Tu B’Shevat - Have You Made Art About It Yet? Tu b’Shevat Edition - We As Tree by Rabbi Adina Allen

To understand more about how JSP uses this source sheet, see The Jewish Studio Project's Approach to Text Study.

Note: In its context this line is read as a rhetorical question “is a tree of the field like a person?” to which the assumed answer is “no.” Midrashically this line is flipped and read as a statement connecting humans to trees.

Questions:

• What might it mean to compare both human beings and Torah to trees?
  • What does this say about Torah? About people? About trees?

• Play with the texts below. How might they expand, add to or deepen this metaphorical connection between humans, trees and Torah?

“Even 1 Tree,” Futurity, posted by Stanford University, Oct 25, 2016

Adding one tree to an open pasture can increase its bird biodiversity from almost zero species to as high as 80.

“15 Astounding Facts About Trees,” Treehugger, Russell McLendon, June 14, 2022

During the Jurassic Period, a genus of cone-bearing evergreen trees now named Wollemia lived on the supercontinent Gondwana. These ancient trees were long known only from the fossil record, and were thought to have been extinct for 150 million years—until 1994, when a few survivors of one species were found living in a temperate rainforest at Australia's Wollemia National Park.

“Forests on Forests,” Radiolab podcast, Feb 4, 2022

… in the [canopies] of old-growth redwood forests on the West Coast…the [canopies of these] giants were found to be holding these pockets of soil up to three feet deep. And growing in this soil were flowers, berry bushes, mosses, lichens. They found salamanders living hundreds of feet in the air who spend their whole lives never touching the ground….these tree canopies that, up until the mid-'80s, everyone thought were just pretty much empty, not only are they not empty, they actually hold about 50 percent of all terrestrial life on the planet.

Note: The forest canopy is the uppermost layer of a forest, characterized by the crowns of the trees