Neot Kedumim brings Rabban Gamliel and his students to the Israel museum in Jerusalem

by Nogah Hareuveni, Founder of Neot Kedumim
Translated by Helen Frenkley

White Squill (Hatzav in Hebrew) one of the paintings featured in the exhibit at Israel Museum

My parents, Dr. Ephraim and Hannah Hareuveni, came to Eretz Yisrael (then Palestine) in 1906. From the beginning of their work as educators in Israel, they concluded that many subjects in Jewish sources could not be properly understood without thorough familiarization with the nature of Israel. With this as their underlying posit, they created a large body of research on the nature and landscapes of Israel rooted in the Jewish sources throughout the generations, supported by a painstakingly gathered plant collection.

As their research and collection grew, they exhibited some of the plants in their home in the Bukharan Quarter of Jerusalem where the collection was called the "Museum of the Plants of Bible and Talmudic Literature." When the Hebrew University opened in 1925, they donated their collection to the new university where they continued to expand their research and plant collection.

They also prepared a detailed plan for the "Garden of the Prophets and Sages" which they dreamed of establishing somewhere in the Jerusalem area. More than a decade after their deaths, their dream began to be realized with the establishment of Neot Kedumim – The Biblical Landscape Reserve in the region of Modi'in, midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Concomitantly with their research and work in the museum, Ephraim and Hannah Hareuveni worked on a major project to publish a lavish folio encyclopedia entitled Botanical Treasury of the Land of Israel. To this end they joined forces with the painter Shmuel Haruvi, who was noted for his paintings of landscapes and plants. They formed a truly unique partnership: In order to achieve the highest level of accuracy in rendering the plants and their individual parts, my parents worked with Haruvi on the smallest details of each plant to be included in the album. My mother went so far as to mix the watercolors for him to assure the exact shades as they appeared in nature and not in the mind's eye of the painter.

This unusual collaboration resulted in a series of drawings the likes of which Haruvi had never created before nor would he again after he ceased to work with my parents. The plants he drew for this album look vibrantly alive, down to the smallest sepal and pollen grain, some of which he drew on an enlarged scale working through a magnifying glass. To this day, I can see Haruvi – my best friend then, at age two – peering through a magnifying lens at tiny plant parts, holding in his hand a paint brush that barely touched the surface of the paper. I watched as slowly and magically the flower parts appeared to flow from his paintbrush on the white paper, the very same ones that were lying beneath the magnifying glass, just as Haruvi promised me would emerge when he began.

Two Stories From The Babylonian Talmud

To illustrate my parents' concepts, here are two stories from the Babylonian Talmud that will be included in the Israel Museum exhibit:

Story #1:

"Rabban Gamaliel sat and expounded: 'In the world to come trees will give fruit every day.' One of his students scoffed at him saying, 'But it is written, "There is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9). [Rabban Gamalial] replied: 'Come and I will show you an example in this world.' He went out [with the students] and showed them a caper" (Shabbat 30b).

Story #2:
It is told of Rabban Gamaliel that he decreed: "No student who is not honest in thought as in deed shall enter the Academy [of Yavne]."

When the Sages of the Academy decided they could no longer support his strictness, they dismissed him from his post and appointed Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah as head of the Academy. On that day hundreds of benches had to be added to the Academy (some say 700, others 500). "Rabban Gamaliel's conviction was shaken" when he saw so many new students coming to study after his removal from office. "He said: 'Perhaps, heaven forbid, I hindered study from Israel ? The heavens sent him a dream in which he saw white squill filled with soot. The dream reassured him that he had been right after all" (Brakhot 28a).

Each of these stories is predicated on familiarity with specific characteristics of the caper and the white squill, so the stories lost meaning to the generations of Jews who were separated from the realia of the land of Israel . After years of studying these two plants that grow all over Israel , Ephraim and Hannah Hareuveni were able to unlock the beautifully simple embedded messages.

The caper

The flower buds of the caper have been used for centuries as a condiment, marinated or salted to flavor fish and fowl, salads and rice. But capers in a jar don't reveal the secrets of the plant itself. One of the unusual characteristics of the caper is the rapid growth of new branches that produce new flowers every day. This characteristic enabled Rabban Gamaliel to use the caper to show his doubting student "an example in this world" of a tree that gives fruit every day, as all fruit trees shall do in the world to come.

When the Talmud tells us that Rabban Gamaliel "went out [with the students] and showed them a caper" – he quite literally took them all to an adjacent field, or to the stone walls of the Academy, or to the roadside to show them the flower buds along each branch, each bud awaiting its turn to open up on the appointed day.

This is one of the characteristics that caused us to select the caper flower as the emblem of Neot Kedumim: an educational institution that strives to produce new fruit every day.

This isn't the place to relate the many stories concerning the caper that appear in Jewish sources throughout the generations: the unnamed sinner who gathered kindling on the Sabbath and the "daughters of Tzlofkhad” (literally, "sharp caper") whose father "died in the wilderness…for his own sin" (Numbers 27:3), or the righteous man who had a caper bush stop up the break in his hedge because he refrained from work on the Sabbath, of whom it was said that he was the transmigrated soul of that same Tzlofkhad in the wilderness. I will mention only the caper's extraordinary capacity to survive, a characteristic echoed in the words of the Babylonian Talmud that dubbed it “the persevering among trees” - yet another highly appropriate reason to choose the caper as Neot Kedumim's emblem.

The white squill

Why was Rabban Gamaliel's mind put to rest when he saw the soot-filled white squill in his dream? Ephraim Hareuveni was able to solve the enigma when in his detailed research of the plant he discovered a rare disease that causes microscopic fungi to develop inside the plant's flower buds. The photograph on page 4 shows that the buds of the diseased white squill remain white on the outside but fill up inside with black "soot" that prevents the flowers from developing and producing seeds. Knowing this phenomenon, it is easy to understand why Rabban Gamaliel's dream reassured him that his strict criteria did not after all "hinder study." Like the diseased buds of the white squill, so those students who were allowed to enter the Academy after his departure whose thoughts are not as their deeds, would never develop into scholars worthy of Torah study.

To learn more about the caper and the white squill, see Tree and Shrub in Our Biblical Heritage, available from American Friends of Neot Kedumim.