Where Is the Soul of the Carob?

Oil is the soul of the tree. שֶׁמֶן, oil, sits inside נְשָׁמָה, soul, and the question that follows is where in any particular tree that oil actually lives.

Carob is the hard case. The pod is sweet, fibrous and nearly fat-free. The seed carries a trace of oil, a fraction of one percent, and the seed is the part nobody eats. Press a carob the way you press an olive and almost nothing comes out. Put whole pods into oil and leave them, which is how the carob oil here is made, and you get the smell of a carob tree in a bottle.

Two candidates for one soul. The halacha has an answer for each, and they point in opposite directions.

The Torah names the method

A nazir is forbidden wine, grapes, skins and pits, and one more thing that is none of those.

וְכָל מִשְׁרַת עֲנָבִים לֹא יִשְׁתֶּה

And any steeping of grapes he shall not drink. Bamidbar 6:3

מִשְׁרַת is maceration. Fruit left sitting in a liquid until the liquid holds what the fruit was holding. The grapes are strained out and thrown away, and what stays behind is forbidden to him exactly as grapes are. The baraita the Gemara brings reads the word as the source of the general rule:

מִשְׁרַת — לִיתֵּן טַעַם כְּעִיקָּר

“Steeping” teaches that taste has the status of the substance itself. Pesachim 44a-44b

טַעַם כְּעִיקָּר is one of the strongest identity rulings in the Torah. What crosses out of a fruit into a medium is the fruit, with full legal force, in a vessel the fruit never entered. A macerated carob is a carob by that reckoning. It is the thing, carrying the thing’s name and the thing’s weight, with the husk discarded.

The olive agrees by example. Shemen zayit comes from the crushed flesh, and the pit is swept off the floor.

The seed answers on the other axis

The third day of creation makes the split before there is anything else to argue about.

עֵץ פְּרִי עֹשֶׂה פְּרִי לְמִינוֹ אֲשֶׁר זַרְעוֹ־בוֹ

A fruit tree making fruit of its kind, whose seed is in it. Bereishit 1:11

The flesh is what the tree gives this year. The seed is what the tree will be next year. One pod holds both, and they are not the same substance doing the same job. A tree has an expressing soul and a travelling one, which is the structure of a person written in a fruit.

The carob seed carries no taste at all. What it carries is a standard. Those seeds were so uniform in weight that the world measured gold against them, and the word for the unit is still the word for the tree: carat, from keration, the carob. The seed’s endosperm is locust bean gum, used to this day to hold other substances together and stop them separating. The seed does not give flavour, it gives structure, constancy, and the ability to bind what would otherwise fall apart.

A soul of scent and a soul of standard, in one pod, and each has the better claim on a different question.

Choni already asked it

A man is planting a carob. Choni asks how long until it bears, hears seventy years, and asks whether he expects to be alive to eat from it.

כִּי הֵיכִי דִּשְׁתַלוּ לִי אֲבָהָתִי, שְׁתַלִי נָמֵי לִבְרָאִי

Just as my fathers planted for me, I plant for my children. Ta’anit 23a

The planter answers from the seed, and the grandson who eats the pod answers from the flesh. The Gemara does not pick between them. It puts Choni to sleep for seventy years so that he sees both ends of the same tree with his own eyes, which is the only way a question like this gets settled.

The answer is both, and that is the useful part

Where the soul of a thing sits depends on what you are asking it to do. Asking a carob for its scent, the soul is in the pod, released by soaking, and the seed is a stone in the way. Asking a carob for continuity, the soul is in the seed, and the pod is a seventy-year advertisement for it.

People are built the same way. What you give off this year and what you hand down are two different organs, and nobody is required to choose. The oil on this table is the first kind. The book is the second.

Carob oil, macerated from whole pods

The reasoning is worked out across קול תהום, חינם לקריאה באנגלית ובעברית.