically then hash graphically and at the end I gave you a little bit of a feel on page seven for the the website the tarit website it's a wonderfully detailed website you could go down the rabbit hole on grafted trees in English and Hebrew and and really have a good time they talk about which are fruits and which are vegetables and whether you can put one with the other whether it's a doubt whether you can I'll leave you to read this and to go into the sherim on your own so bottom line can I keep my fruit s Tre I'm not sure I'm not sure I was sure when I first gave this sh that I could keep it but now I'm not sure um the fruit for sure is kosher the fruit is kosher the fruit is for sure kosher the question is do I need to chop off one side of the tree so it'll only grow one of the minum I'm going to have to work out who to ask I think if I ask these ter Aris people they're going to tell me to chop it off so I have to try and ask somebody that I don't know what they're going to say that's always the the art of Shila asking you know asking someone and you don't know what they're going to say so maybe I will ask Ron who is our and also his name may be a siga that we we will we'll get a a fruitful pack uh so let let's leave it there next week be we get back into the issues of the war um and we will take that further and two weeks from now beem I'm not here