Once upon a time, we knew, deep inside, the magic of fruit trees.

The trees of life and the knowledge of good and evil in the Book of Genesis were not pine or poplar or cypress. They were fruit trees. The dove did not bring back an ash leaf or elm bough but an olive branch.

The laws of the Torah that urge us to avoid waste and limit what we disturb in the process of building, come from the command not to destroy fruit trees in the pursuit of war.  Other trees may be made into battlements and weapons of war, but not fruit trees. In a time of siege, in a time of such need, fruit trees may not be destroyed or harvested for their wood.

The lesson: we may not destroy what we will need tomorrow in response to the desperations of today.

The rabbis extended this preferential treatment of fruit trees.

They asked, why does the Torah (Exodus 26:15) require the pillars of the Tabernacle be made out of acacia wood? To teach us a lesson. Though God could have chosen any tree for the construction of the Tabernacle, God chose the acacia, a tree with no beneficial fruit or product save the wood itself.

So too, we humans, when selecting wood to build our homes, should not choose a fruit tree. To do otherwise would engage in discretionary, avoidable destruction.

It is not hard to extract a more global message: in the act of building civilization, we must uproot bits of nature. That is unavoidable. But we should do so only with the most efficient of materials, the least disruptive of methods, and in ways that allow us to be nurtured as much tomorrow as we are today.

I went to the first Siach conference (see below) last summer. It was an amazing opportunity to meet fellow activists all along the religious and social justice/environmental spectrum. It is premised on created a world-wide conversation, and new, unexpected synergies to make things happen.

This summer, it is in Israel If you are interested, check out the information below.

Siach: An Environment and Social Justice Conversation

Applications for 2012 conference are open!

WHAT:  A unique opportunity to meet, share and collaborate with fellow social justice and environment activists from across the Jewish world.  Siach, an Environment and Social Justice Conversation, brings together committed activists from across Israel, North America, and Europe. Supported by the UJA Federation of New York, with anchors in the US, Israel and Great Britain, and scores of member organizations, Siach is deepening the nuanced understanding of Jewish Peoplehood and Israel engagement with those for whom the pursuit of social and environmental justice is one of the defining characteristics of their identity.

WHERE:  The second annual Siach conference will take place in Ohalo Manor Hotel, on the Kinneret in Israel.

WHEN: June 15-18, 2012

WHO:  We are looking for individuals who are doers, networkers, out-of-the-box thinkers and visionaries with the desire to share our vision of creating a global network of collaboration in the areas of environment and social justice.

Stipends up to $1200 are available.

Click here for more information and to apply.

When my son moved to NYC last summer, he took the furniture from his DC-sized area apartment to his Manhattan-sized apartment. And - unfortunately - discovered that it didn’t all fit.

So, like the native New Yorker he is,  he put the excess furniture out on the curb. Three hours later, it was gone. I had earlier seen a man on the street stop, set his briefcase down beside my son’s flotsam (or more properly, jetsam), call someone to describe his find to, all the while assuming that protective, this-is-mine-don’t-even-think-about-it stance.

When I went back outside a half hour later, the furniture, and the man, were gone.  You gotta love New York.

It handily solves one of life’s persistent questions: What to do with things we don’t want, perfectly good things that too often find their way to the trash, or clutter up our otherwise perfectly fine homes, all because we don’t know how to properly get rid of them.

Thankfully, more and more, across the world, we are re-creating the best of New York City’s casual street trade in a more organized, yet equally robust recycling, re-using, and re-purposing marketplace.

I recently read about Bookcrossing.com,  a way to recycle your books, track where they go and see who else reads them in a worldwide book-sharing community. (You go to the site, download bookcrossing ID labels, slap them on the books you want to give away, and then either release them into the wind or register them on the site for others to request).

There is of course the old standby, Freecycle.org, the local on-line neighbor-to-neighbor free marketplace that allows you to post stuff you want to give away and find stuff you want to get. It is, according to their website, made up of “5,022 groups with 8,878,732 members around the world.” Pretty impressive. And you can get anything from open bags of kitty litter to living room suites.

Baltimore also has our very own Loading Dock, a national model for re-cycling and re-using building and construction materials. You can get or donate windows, appliances, flooring, paint, most anything that is still in good working order that you would otherwise have to pay to haul away. (Baltimore County, at least, does not collect construction debris in its trash or recycling rounds.)

And there are of course the old stand-bys: flea markets and garage sales.

There are some folks who worry about lost manufacturing jobs and a hit to the economy that such re-use might have. The truth is, as long as the population is still growing, we will need more - not just re-used - stuff. But we also know that we cannot keep digging things out of the earth for materials and energy and think that is the best way to give people jobs.

