Now because the Tov, the Good One, Yatzar kavod lishmo, created this universe so that we should bring glory to His name by thinking about Him; and because it’s such an important part of our lives, He did something therefore when He created the world that would encourage us to succeed. In one word, it’s ‘variety’.
I’ll illustrate that with an example. When you go into a fruit store so you see various kinds of pri ha’eitz, of fruits of the trees. Here there are boxes of dates; here, packages of figs. There are plums and peaches and oranges. Next aisle, bananas, grapes, blueberries, mangos. Over here, cherries, cantaloupe, avocado. Various kinds of vegetables! Various condiments! Fruits of all kinds. A riot of taste and color! Figs and cranberries and grapefruit and apples.
But not only apples; a wide variety of apples! Red apples, yellow apples, green apples – and of all types. The people who know, the ones who study apples for a living, tell us that there are at least 7,000 varieties of apples. 7,000! And they’re always finding more.
Discovering Gold
I told you how they found the Golden Delicious. There was a company that used to send out scouts – they still do – to look for the best kind of trees, fruit trees. So once this scout was motoring through the countryside and he saw an apparition. He saw a tree that seemed to have apples on it, but they weren’t the apples he knew – these apples were golden colored.
So he stopped and he bought one and the taste was delicious. That’s how the Golden Delicious was discovered. Immediately on the spot – he was authorized by his company – he paid the farmer 5,000 dollars for that little apple tree. And he immediately called artisans and they built a steel cage around that tree and it became the property of the company. And then the company took cuttings from that and sold them all over the world. That’s how the Golden Delicious spread all over the world.
Now, the farmer hadn’t planted any Golden Delicious; he had planted an apple tree. But in the apple seed lay dormant the Golden Delicious apple. It’s not a new fruit. The Golden Delicious is an apple as far as we know but Hakadosh Baruch Hu made it that way, that there should be potential for variety. That’s why with proper breeding it’s possible to bring forth various strains, because that was the plan of Hashem from the beginning. He put into the apples that they should contain recessive, dormant genes because He wanted not only a world of apples but a world of all types of apples.
