Yesterday was Tu B’Shvat, the day our tradition calls the Birthday of the Trees. Throughout this week, the Daily Kavanot will focus on nature, the environment, and sustainability practices.
Perhaps the most well-known Tu B’Shvat-themed story centers on a Talmudic figure named Honi HaMe’Agel, Honi the Circle Maker. Noticing an old woman planting a carob tree, he asks her about the nature of the tree—how tall it will get, and how long it will take to bear fruit. Upon hearing that it will take up to 70 years to bear fruit, Honi is flabbergasted. Why, he wonders, would you plant a tree whose fruit you will never enjoy? Her response? “Someone who came before planted trees for me; I plant now for those who come after me.”
As a rabbi, I have told this story a million times; it feels like I actually told it five or six times last week alone! And yet, each time I tell it, I am struck anew by that teaching, that idea. We learn it from Honi and the carob tree, but long before the Talmud was written, our mission—and relationship to the land—is clear: In one of the Biblical stories of Creation, as humanity is placed in the Garden of Eden, we are taught that we were put on this earth to till and to tend it; we are asked to be guardians of the earth.
Last week, I sat in a very cold hotel conference room in Dallas with other rabbis and synagogue leaders, as Reverend Cameron Trimble led us through a Futures Laboratory. Like Honi, we were asked to imagine a world that most of us will never get to see. The exercises that she ran asked all of us to be creative imagineers, anticipating what a probable view of the world—organizations and structures, spirituality and synagogues—will be in the year 2070.
At my table for this exercise were a number of rabbis and synagogue leaders from California, and all of us began with the question of climate change. Will California have water by the year 2070? Will our major cities—or our farmlands—be habitable? The questions felt real, and they felt pressing, and they were a reminder that we—as a global community of humanity—have not done all that well at the Biblical commandment to till and tend and protect the land. And yet—as we learn from the carob tree—we can still plant seeds today that might blossom by 2070– or beyond.
Here at Wise, we are thinking about sustainability. We are thinking about it in the design and work of our new Aaron Milken Center, being built as we speak. We are thinking about it in our parking structure, as more and more electric vehicles use our chargers. And we are thinking about it through our sustainability initiative, an effort between teachers, staff, students, and congregants. My kindergartener can tell you with confidence what goes in the green compost bins and what does not, and our youngest to our oldest learners are starting to understand the impact of small actions in creating big transformations.
However and wherever you learn the lesson, the sentiment—and the call to action—is clear: Our job is to plant and to sow, literally and figuratively. In all that we do, in the many choices we make—what to drive, what to build, where to travel, what to teach—we are sowing the seeds of the future. That is true for our families, for our communities, and—perhaps most critically right now—for the earth.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer