Trees are at their least compelling around Tu Bishvat. There’s nothing interesting to see.
But we’ve got it all wrong, says Katherine May in Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. During this period of apparent dormancy, she says: “The tree is waiting. [...] It is far from dead. It is, in fact, the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.”
Tu Bishvat, falling as it does in the UK, when it’s still very much winter, confronts us with the truth that life doesn’t always look lively. Indeed it might be exactly when there’s virtually nothing to see that the most significant activity takes place.
Anyone who has ever been pregnant knows that before you start “showing”, and certainly well before “quickening” when the baby begins to move, every atom of your body tells you that change has begun.
Gestation is an internal process. The fertilised embryo develops safely cocooned in its mother’s body. And as monumental as the creation of a new human being is, that’s not the only change taking place. A mother is also coming into existence through a process called matrescence.
Matrescence covers two distinct periods: before and (hopefully) after a successful birth.
That period of gestation, which takes place inside the mother’s body, is the first stage. The second stage follows the birth of the baby. Again, as all parents can attest, this too is a time where there is much busyness and seemingly little to show for it.
Vast inputs of time and energy are spent on the basic, and seemingly endless, bodily maintenance of the newborn. The only outcome is an alive (and not even always content) baby. It’s all encapsulated in the title of Naomi Stadlen’s book, What mothers do: Especially when it looks like nothing.
Now that my children are almost grown, those early years seem like a dream. We (me, my husband and the helpers we enlisted) were perpetually occupied keeping them alive and earning our keep. And now some 20 years later there are three radiant grown-up humans to show for it.
Seeming dormancy concealing growth can be a lens for reinterpreting one of the most famous Jewish stories involving trees: “One day, Choni was walking along the road when he saw a certain man planting a carob tree. Choni said to him: ‘This tree, after how many years will it bear fruit?’ The man said to him: ‘After 70 years’. Choni said to the man: ‘Is it obvious that you will live 70 years?’
"He replied: ‘I came into a world full of carob trees. As my ancestors planted for me, so too am I planting for my descendants.’” (Talmud, Ta’anit 23a)
Then Choni eats his meal and falls asleep. When he wakes up, Choni sees a man gathering carobs. He learns that the tree whose shade he lies under is the sapling he saw being planted, and that the man gathering fruit is the grandson of the man who had planted it. His donkey has given birth to generations of baby donkeys. He has in fact slept for 70 years – a lifetime.
Choni has been transplanted into the future and it could not be more disorientating or distressing. He enters the study hall and hears students discussing his own teachings, but when he introduces himself, nobody believes he is who he says he is. Having outlived everyone of his generation, he dies of loneliness.
Choni’s story is an utterly tragic one. He slept his life away and accomplished nothing. But that’s true only if you think that sleep is a waste of time. Maybe a different reading is possible.
Matrescence is an involuntary but immeasurably fruitful process. Creating and supporting new life is the very definition of productivity, even if it looks like nothing. Sleep too, is a time when nature forces us to get out of our own way so that biological and psychological processes can take place unimpeded by the busybody that each of us is while awake. It’s not unproductive.
Katherine May urges us to recognise that wintering is a seasonal process, though not one whose schedule we control: “It’s a humiliation or failure. The drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. [ ] It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”
Wintering is being stuck, depleted, depressed, sick or convalescing. We are far from dead. Those periods of dormancy, sleep and wintering are in fact richly generative. That’s life gearing up for its next act.
Tu Bishvat takes place when it’s still winter because, as May says, “Winter is not the death of the lifecycle but its crucible.”
Zahavit Shalev is interim rabbi at Westminster Synagogue
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