As I was taking my daily walk around my hometown of  Har Adar the other day, I came across a weird plant that grows wild in the Galilee and Judean Mountains – as well as in urban abandoned lots, junkyards and cemeteries.  It’s called the “exploding cucumber.” Of course it is. It lies there hugging the ground, looking as innocent as you please, with pretty yellow flowers to boot. But if you step on it, kick it or even touch it, it will explode – literally – catapulting its seeds into the wind. That’s what ensures its survival, botanists tell us.

The exploding cucumber (Ecballium elaterium). Late October 2014: Most of the pods are still not ready to pop.

In the Mishnah, in a discussion about how to hang on to ritual purity, an issue that intensely preoccupied the ancient Jewish sages, they note that the “squirting cucumber” as they called it “gives passage to uncleanliness and serves as a screen against it” (Mishnah, Ohalot 8,1).  They might have gotten wrapped up in this because of the plant’s prevalence in cemeteries, where ritual impurity from contact with the dead was considered serious risk.

The innards of this plant, which in Hebrew goes by the evocative name yeroket hehamor – “donkey scum” ­ – is poisonous according to botanists. Yet, like many toxins, they say that in the right dosage it can be therapeutic; in folk medicine the exploding cucumber is used in treating jaundice, cataracts, ear and skin ailments.

Call me a masochist, but on my morning walk I like to listen to Israel Radio’s daily talk show, where interviewers elicit outrageous statements by the great and powerful wizards who control our lives. Or call me hope-filled when the show interviews people with ingenious and inspiring startups, studies and initiatives for a better society. On a recent walk, right at the moment I was catching my breath and surrendering to the urge to give our botanical bombshell a little nudge, the radio interviewee was Prof. Oren Kaplan, of the College of Management in Rishon Letzion, Israel. His research: how do people’s reports of good deeds affect others. The study showed empirically what most of us realize instinctively – that good deeds are “catching” – hearing about them spurs some people to do good deeds themselves.  However, according to Oren’s data there’s a catch: Once a person had done a good deed, there’s some tendency to feel smug enough to skate right on by the next opportunity to do good.

Exploding cucumber, November 2014 – most of the pods are gone with the wind, leaving empty stalks.

But I also heard the professor say that morning that he believes we can fight that tendency and go for the good. We can go either way, he says. I say, we can be a “screen for cleanliness or uncleanliness.” Genesis 8:21 has a reflection of that: “The imagination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth,” God says, but right then and there vows never again to punish all of us for being that way.

That day as I watched the lowly plant disperse its seeds so vigorously at the merest touch, I thought: the Exploding Cucumber.  Yes, that definitely works in the part of the world. There are other plants, in the Holy Land and elsewhere, that disperse their seeds through the air more gently, like the milk thistle, or the make-a-wish dandelion. But I like to think of our exploding cucumber as a symbol of the enormous energy we need to keep on doing good. We need this very badly, in a world where we have allowed the power to impact larger events to be taken from us by those who have let impurity through the screen, a world where every one of us “great” or “small” has the capacity to hurt or heal in a heartbeat.

Read more about the unusual plants and spices of the Bible in Food at the time of the Bible: From Adam’s Apple to the Last Supper.

As for hope, leadership and losing both, read The Scroll

 Another Yom Kippur has passed. Our family shares the hope it symbolizes for Jews everywhere, that our efforts to forgive ourselves and others bear redemptive fruit. For Arik it is a more “awe-ful” day, as it marks the beginning of the war in which he was catastrophically injured in 1973, and the beginning of his successful, unceasing efforts to build a new life outside the parameters of what would ever be possible again.

As I write, I can hear my neighbors beginning to build their sukkah, the temporary dwelling in which they will have their meals. For friends less familiar with our Jewish traditions, I would like to introduce you to this wonderful concept. Yom Kippur is devoted to our inner selves. It is a time to focus on rebuilding our spiritual bridges as we consider how more to strive for our better selves in the year to come. Later this week we will begin the week-long celebration of Sukkot, the “feast of booths.” Like so many of our holidays, it has at least two levels: Leviticus 23:33–44 tells us that we are to dwell in booths to remember that the Israelites lived in such flimsy temporary dwellings during the 40 years of wandering in the desert, and it’s the time of the fall harvest.

Maya and Nili, now a mother of two and a mother-to-be respectively, having breakfast in our sukkah way back when.

Jewish tradition tells us that we should begin to build our sukkah immediately after Yom Kippur ends – that same evening – four days before Sukkot actually begins. We are told that this is a way to bring together the personal (the soul-searching of Yom Kippur) with the universal (the outside world). For one week, leaving our perfectly good four walls, we turn ourselves “inside-out”. Arik and I taught our girls, Maya and Nili, that as we sat in the sukkah we built on our porch, we should think about families the world over who live their whole lives in structures no stronger than this, or people who have far less than this due to natural disaster or war.

These are the perfect moments to focus on the universal aspects of Judaism – the oft-repeated commandment to do justice (Prov. 21:3; Micah 6:8). At this special time, when the Muslim festival of Id al-Adha, the holiday of the sacrifice and our Yom Kippur coincide for the first time in 34 years, I like to think of the verse where God ponders the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah and God’s hopes for Abraham, the father of both our faiths and ponder the possibilities in interfaith relations: “For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment; that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him.” (Gen. 18:19).

What the bee-eater told me

Last fall, while guiding a group at Qumran National Park, I had the most wonderful opportunity to snap a picture of a bee-eater. Every fall and spring these iridescent migrants visit us.  In a 2011 article in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, researchers Nir Sapir, Martin Wikelski, Roni Avissar, Ran Nathan inform us that the bee-eaters apparently know the best time do depart on their migration (see Jeremiah 8:7 re the storks’ talent at this). Their research suggests “that a trend of increasing temperature and decreasing barometric pressure lasting a few days can potentially provide a reliable cue for the birds to adjust their digestive, muscular, and circulatory systems in preparation for the enduring cross-country flight.” High temperatures, these scholars say, facilitate soaring – an energy saver as opposed to flapping their wings. Individual birds have to gauge their go-no-go for that day on a mechanism they evolved for gauging temperature and pressure. These abilities can be essential to the survival of the species.

Bee-eater at Qumran

Now, I’m no bee-eater, but this is what I glean:  Abraham sensed the changing conditions when he smashed the idols in his father’s “idol store,” according to legend, and he soared upward. We, his descendants seem to have lost the ability to soar, constantly doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and flapping our wings to exhaustion or with great harm to our species. It is the responsibility of each of us to get it a little more right in the year to come.

Read my version for children of the ancient legend “Abraham in the idol store” in the chapter on worship in my book Teach it to Your Children: How Kids Lived in Bible Days.