Rabbi's Blog: Planting for the Future

This spring, our backyard was littered with dead and dying trees — a long row of Leyland

cypress, planted years ago as a quick privacy screen. I didn't know much about trees before this happened to me. But I've since learned that Leyland cypress are popular precisely because they grow fast. The tradeoff is that they don't live very long. Someone, at some point, planted them to be enjoyed sooner rather than later.

I did not enjoy them later. I enjoyed them not at all, in fact, once we learned what it takes to remove several enormous dead trees from a backyard. Turns out that hiring a trained, insured crew that has a crane capable of lifting 60’ dead trees over our house is not cheap.

Now we're planning what to plant this fall, and that experience has made us more thoughtful. What will give us something now, some shade, some beauty, and a sense of privacy, but also hold up decades from now, long after the fast-growing stuff has come and gone? We're trying to hold both timelines at once: the near future we'll actually get to enjoy, and the far future we're simply trusting will be worth building toward.

There's an old rabbinic story about a man named Honi, who saw someone planting a carob tree— a tree that takes seventy years to bear fruit. Honi asked him: do you really expect to live seventy more years and eat from this tree? The man answered simply: I found a world full of carob trees because those who came before me planted them. So I plant for those who come after me.

We're entering Elul now, the month of reflection before the Days of Awe, and soon after, Sukkot, our harvest festival, of gathering in what was planted long before this season began. As we plant this fall, in our yards and in our lives, may we have the wisdom to plant some things for now, and the faith to plant other things for a future, even if there’s no guarantee on what that future may hold.