Re-cycling and re-purposing can also be a growing jobs sector. Someone has to drive the trucks and manage the inventory and keep the books and do the advertising; and someone has to demolish the old and rebuild the new.

What is wonderful about many, if not most, of these enterprises, is that they start out home-grown, work through the affordable services of the internet, and build community at the same time. They don’t take an MBA or lots of start-up capital. They take passion, caring and faith in the goodwill of people.

I do have one question though: What do people do with their old, shabby clothes? Not the kind that you can give away to Goodwill or take to the Hadassah re-sale shop. And certainly not the kind that you can sell via a consignment shop.

I mean those socks with holes and t-shirts that are threadbare… those things that years ago might have been made into rag rugs or used to clean silver.

I have enough cleaning rags, thank you. And we have enough quilting squares to keep my daughter busy for years. So the question remains, how do we recycle fabric that otherwise just goes into the landfills? Old kitchen towels, underwear, totally unwearable and unsaleable stuff hanging in closets.

If you have an answer, or better, a vendor, who can solve this dilemma for me, please do let me know.

I will gladly share the advice.

There is a tree in our yard that is hard to see, nestled as it is in the midst of bolder, taller and more boastful trees.

Its demur boughs are entwined in a tangle of branches. You would hardly know it was there at all, and I almost never pay attention to it. But what caught my eye today, as I wrestled with a stubborn, thorny nemesis nearby, were the drapings of shimmering, gossamer pods.

The tree looked enchanted, lit up as if from within, by the light of the translucent pods. It was as if a fairy had hung the seeds of a thousand dreams on the tips of its branches.

(Now it all makes sense: This is what the tooth fairy does! It isn’t our children’s teeny teeth that she wants. It is the dreams that are born with, and borne by, each tooth lost. Each tooth that falls out, each tooth excitedly placed beneath the pillow, captures the delight, the dreams, of our children. It ferries them between their worlds of fantasy and growth, childhood and maturity. The tooth fairy gathers these innocent, inchoate dreams, before they get lost in the passage of time, and adorns the world with them.)

The pods are frail, yet tenacious. They hang there together, two-by-two, bunch by bunch, throughout the winter, cradling the dreams of yesterday, the seeds of tomorrow.

Waiting. Waiting.

Waiting for us to remember and redeem them.

We are like the tree. We carry around our invisible, tenacious gossamer dreams, hidden in the rush of daily life so that we rarely notice them. They dangle, almost weightless, as we move, fluttering ever so gently in the gusts of time.

Then one day, when we are wrestling with the weeds of life nearby, we look up, and there they are.

And we remember, vaguely, the delight of childhood and the world we wanted to find, the world we wanted to create.

I just returned from a whirlwind trip to Israel, which serendipitously coincided with the season of Tu B’shvat, the day that marks the new year of the trees. Since the times of the early rabbis, this holiday has been a sacred day on the Jewish calendar.

In modern Israel, it is a day of joy, when school children go out into the fields and countryside to plant trees, put on plays and celebrate the glories of a returning spring. Friends and family visit each other, exchanging gifts of dried figs and dates, almonds and apricots. Wherever we went, we were the recipients of the abundance of these baskets and platters of this vernal visiting.

Off a side road from Tel Aviv to Be’er Sheva, at the farm of Ariel Sharon, we saw that almond trees really do burst into blossom almost overnight. Adorned in white petals with a pinkish hue, almond trees stand, a bit demur yet all puffed up, looking like a shy but proud debutant being presented to the world in her poofy crinolined skirt. All around, the land just smiles, covered with a profusion of wildflowers.

What struck me throughout these quiet celebrations - though why it took me all this time to fully grasp this, I don’t know - is that Tu B’shvat is not a holiday about trees. It is not like Arbor Day, a broad celebration of the gifts of all trees. It is, rather, a holiday pointedly about fruit trees. Non-fruiting trees are, technically, unconcerned with Tu B’shvat. For Tu B’shvat is an accounting tool, a way to determine how old a fruit tree is and which fruits are counted in which year’s harvest.

Perhaps I am more sensitive this year to this fact given that I am the founder of a new organization called the Baltimore Orchard Project, which began last September and focuses on gleaning fruit from residential and other non-commercial trees and giving it to the hungry, as well as promoting the planting of more local fruit trees.

(By the way, we are looking for volunteers to help us build an inventory of all such fruit trees in the city and county, and to help us harvest and distribute the fruit in late summer and fall. If you would like to join us, please let me know! You can sign up on our website or send me a comment on this blog.)

