Tu B’Shevat – Celebrating the Trees, Part I
Tonight at sunset begins Tu B’Shevat – “The Beginning of the New Year of the Trees”. Beginning. Always beginning.
I have often said that the work I do is to teach people how to die. Dying is about transitioning. Transitioning is about beginning.
Trees teach us how to transition – every year they stop making fruit, drop their leaves, and at this time of the year appear, to the outer eye, as scraggly skeletons. Dead. And yet, at this very moment, at this VERY second, deep deep deeply within, these very dead-like trees are birthing something new. Their sap is beginning to rise, they are planning the buds that are about to start peeping through, daring to show their newness and beginnings to the outer world, and they even hold the ideas of the fruit that will, months from now, be produced from all this newness.
The question is: do we dare to die to old ideas in order to allow new ones to arise?
Oh how we resist change! If the work I do is to teach people how to die – to old ideas, old belief systems, old patterns, old constructs, old identities – what that looks like is a wrestling match: Every new revelation is met with resistance. Moses argued with God about being the one called to lead the Jews from slavery to freedom; Jonah argued with God about being the one to aid Ninevah and went so far as to hide out in a boat going the opposite direction. Argue argue argue. In the Parashot we are currently reading it is one argument after another of us complaining in the desert in our movement from death (slavery) to life (the new land).
We argue because we fear death. Because inherent in transition is letting go of all that is familiar and props us up (however artificially), and entering the total darkness of “what next”. Instead of patiently awaiting the seed of creation to sprout, we fear the silence and pause of “what next” so much that we rush to fill the space with the noise and distractions of repetition.
My elderly neighbor has a wall of old photographs and vintage post cards of our village. How alive the main street was – in my little village of less than 500 people (then) there used to be seven restaurants! A beautiful bridge crossed a bucolic river that wound through town, and stores abounded. I asked him what happened – he said “Cars.” Explaining, he said that after cars came no one could really park in the ancient village (built in the Middle Ages, long before the size of cars and parking needed to be considered), so everyone stopped coming there and started to drive to the newer big-town 30 miles away to buy their groceries, get their hair cut, etc. And that pretty foot-bridge got ripped out to widen the streets for the cars, was replaced by a smaller, concrete one, thus reducing the bucolic river to a trickle. Because there wasn’t enough parking. Ask someone today to give up their car and they say “no way – how could I possibly get to the stores I need to get to?”
We forget the times before the cars, the times before we formed and got stuck into a certain idea of who we are. We get stuck in constructs of “what is”, no matter how quickly the “what is” was formed. Using our car example, we alter our lives to fit this new invention, rather than question the invention; rather than asking if moving so quickly, dispersing families across the world from each other, separating us from each other and the natural exchanges that take place when people walk to watering holes or trade their wares, we rush to simply “modify”, “better” or “make tolerable” something that isn’t really working – building up suburban shopping monstrosities with miles of parking, replacing gas energy with electric. In place of radically, courageously, tree-like transitioning, and letting fall the ideas that “this is how it is”, “I’ve always been this way”, “my family has always been like that”, we criticize new possibilities and argue for old limitations.
Let it fall. Drop away. Let it ALL fall, even the fruiting of an old idea, no matter how tasty that fruitful idea was at that moment, and return instead to the seed of idea and new creation.
We all have crutches of beliefs and self-identities that we grasp onto as lifejackets: “If I buy this I’ll be happy”, “If I don’t do it, it won’t ever get done”, “I would change my job but I have to make the same salary and I can’t find anything else to do that pays me this well”, “I can’t tell my partner it’s important for me to start keeping Shabbat, it will mess up his game-night”, “I would move somewhere else but I’ll never find a job”. But change is possible. It is happening all around us at every second in nature, and trees are our most wonderful examples of how to do it.
In Los Angeles, and other cities around the world, car-free days are being planned more and more, supported by the positive responses of the joy experienced being out amongst others as families, on foot, running into folks they wouldn’t have otherwise all packed into metal and shut-up houses, enjoying cafes that set up in the streets. In the capital of Slovenia the city center was becoming wrecked with the sounds and pollution of traffic and decided, a few years ago, to cordon off a no-car zone – result: parking lots reverted to parks, restaurants took advantage of street-space to put out tables and serve outdoors, and people walk and meet and enjoy each other in these spaces. A few weeks ago the government of Delhi stipulated that people are allowed to drive cars on alternate days only. Whole new ideas of community and possibility are being born. Instead of saying “There isn’t enough parking”, it is being asked “Do we need the lifestyle changes brought by cars?” The fruit is being allowed to fall off the tree so that something new can sprout.
The same can be true in our individual lives. We can turn “I am the only one who gets things done” into “I can take a step back and allow others to contribute”; instead of “I’ll mess up game-night” we can say “I have new ideas and means for family to come together”; “I’ll never find a job” we can ask “what other things am I passionate about doing”; in the place of “have to get paid the same” we can choose to value the joy that comes from meaningful contribution and seek that instead, letting our lifestyle adjust to an inner value instead of an outer one.
Radical change. Is there anything more radical than acknowledging that worked and now let’s go back to the drawing board? Than considering that the earth was flat but maybe now it is round?
We can learn a lot from trees – those radical, rebellious, wise beings that never let anything stagnate, that never rest on the last good idea, which doggedly pursue evolution instead of comfort, question instead of answer. If we follow their rhythms we learn that, year after year, season after season, there is a rebirth after the pause. And that until we pause – until we allow everything to drop away and return to the fertile nothing of question mark – we cannot rebirth. If we follow the rhythms of the tree this rhythm becomes our assurance, gently, patiently giving us the blueprint for how to transition, and the comfort that on the other side of the darkness of “what” is a “next”.
