“Unlike humans, who never really mature. Trees have no need for our fickle sensibilities, and our tendency to seize every moment.”
Sacher Park, Jerusalem, February 1 – The trees in this wooded patch of the city remain completely unaware that the country around them is preparing to celebrate them on Wednesday, sources within the arboreal community report.
Jewish tradition cites the fifteenth day of the month of Shvat, a winter month, as the “New Year for Trees.” The occasion chiefly refers to how fruit tithes may be grouped, but in recent decades has become a celebration of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel through its produce. The pine, olive, acacia, almond, carob, and other species of tree, whether fruiting or not, have shown no sign of knowing, let alone caring, that Israelis intend to celebrate them in any fashion.
Experts attribute the apparent aloofness to a highly evolved sense of patience among trees. “It takes a long time for a tree to reach real maturity,” notes botanist Alon Oren of Bar-Ilan University. “Unlike humans, who never really mature. Trees have no need for our fickle sensibilities, and our tendency to seize every moment.”
The comparison of man to trees occurs in Jewish tradition as far back as the Biblical book of Deuteronomy, where the Torah proscribes felling fruit trees even in prosecuting a siege against an enemy city. While in context the verse seems to make the analogy a rhetorical one, interpreters through the ages have seized on it as indicative of many shared characteristics that speak to a primal, essential similarity. While the commentators wax poetic and epic in their explorations of the theme, trees continue not to care less.
Professor Oren notes that even if they do notice the proceedings, trees can be forgiven for taking the celebratory atmosphere with a grain of salt. “These are the same people, after all, who on [the holiday of] Lag BaOmer hold massive wood-fueled bonfires.”
On a more contemplative plane, Israeli Jews have a practice of holding a “Tu Bishvat Seder,” a meal at which various types of the land’s produce are given prominence and expounded upon. Kabbalistic and Hasidic sources describe the mid-winter minor festival as a time of incipient redemption and growth, anticipating the spring. In that sense it represents a cultural phenomenon parallel to, but considerably more profound than, Groundhog Day, to which trees react in exactly the same manner, which is to say, not at all.
A fifty-year-old oak in the Yitzchak Rabin National Forest was asked to comment, but his response was either inaudible or nonexistent, but no one knows for sure since nobody was there.
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