[Like] many plants about this season of the year, . . . some human beings in the November of their days exhibit some fresh radical greenness, which, though the frosts may soon nip it, indicates and confirms their essential vitality. When their summer leaves have faded and fallen, they put forth fresh radical leaves which sustain the life in their root still, against a new spring.
—Henry David Thoreau’s Journals (November 17, 1853)
It’s the gradual change of seasons, from fall to winter, noticeable even here in Soutern California, that has made me think a bit differently about the ongoing war in Gaza and the rise of anti-Semitism around the world.
As Oct. 7 recedes in the calendar, though not in memory, I’ve begun to see it as another major event that defined our times, but with the stress on ‘another’. Our long history is marked by many tragic and joyous events, and in this century already: wars, elections, demonstrations, the recent upswing of hope for a lasting peace with the Abrahamic Accords, and now this.
And yet, the river of history is flowing on unstoppably. Hope will return and possibly be dashed again, or triumph, or transform into something entirely new.
My cousin Gil sent me photos of birds filling up the marshes of the Hula Valley in the north of Israel. They reminded me instantly of the change of seasons. Noticing things outside our heads is critical, and nature is the first place we can go to.
Every year, half a billion birds pass over the valley, migrating from Europe to Africa, and thousands of birds spend the winter there. This fall, missiles fell in the valley, yet birds still come, seasons still change, and life goes on with its cycles.
I found more inspiration in a little-known book by Thoreau, called The River, a compilation of the journals he kept in the 1850s living in the woods by the Concord River. His journals are deeply introspective, observing the world at the micro-level, slowing the pace down to that of spiders walking on the surface of water and the stillness of a “clear cool calm morning in November when the air is peculiarly clear and resonant and that white vapor as of frost-steam hangs over the earth.”
His descriptions are exquisite, such as this one:
“As I pushed up the river, I saw the blue heron arise from the shore and disappear with heavily-flapping wings around a bend in front . . , low over the water, seen against the woods, . . . with a great slate-colored expanse of wing, suited to the shadows of the stream, a tempered blue as of the sky and dark water commingled.” (November)
The 12th-century Rabbi Moses ben Rahman (a.k.a. Nachmanides or Ramban) suggested that G-d created the rainbow to be the sign of His covenant with mankind. “Why? Why the rainbow?” asked Rav Yosef Kanefsky, my synagogue rabbi, on our shul blog.
“People stop on the sidewalk and look and point when a rainbow appears. And the whole rest of the day we ask each other, ‘Did you see it? It was beautiful’. G-d chooses as His sign something that is beautiful. As a way of saying to us that even at a time of utter bleakness and destruction, we should hold out for the beautiful.”
These times of bleakness have already given us some ‘fresh, radical green leaves’ – moments that inspire, even uplift:
Thousands of Israelis have gone to volunteer on the farms in the country’s south, left now without workers. Regular citizens stepped up to meet the challenge of picking harvest and planting the next year’s crops.
My friend Eran Shayshon, a political scientist by trade, describes his experience picking pomegranates at one of these farms.
Israel’s tiny Druze community has thrown itself into the effort to help the country, sewing army gear, cooking for soldiers, and supporting evacuees from border zones.
And out here in the West, where thanks to the anti-Semitic hysteria, some Jews started to remove the mezuzahs from their doors to avoid being singled out, some of their non-Jewish neighbors started to put mezuzahs on their doors in solidarity.
I can share many other of these ‘radical leaves’. May we see more of them in the days to come!
-Lane
Lane Igoudin | Author, Professor, Dad 