It shall be when you enter the Land that Hashem your God gives you as an inheritance and you possess it and dwell in it; that you shall take of the first fruit of the ground that you bring in from your land where Hashem your God will choose. – Deut. 26:1-2

I was speaking with Rashi (vintner, 11th century, northeastern France) this summer.

Me: Of the seven species associated with the Land wheat, barley, grape, fig, and pomegranate, a land of oil-olives and honey [Deut.8:8] — what kind of honey?

Rashi: Not bee honey date honey [I’m translating], oil-olives, the olive she grows where winters are temperate, I am too far north. I am loving a good olive, but I often summer by south Italia, where the oils in the southern provinces are heavy. In the northern provinces, the oils are milder.

Me: Liquid gold.

Rashi: Exactement. Parfaitemente.

Me: You know, of course, to domesticate the olive comes from the homeland, Middle East, 6000 BCE. Olive trees make fruit in arid, stony soil all around the Mediterranean.

Rashi: Tell me something I don’t know. I have heard that there is a tree in the Maremma near Tyrrhenian coast, 3500 years old, before the Greeks, before the Etruscans even. The Romans made the commerce with the olives, they created the classifications too: vergine, extra vergine all that. The Benedictines took over after the fall of the Empire.

Me: I hear the first pressed oils are sometimes blended with lesser oils. This troubles me.

Rashi: Troubles you? I live for this, for everything that issues from the mouth of God. Extra vergine the oil must be extracted from first press, mechanical only no chemical, must contain less than 1 percent acid. Vergine, same extraction, less than 2 percent acid.

Me: It’s the olive oil that’s one of the seven species, not the olive.

Rashi: The midrash says the olive releases its best qualities when squeezed. Don’t you love that?

Me: I do. I do love that. The Italianos have a wonderful expression. I will translate for you: the great olive oil must suffer.

Rashi: Oh, that’s so Jewish.

Ki Tavo

Rabbi James Stone Goodman serves Congregation Neve Shalom and is a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical Association.