As you may (or may not) remember, I spoke last Rosh Hashanah about the Lahaina Banyan Tree. I have appreciated the updates that some of you have sent throughout the year; the latest I saw is that the arborists and community members who have spent the last year taking care of the banyan have reported fresh shoots that are now nearly seven feet long. I continue to be moved by the story of this tree, and its lessons about community care and healing. But, after a trip to Northern California last week, I am thinking about other trees.
My son kept commenting on the dappled sunlight, while my daughter kept noting that she barely came up to the trunks of the trees. We stopped in silent awe at a stag, and breathed in fresh air and fog. All in all, I fell in love on my first visit to Muir Woods.
This has been a year of living painfully in the present. With each day marked in masking tape, it feels like we, the Jewish people, have been stuck; we cannot move forward without being whole and we cannot be whole without our hostages. In Israel, there is a sense that it is still October 7, and I think we feel that too, even thousands of miles away. So, there was something refreshing about stepping out of time in the redwood groves. The California coast redwoods began growing almost 20 million years ago and—at least in Muir Woods—you can feel all the ways that they will last long after us.
While I loved looking up into the towering trees, I found myself fascinated by the fallen trees. To see the regrowth and the different shades of green; the symbiosis reminded me of a poem to which I often turn when I am with families during shiva. Written by Laura Gilpin, the poem is entitled Life After Death, and speaks about the natural cycles of life and death that one can observe in a forest. She writes:
These things I know:
How the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
so that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it
and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest
inside the dead tree
so that nothing is wasted in nature
— Rabbi Sari Laufer