Today is one of my favourite Jewish holidays. It\u2019s the birthday of trees. When I was a child, we planted a tree in the backyard. I used to find a really nice tree and hug it and wish it happy birthday. This latter wasn\u2019t due to any religious proclivities \u2013 I loved hugging trees when I was little and this was the perfect excuse. If I had time and could find a good paperbark, I\u2019d take a bit of the paperlike bark and write a poem to trees, on their birthday. Luckily for the world, none of these poems survive. I don\u2019t think I showed them to anyone, either. They were between me and the birthday celebrants. I once made a magazine using paperbark, but that had nothing to do with the birthday of trees.<\/p>\n
These days, I donate a sum of money that has symbolic significance and someone plants trees for me, in a place that really needs them. Every year I do a bit of an internet search to decide on which organisation should get my money. I donate, then promptly forget how much money and which organisation. The trees will be planted, that\u2019s the important thing. I may, however, quietly whisper a \u201cHappy birthday\u2019 when I press the \u2018donate\u2019 button.<\/p>\n
Because the old Jewish way of counting used the alphabet, every word in Hebrew has a numerical value. The word I chose for trees today was \u201cLife.\u201d I didn\u2019t have enough money to plant that many trees, but I had enough to spend that amount of money on planting trees somewhere they were needed. I forgot, however, to whisper that happy birthday. If I were still that tree-hugging five year old, I\u2019d wonder if they missed me. (Let me make up for dereliction and whisper right now…)<\/p>\n
I’m back. I even sang trees the birthday song this year, because it’s midnight and midsummer in Australia and it seemed appropriate.<\/p>\n
One of the small mysteries of my life is that so many people tell me how important Chanukah is. I know this is because it\u2019s closeish to Christmas so it\u2019s considered an acceptable festival by many non-Jews. Tu B\u2019Shvat (today) is only a little further away, and it\u2019s all about trees. Why can\u2019t the secular world choose it, instead?<\/p>\n
I may never truly understand why the non-Jewish world favours the festival when we gamble above the festival when we plant trees.<\/p>\n
Our next important festival is the one where it\u2019s obligatory to get drunk. I have my own version of the Purim story. If any of you are interested in it, let me know and I\u2019ll put it up here when the time comes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is one of my favourite Jewish holidays. It\u2019s the birthday of trees. When I was a child, we planted a tree in the backyard. I used to find a really nice tree and hug it and wish it happy birthday. This latter wasn\u2019t due to any religious proclivities \u2013 I loved hugging trees when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[636,56],"tags":[253,654,178,653,655,652],"class_list":["post-2564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-life-experiences","tag-birthday","tag-celebration","tag-chanukah","tag-purim","tag-trees","tag-tu-bshvat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2565,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions\/2565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}