ANSWER:
I'll ask you another question. Why are the seeds of the apple on the inside? On the outside at least it's an object lesson. Before you eat the strawberry, take a look at it; you see a marvel. You see that the purpose of the strawberry is to attract you to eat it, with the beautiful red color.
And so, in the good old days before they had canalization, bathrooms, when a man wanted to relieve himself he went back on the field and he returned to the field all the important minerals that he had ingested. Instead of sending it out today by canalization, to the ocean where it's worthless, and he also deposited the strawberry seeds in the field. That's why today you find strawberries growing alongside fences, because birds who eat strawberries, when they perch on the fence they drop a little fertilizer with some strawberries in it and that's why wild strawberries grow near fences.
And so the benefit of the gymnosperm is to demonstrate to people the beauty of the plan, that the species must be propagated. Now the seeds on the inside however are just as valuable, because when you eat the apple and you come close to the ovary, you are confronted with plastic shields that don't permit you to go any further. So what do you do? You take the entire core and you throw it away someplace, or you spit out the seeds, and then the plan begins to work.
Why is it made so, why shouldn't the seeds be soft and edible, and they should be unprotected by an ovary of plastic shields? The answer is, why is it that all the seeds are protected?
It's a marvel, wherever we look. If you eat a peach, the peach is delicious, it's attractive, it's soft, juicy and sweet, until you come to the stone inside. Don't try to bite it because it means a visit to the dentist, you can't open it up so you throw it away. Sometimes even a hammer won't help...You throw it away, it falls upon the dirt and lo and behold the stone opens up by itself. What you couldn't do with a hammer is accomplished by some bacteria in the soil, because there's a certain paste between the two parts of that cell that protect the seed inside. It's a marvel! An accident of evolution! Just the right paste was developed. Had it been a cement that we use, the pit would fall in the ground and would remain unopened forever, but Hakadosh Baruch Hu's paste responds to the action of the bacteria and it opens up by itself. That's the miracle of the pits.
Therefore when we study seeds, we come to the understanding that seeds are given to the world more than for the benefit of reproduction, the greatest benefit of a seed is to make people aware of plan and purpose.
Good Shabbos To All
This email is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures.
To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
Important Numbers
