We were planting pomegranates by candlelight

last Sunday night, because the generous

tree donor could make that time work. There's no

electrical in the garden, so we lit up the world

with candlesticks, wedged carefully between bricks,

over sodden ground, sharing their spare lambence 

as we dug the sapling's roots enough space to grow.

We're planting 3 total pomegranates this month,

the tree of Jerusalem, one of the candidates for the

Eden tree listed in the Tanakh I bought to practice my 

Hebrew on, though I'm currently at the Cat in the Hat 

stage of language learning. In Hebrew and in Arabic,

which I speak conversationally, words have a 3-letter root,

which they share with lots of words like them. In Arabic,

book is كتاب (kitab), a library is مكتبة (maktaba), and

a writer is كاتب (katib). Since both Arabic and Hebew

(along with Assyrian, Amharic, Aramaic, Tigrinya,

Tigre, and Maltese) are semitic languages, they

not only share a lot of grammar, but also many

cognates, that is, words which share a root and so

sound the same in languages which share ancestry.

"Pomegranate" is one of them, רימון (rimon)

in Hebrew and raman (رمان) in Arabic. The words

share the same roots, r (ر | ר) - m - ( م | מ) - n - ( ن | ן)

and even some of the letters sound the same:

"r" is resh or rim, "m" is mim or mem, "n" is nun or noon.

The ancestors of the pomegranate were from 

what we would now call Iran, and they grow

just as beautifully in Israel as they do Sunnyvale

or our own garden in San José. So we'll have 3

pomegranate trees in the community garden,

like the 3-letter roots of the languages they were

cultivated around, planted by the same kind of

candlelight that lights them on family tables during

Rosh Hashanah or in Bethlehem during blackouts.