7 SPECIES CONTINENTAL ECOSYSTEM
We have just concluded the 50 days of the Omer, the time of the grain harvest in ancient Israel, culminating in the holiday of Shavuot or the holiday of first fruits (Exodus 23:16). The holiday was marked by the offering of the first bread from the grain harvested that year on the Temple altar. The counting of the Omer has come to have spiritual practices originating in seven of the sephirot from Kabbalah, but originally, it was all about the weeks (Shavuot) of the grain harvest.
Grain was by far, the most important food in ancient Israel in terms of providing calories for our ancestors, who were often challenged to have enough to eat. The importance of barley and wheat is captured in the seven species of ancient Israel, which were, according to the Talmud, the only species acceptable for first fruit offerings in the Temple. The seven species were: Barley, wheat, olives, grapes, dates (used for honey), figs, and pomegranates. 2 kinds of grain and 5 kinds of fruit.
I’m interested in reclaiming the importance of seven species in a way that fits the ecology in which I live. If you read this and live in a Mediterranean ecosystem, I encourage you to utilize the ancestral seven species. A reclaiming of the seven species for a continental ecosystem has to answer what should the 7 species be and why? How do we celebrate them, given that we are not offering first fruits in a Temple? Why do this at all—what difference does it make? Last question first.
The reason to do this is to honor the most important food species for us as humans. Most humans in the developed world eat unconsciously, and even those who eat consciously usually choose to eat in certain ways for health or possibly moral reasons (e.g. vegetarians), but not for reasons connected to the ecosystem in which we live. Yet if we are to reclaim our connection to our ecosystem, eating from local sources, however defined, is imperative to deepen our being embodied.
Our grain representatives should be corn and wheat. Now I know that here in the mid-Atlantic, farmers don’t grow much wheat, but instead grow soybeans. But that’s all because of our crazy economic system—and if we had to basically eat from what we could grow, we’d be growing wheat and corn as our two main grains (along with oats). How do I know this? Because that’s what was grown before WW II in this area. Soybeans are mostly grown for either animal feed or as part of the crazy range of cheap stuff in our processed foods.
I’d like to offer the possibility of the following as the other five: tomatoes, apples, grapes, winter squash and potatoes. The first four are fruits and the last is a root crop. Apples, winter squash and potatoes are core crops for the winter when there aren’t fresh crops and were stored in root cellars. Tomatoes have a long history of being preserved for the winter through canning and grapes were made into wine, just as in Ancient Israel. They all grow well in most of the ecosystem (apples don’t like low lying flat ground, for instance and tomatoes do better in the warmer parts of a continental ecosystem.)
How might we celebrate these? The first thing is to grow some or all of them, depending upon your circumstances. This is a way to honor the land upon which we are living. Another possibility is to host a potluck with other earth based oriented people with the dishes built around one of these seven species. A third way is to have them present at Sukkot meals because all of them can be harvested by then (Shavuot is too early for most of them).
What do you think of the idea of uplifting seven species that fit your ecosystem? How do you think you might bring them present in your practice?
7 Species Israel