Visiting the synagogue Judaica store I was amazed at the sheer number of decorative tzedakah boxes available today. Children’s tzedakah boxes in the shape of Noah’s ark, abstract metal shapes, historic synagogues, and simple wooden boxes with the word tzedakah burnt on. However there was one box that was not on the shelf, which from my Hebrew School days was probably the most important box. It wasn’t the most decorative and in fact the box itself didn’t cost a dime. It was metal, coated with light blue and white paint and had a funny key hole on the bottom which made me always wonder how they ever got the money out of the box. The JNF tzedakah box was a stalwart of my Hebrew school days. Every year each student would receive a box with the express goal of filling it with money. On Tu B’Shvat we would bring in the filled box and hand it to the teacher. I am not sure if it was pure marketing genius or just social conditioning, but somehow every kid (parents included) even if they saved for other charities knew that it was important to fill that little blue box. Of course as kids it was a contest to see who could plant more trees. One kid boasted that his father had planted an entire forest with the names of each of his family members. I admit that when I went to Israel for the first time when I was ten years old, I tried to find the trees with our names, only to be disappointed that the trees themselves did not have nametags. This aside, I believe the real impact was that for $18 a kid could make a difference by planting a tree in the land of Israel.
In what I consider another one of the other great miracles of the State of Israel, the barren land was made to bloom and I got to help. In a famous Talmudic passage (Taanit 23a) a young man named Honi was walking down the road, and saw an old man planting a carob tree. Honi said to him, “Since the carob tree doesn’t bear fruit for seventy years, are you so sure that you will live seventy years and eat from it?!” The old man replied, “I found a world that was full of carob trees. Just like my ancestors planted for me, so I plant for my descendants.” Even in the time of the Talmud we can see the pull of immediate self gratification or of “looking out for #1”, as a concept in which the tradition tried to counter. In our modern world today the notion of a disposable, live in the moment world, has hampered the long range planning which is necessary to protect and conserve our precious environment. What we do today both for the positive (planting trees, recycling, eating organic), or for the negative (S.U.V’s, drilling in nature reserves, urban sprawl) impacts not only our quality of life, but the quality of life for entire future generations. What will we leave them as a legacy? This Tu B’Shvat let each of us strive to become more environmentally aware, take greater care in the decisions we make, and give tzedakah to those who on our behalf protect, and enrich our world. Indeed as those little blue boxes taught us, each of us can and does make a difference.
