Fwd: [Chasidus w/o Borders] The meaning of Tu Bishvat this year

[Aharon Varady]

Forwarding this important message from Open Siddur Project contributor, Rabbi David Seidenberg, author of Kabbalah and Ecology (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Seidenberg <rebdu...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 2:16 PM
Subject: [Chasidus w/o Borders] The meaning of Tu Bishvat this year
To: ha...@googlegroups.com


There is tremendous motivation to stop civil and human rights abuses,
and I am confident that we will in the end succeed.

But Tu Bishvat is coming up tomorrow night, and we are not paying as
close attention to what Trump &co plan to do to the environment. I'm
writing to beg you all to please put some of your attention to those
issues. Tu Bishvat is one moment to do that. (See
neohasid.org/resources/tu_bishvat for resources.)

I think this year Tu Bishvat is more important than ever. The tycoons
and oil barons now in charge of our government will strip the earth of
her forests and poison her aquifers and ruin the atmosphere in order
to make their money, and when things become too far gone, they're
gone.

It's already so easy to focus just on the outrages being perpetrated
directly against humanity, and of course we need to focus on them. But
we can't take our eyes and hearts away from what's happening to the
Earth either. Even from a human-centered perspective, there can be no
human rights without access to water, good land, a thriving natural
world.

I believe there is a Trumpist long game, and it's this: overwhelm us
on the human rights front and then, while we are focused on that,
complete the works of destruction against the earth.

What's their theory -- after all, don't they need the fruits of the
natural world to survive too?

I think what's going on, though not consciously, is that we all
understand that we are about to go through an evolutionary bottleneck.
Our past actions as a species have made that set in stone, I would
say.

One way through that is for everyone to work together mutually for our
survival. The other way is for individuals to commandeer tremendous
volumes of resources for themselves and to outcompete the rest of
humanity. The first way requires healthy democracies, while the second
way requires a fascist political system. If you think fascism is
tempting now to so many Americans, imagine what it will be like when
we are actually fighting wars over water and dealing with ten times
the number of refugees from climate disasters.

The Tu Bishvat seder is actually about this very question, because it
is broadly speaking a celebration of symbiosis between species.
If you think just a little bit about the Kabbalistic seder, as we move
through the worlds we move from one kind of "fruit" to the next
representing greater and greater symbiosis. So at the first level,
when we eat nuts with a shell (which are not actually fruit in the
botanical sense but something that we can take from trees), we are
destroying the seed that needs to be planted in order to feed
ourselves. At the second level, eating fruit with a pit, we are eating
fruit and discarding the seed, so we cannot pass the seed through our
bodies to help fertilize and nourish it. At the third level, wholly
edible fruit -- meaning fruit with seeds small enough to swallow, we
are in a kind of perfect symbiosis, where we pass the seed through our
digestive tract and we can fertilize and nourish it.

I also like to think of the seder as a celebration of the evolutionary
Tree of Life and not just the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. In both
senses, this is the tree that nourishes us and that we are responsible
for. Democracy -- true democracy -- fits the spirit of evolution and
ecology. "Survival of the fittest" actually means this: survival of
the species that find ways to fit together with each other so as to
increase life for all beings.

In sum: we need to always remember the Earth and our responsibility to
her and to all living creatures. Please take some time to look through
the resources on neohasid.org, and also on other sites like
opensiddur.org, hazon.org, etc, so that we can muster all our
spiritual resources to fight for the good of all creatures on this
planet.

You can find resources to help you do this on Tu Bishvat on
neohasid.org at neohasid.org/resources/tu_bishvat .

--
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Aharon Varady
Founding Director, Hierophant
the Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.org

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