Trees.
This is our time to refocus on honoring, protecting, and preserving the safety and health of our Earth – whose verdancy, climate regulation and habitats depend greatly on old growth trees and forests. Jewish and green values align: planting small young trees is good, but protecting existing mature trees is even better!
We celebrate Tu B’Shvat, our ‘poster holiday’ for Jewish environmentalism. It used to be a holiday for tithing fruit; late medieval Kabbalists reshaped it for mystical union with Torah -- “the Tree of Life” – itself a sign of God’s essence. Fifty or eighty years ago, it focused on planting trees, in Israel. Today, it’s all about protecting trees and habitats, and critters, and ourselves.
Trees aren’t just about carbon sequestration, erosion protection, biodiversity. Trees aren’t just about beauty, majesty, symbolic contemplation. Trees are about democracy, human rights, your life and mine and our grandkids’.
Jewish law tells us to waste nothing, even to conserve energy by burning fuel efficiently. We learn conservation from Deuteronomy 20, 19 – “when you besiege a city, don’t cut down the enemy’s trees.” The verse continues, as usually translated, “for is the tree of the field human, to retreat?” But in the original, the Hebrew reads literally: “ki ha’adam etz hasadeh -- for the human is a tree of the field.” We don’t just depend on trees; we are the tree.
Source: Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb
We celebrate Tu B’Shvat, our ‘poster holiday’ for Jewish environmentalism. It used to be a holiday for tithing fruit; late medieval Kabbalists reshaped it for mystical union with Torah -- “the Tree of Life” – itself a sign of God’s essence. Fifty or eighty years ago, it focused on planting trees, in Israel. Today, it’s all about protecting trees and habitats, and critters, and ourselves.
Trees aren’t just about carbon sequestration, erosion protection, biodiversity. Trees aren’t just about beauty, majesty, symbolic contemplation. Trees are about democracy, human rights, your life and mine and our grandkids’.
Jewish law tells us to waste nothing, even to conserve energy by burning fuel efficiently. We learn conservation from Deuteronomy 20, 19 – “when you besiege a city, don’t cut down the enemy’s trees.” The verse continues, as usually translated, “for is the tree of the field human, to retreat?” But in the original, the Hebrew reads literally: “ki ha’adam etz hasadeh -- for the human is a tree of the field.” We don’t just depend on trees; we are the tree.
Source: Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb