Tu B’Shevat is the birthday of the trees. For the past few years Temple Isaiah has gone to Kenneth Hahn Park to plant trees in celebration. We also have a special Tu B’Shevat seder where we sample all sorts of fruits and nuts. The seder is coordinated by our Green Team.

The New Year for Trees – a poem by Howard Schwartz

All year
They have kept a careful record
Of everything
The waters of the moon
The slow descent
Of every sun
All year
They have charted the course
 Of every comet
Eyes drawn to the center
To the star that supports
The planet
The beam that holds up every arch
The line that continues into the future
Unbroken
Unchanged.

But tonight
As the light descends into sleep
The trees
All lift their branches to the sky
Cradling the moon
That shines through the night
Like blossoms of the almond
That have already appeared
To announce
That all fruit that follows
Belongs to the new year
To come.

The Story of Honi

Long ago, there lived a righteous man named Honi. One day he saw an old man planting a carob tree. Honi said to him: "Foolish man, do you think you will live to eat and enjoy the fruit of the tree you plant today? It will not bear fruit for many, many years."

The old man replied: "I found trees in the world when I was born. My grandparents planted them for me. Now I am planting for my grandchildren."

Honi sat down in the shade of a nearby tree to take a short nap. But his short nap lasted 70 years! When he awoke, he was surprised to see a full-grown carob tree where the old man had planted a seed just before Honi fell asleep. An elderly man was picking its fruit. "Are you the man who planted this tree?" asked Honi.

"No," replied the man. "My grandfather planted it for me." And so Honi learned the importance of planting seeds for future generations.

An excerpt from Martin Buber’s I- Thou:

I contemplate a tree.
I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.
I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air, and the growing itself in the darkness.
I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life.
I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law, those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate.
I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers and eternalize it.
Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.
But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It…everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number, form and mechanics, its color and its chemistry, its conversation with the elements and its conversation with the stars, is included and inseparably fused.