How Trees Talk: A Blessing for the Month of Shevat

Shevat asks us to place our trust in a process we cannot yet see, but one that we know has worked wonders before.

Here in Boston, as in much of the world, the trees have no leaves. The skeletal branches, cold air, and early nightfall make venturing outdoors a bold proposition. Named after the Latin verb decidere (to fall down or away), deciduous trees' signature action is shedding what no longer serves, even though doing so creates a sense of rawness, exposure. Loneliness, perhaps. Even grief.

At risk of stating the obvious: there's a lot of grief in the world right now. Is it minimizing or romanticizing to link the decay of global institutions, political discourse, and civil norms to natural cycles of release and rebirth? How likely is it, really, that something new and vital will emerge in the place of all we are losing, have already lost? And even if something glorious does miraculously enter the growing void, where are we supposed to put all this pain until then?

This new month of Shevat begs these questions, but I don't think it fully answers them. In the Hebrew cycle, this lunar month is the moment when energy begins flowing back up from the roots of the trees. Not when new leaves grow, or even when their buds become visible, but when something unseen turns towards life again. Shevat asks us to place our trust in a process that is not yet visible, but one we know has worked wonders before. This is a month of what we might call faith.

Personally, I don't believe in a God that will redeem us without our participation. Weaving the threads of society back together — in America, around the world, and within our own Jewish family — is not inevitable in the same way as the fresh leaves of spring. So I'm not asking us to wait in silent patience for a new order to form or for the old order to heal. Forests are being razed today. Carbon levels are rising, and so are the seas. A call to complacency these words are emphatically not.

But please — don't despair, either. Or if you do find yourself in despair, ask yourself whether you've been here before, and what helped you emerge. If the answer is based in which party holds the White House, or even in which paradigm of human power reigns supreme in the world, that makes sense. And still, there may be room to sink into rhythms a bit more enduring. Perhaps your despair tends to soften from friendship, a warm meal, a good night's sleep, a walk in the woods, or your own personal ways. Whatever the medicine, please give yourself the grace to seek it out. To make your own baseline OK-ness the number one goal, the ground of all action, even in a world on fire.

When we celebrate the full moon of Shevat, at the very start of February this year, we will honor what the earliest record of Jewish oral tradition calls the New Year of the Trees. Since that text was written, generations upon generations of human beings have lived and left this earth. Empires have risen and fallen. Grave injustices have been committed, and great art has been made. Will the moral arc of our species bend towards a period of true, sustainable peace? I hope so, and certainly think so, and so wish someone could promise it will. Beneath the humility-forced uncertainty, however, what I believe is inarguably true is this: We, each and all of us, are in the hands of a much bigger, infinitely mysterious, confounding, staggering, and stubbornly surprising process of life.

May the new moon of Shevat bring you some small taste of what might, just possibly, be becoming. One day, on the other side of so much falling away, perhaps there will be more life than we can imagine. Or at least enough for us to breathe easy without feeling selfish, avoidant, or meek.

May the month of Shevat be a container in time to make peace with barren branches. To soberly acknowledge what has fallen, to remember what has risen within and beyond us before, and to find comfort in the kind of trust rooted in lived experience rather than fickle or wishful expedience. As the American folk-soul duo Johnnyswim sings in Don't Let it Get You Down, "Oh, but mama said, 'Girl, faith ain't for the blind.'"

And may the full moon of Shevat, our month's peak, shine its bright light on all we still must see, all we can never unsee, and all we can sense beyond sight. May this day, at this ancient arboreal threshold, give us the clarity and strength to rise as sweetly as sap — and as purposefully, too.

L'chaim — to life,

Yaakov Ginsberg-Schreck

Founder + Executive Director