A dream of trees

Yesterday we marked the celebration of two holidays, two birthdays even. In a rare coincidence, the American national observance of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday fell on the same day as the Jewish observance of “the birthday of the trees,” otherwise known as Tu B’Shevat. 

Martin Luther King, Jr, or MLK as he is often known, was rightly famous for many things, not the least of which was his ability as an orator. And his most famous speech was the one in which he told us that he had a dream, a dream that someday his black grandchildren would play side by side with my white children in a world where people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. 

This speech was delivered in the summer of 1963, 55 and a half years ago. And that dream has come tantalizingly close to reality – my children have indeed played side-by-side with children of diverse skin colors, ethnic backgrounds, and religious upbringings in their various schoolyards and day care programs – and yet our world is not yet as color-blind as Dr. King would have hoped. Police still target people of color while ignoring similar behavior from whites, the students at the urban core school my wife teaches at (who are among the poorest and most disadvantaged students in Houston) are still almost all black and hispanic while my privileged suburban neighborhood is still almost all white, and my community college students still largely sort themselves by race and ethnicity when they choose their seating arrangements in my classroom (and they hate it when I disrupt this self-selection halfway through the course). 

And people in those urban core areas are now finding a new problem: food deserts. Nobody wants to open and staff a grocery store in the bad parts of town, where they would struggle to make a profit and deal daily with the threat of rampant street violence besides. So their only choices for food are to drive far away (if they own a working car and can afford gas for it) or to buy food at overpriced convenience stores. For most of my wife’s students, the only adequate nutrition they get is when they attend school. 

What’s the connection to Tu B’Shevat, here?

On Tu B’Shevat, it is traditional to remember a colorful character from Jewish legend known as Honi the circle-maker. He gets this name from a famous episode where he drew a circle on the ground to protest a drought and told God – whom he evidently was on very good terms with – that he would not leave the circle until God made it rain. God played with Honi, first blowing in a light drizzle and then a raging gullywasher, but eventually acceded to the demand and brought the gentle yet nourishing rain that the land needed. 

But he has another connection to the holiday of trees. Legend has it that Honi was pondering how the Jews’ dream of returning from exile in Babylon could have taken a full seventy years to be realized. An actual dream is a fleeting thing – it lasts only a portion of a single night’s sleep, after all – so how could a dream of return to our land last for a full seventy years before the dream came true? 

According to this legend, Honi then passed a man planting a carob tree. He realized that the carob tree would have to grow for seventy years before it yielded fruit, and so he asked the planter, essentially, what was in it for him? Surely he did not expect to still be around in seventy years to receive this tree’s fruit. The man answered that seventy years ago people had planted carob trees for him to eat from, and he was passing along the favor to his grandchildren. 

Honi, musing about this thought, lies down for a rest and miraculously sleeps for seventy years. When he wakes, he passes the same spot, now containing a full-grown carob tree. A man who is the spitting image of the man he saw before is eating from the tree. Honi asks: are you the man who planted this tree? The man answers: no, my grandfather planted this tree, and soon I will plant another for my grandchildren. At this, Honi realizes that he has slept for seventy years, and he has the answer to why it takes so long for our dreams to come to fruition. 

Dreams, it seems, can either be fleeting things or they can be seeds that we plant for our grandchildren. 

Fifty-five years on, Dr. King’s dream is still not fulfilled, but as I said it is tantalizingly close. Formal discrimination by race has been outlawed, and what we have left are more like habits of the mind – harder to legislate away, certainly, but possible to cure if we can keep our children playing together. After all, my children have never seen skin color as a sign of someone’s character. If we can build that to a critical mass, Dr. King’s long arc of history will have taken another step toward justice. 

So what trees do we have to dream about today? I asked my children this as we sat down for Southern food to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday. They said they want republicans and democrats to be able to see past their differences and recognize that we are all, ultimately, supposed to be on the same side, working toward a better future for our country. They said they want to add a dream of religious tolerance to the dream of racial unity – that Christians, Muslims, and Jews (and others) could all get together to work for a better world and that our public schools and other institutions would recognize all religions equally (I’m looking at you, Clear Lake High School Choir!).

And my rabbinical school added another dream Dr. King has once espoused: food for all. A visitor from a poor “third world” nation actually expressed pity for the people of New York City because there were no wild fruit trees from which the poor could pick fruit to eat as they walked by. Perhaps we need to dream of literal trees, bearing actual fruit to feed the masses. Community gardens in place of some of the huge grassy areas we like to waste water on. I am starting a push for a feed-the-community garden at my synagogue. Maybe you could start a push for one at yours. 

Whatever your dreams, keep on dreaming them. Don’t let the “realists” discourage you. Turn them into seeds and plant them well. When our grandchildren inherit the world in seventy years, who knows what might have become of them.