What was stunning in Israel is the way so many people across the land (we went from Be’er Sheva in the south to Zichron Yaakov in the north) have fruit trees growing in their yards and along the sides of roadways. Teas were spiced with lemons and loquats plucked before the meal (and in one case, our host made it from fresh herbs growing in her garden).

Though Baltimore is not the climate for citrus, we are a great climate for other fruits like figs, peaches, pears, apples, nut trees, and much more. Once upon a time, here in Baltimore, it was all the rage to plant fruit and nut trees in one’s yard. Somehow that fell out of favor for more exotic ornamentals.

How wonderful would it be if we could re-establish the norm of planting fruit trees in our yards. And orchards on empty city lots. How wonderful if our homes and cities were not simply sterile, ornamental landscapes but working land that enriched the beauty, the bounty and the health of our community.

On Sunday, I had the pleasure of visiting Congregation B’nai Israel in Easton, MD. A gem of a shul, we celebrated a Tu B’shvat seder that was built around the kabbalistic symbols of four cups of wine whose color deepened from white to red as the seder progressed, and four kinds of fruit with edible and inedible centers and skins.

After the seder, I spoke about the need for us to imagine a new narrative, one that moves us from what-we-do to who-we-are; one that can transform our bundle environmental deeds into body of purpose.

Shabbat, it seems to me, is such a narrative. Our entire week (and hence our entire life) is framed by Shabbat. The rabbis tell us that just as a person cannot go three days without water, so we are never more than three days away from Shabbat.

We are told that the essence of Shabbat trails into the beginning of the week, that we can do havdalah, the ritual ending of Shabbat, as late as Tuesday. And on Wednesday, we begin preparing for the coming Shabbat.

Shabbat, then, is not just a day. It is the frame of our days and our lives.

And what is the essence of Shabbat? Abraham Joshua Heschel explains it this way: “There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.”

This vision of Shabbat the rabbis call: a taste of the world to come.

Shabbat is, in essence, the perfect world we seek, where there is no want, no possession, no lack. We rest on Shabbat not so much to recover from the week past or to prepare for the week to come - though those are blessed benefits of Shabbat. We rest on Shabbat for all is - symbolically - done. We have arrived - the fullness of our quest is realized. We don’t need to own anymore for all that we have is sufficient. We don’t need to work anymore for all we sought is accomplished. We don’t need to fear for everyone has all they need.

But the commandment to observe Shabbat has not one part but two: “Six days shall you labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord. You shall do no work.”

The Shabbat commandment teaches us not only about the quality of our “rest” but the quality of our work. We get to enjoy Shabbat because we earn it through the work of our week, the work of our lives.

Ortega y Gasset said:  “Living is nothing more or less than doing one thing instead of another.”

Living in the light of Shabbat helps us choose what to do: to live in a way that leads to a world of fullness and contentment, a world of Shabbat.

“We used to teach technology as a subject. [Today,] it’s no longer the ‘something’ that we teach; it’s the platform on which we deliver information.” Shaindle Braunstein-Cohen on iPads in Jewish Day Schools, by Rabbi Jason Miller (quoted from eJewish Philanthropy)

This is true with so many fundamental tasks of life: walking, reading, writing ... The techniques that we once labored so hard to master ultimately become merely platforms upon which we build creative worlds.

So too with sustainability. We teach sustainability as a subject today. We will know we have arrived at a sustainable world when it is no longer something we teach but something that forms, quite naturally, the “platform”, the given,  upon which we build the production, consumption and “waste” of our society.

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Poor service and terrible meals.  Visited on 2/4/10 and three of us ordered steaks.  Two of the steaks arrived and were cooked inconsistently and one was missing the jumbo crab.  Third steak was not delivered because it was “overdone”.  When it finally arrived, it was raw and accompanied by glossy and gummy looking garlic mashed potatoes (waiter said they always make them that way).  Waiter said he thought the steak might not be done - but decided to deliver it anyway?  Break never arrived and the potpie special wasn’t…  Topping was pastey white and consisted mostly of gravy.  I called the day after to talk to the owner or manager and did not get further than the bartended, who said she would make sure the manager called me back (Friday).  Given the forecast for bad weather, I said it would be fine if the owner or manager called me by Monday, was again assured I would get a call on Friday.  It is now Tuesday…  I recommend that if the kitchen is overwhelmed on a given night, tell your patrons to order sandwiches - not a steak for $20+ dollars that they cannot deliver.  We won’t be back.