Happy New Tree: A Tu B'Shevat Prayer

From the Izhbitzer Rebbe, this little bit of excerptage comes to us by way of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, by way of my old yeshiva Simchat Shlomo. I edited it a bit, solely for purposes of cutting out the Hebrewese and the "you know"s, but for the most part, it's Shlomo's words. It's about how what we can learn from the way trees and seeds and vegetables pray.

What's the difference between a cute little vegetable and a tree? How come a vegetable is dead when it's done? A tree can live for hundreds of years.....The tree prays to G-d, please make something out of me.

How come one apple tree tastes so good and another one not? When the apple seed is praying before G-d the very last second before it’s completely disintegrated it's the prayer of the deepest depths. And if its prayer is not so deep...There you have two trees.

The depth of this lesson is awesome. Gevaldt, it's the very last prayer we say before we leave the world... A vegetable prays a cute little prayer. A vegetable grows and then just stops... But an apple seed, it prays so much. It’s every second. It can't stop. The apple seed's prayer is a "forever" prayer. So the tree lives forever because this seed prayed so hard.

The month of Shvat is the Rosh Hashanah L'Elanot, the new year - the headquarters - of the trees.

Now, listen to this. A vegetable doesn't cry when it disappears. It says, "I had my day. I'm happy. I had a summer. I had a good time on the earth, saw the sun, went to the supermarket, ended up in the Shabos stew...."

Do you know what the tree is crying out? The tree, when it reaches the end, all its prayers are rising up again. The tree prays all its prayers again.

I want to tell you something very deep. Imagine I need coffee. I say, "Please G-d, give me some coffee." And G-d answers me, "OK, I'll get you some coffee." But when I pray for something very deep, my prayer is all that there is. The more I need something from G-d, the deeper my prayer touches my soul. And that prayer touches all the prayers which I ever prayed in this lifetime and perhaps other lifetimes as well...

It's rare that something in the Torah strikes me that makes me believe in it. Agreeing with it is nothing special. Disagreeing, that's even more frequent. But something that makes me pump my fist in the air like a rock song and start loving the world all over again....

Yeah. That's all I wanted to say.