ESSAY: Your True Tree Self (Parashat Shoftim)

כי האדם עץ השדה
For a person is a tree of the field (Deuteronomy 21:19).

This phrase appears as part of the Torah’s prohibition against cutting down trees in a wartime siege.  You should not cut them down because people are like trees.  What is strange about this phrase – and interpretations abound – is that logic dictates that the phrase should have been stated in the reverse, as in “don’t cut down trees because trees are (like) humans.”   “For a person is a tree of the field” implies that the Torah is making a statement not just about trees, but also about humans, about what it means to be a human being – that being human has something to do, in its essence, with being a tree.  

(I want to pause at the start to emphasize that my reading of this mitzvah is not at all meant to deny its practical concrete meaning – don’t destroy actual trees in the world – which is so important in the world right now.  If anything, it is my hope that in reinforcing our sense of identification with trees, we will feel all the more strongly about their protection.)

Part I: How Are We Like Trees?

Ki ha’adam etz hasadeh.  “For a person is a tree of the field.”   In our best moments, we are indeed like trees – grounded and steady, strong in our sense of rootedness in the earth, and majestic and dignified in our uprightness, standing tall like a tree.   

And still.   There is a deep tree-like stillness that we are capable of, a quiet calm presence that is not flailing about in anxiety or desperately trying to fix things, but resting in stillness and allowing the world to happen around us, standing witness to whatever transpires with the perspective of many years and other scenes that have gone by, bearing silent witness with steadiness and strength to the joys and the sorrows, the tragedies and the cruelty and the kindness.  

At the same time, we share with trees a reaching quality.  The trees’ limbs reach up and out – like our arms  – yearning to reach heaven, to implore God for assistance in what has been witnessed below, and also reaching out to provide shade and shelter and nourishment as it can, as we can.   Like trees, we are both still and reaching.  

Trees communicate through their roots with other trees around them, in a vast underground network.  We, too, are part of a silent, invisible network of communication and connection – though we are often unaware of it –  to other humans, to the earth, to everything in the universe, to all consciousness that is linked and one, to God.  Indeed, our relationship with trees can help us tap into this connectedness; there is a give and take between us in the form of our breath, as we breathe out carbon dioxide and the trees breathe it in and send back out the oxygen we need. Back and forth, a silent invisible current running between us, connecting us to the universe in unseen ways.  

The Torah does not just say we are like trees; it says we are like an etz hasadeh, “a tree of the field.”   This is not a drawing of a free floating tree hanging in the air, but of a tree rooted in a particular place, within a context, a field, a larger place.  There is a sense of belonging in this space, not floating, but rooted and belonging; we are a part of something larger.  

It is also important to note (as pointed out to me by Rhondda May) that the Torah’s image seems to be of a solitary tree in a field, not of a tree in a forest full of other such trees.  There is a sense here of individuality, of uniqueness.  Indeed, one of the traits we share with trees is that each tree, like each human, is a unique specimen, unlike any other.   We stand tallest when we remember that specialness, when we remember that God created us as a very particular manifestation of the divine and we have a unique destiny to fulfill. 

Part II: Trees in a War

Significantly, the Torah draws this equivalence between humans and trees in the context of war, warning us not to destroy the tree while we are in the midst of a siege.   Why?  Because it is at war, in the constant continuous struggle – both inner and outer – of our lives, in the daily energy of sieging, of overcoming obstacles and striving to win, to accomplish, to vanquish, that we are most at danger of losing sight of our “treeness.”   

The “war” activity may manifest as self aggression or inner conflict or as outward directed aggression or competitiveness.  These are not completely negative energies – they make the world go round – but there is danger when they go on, as they do for most of us, yamim rabim, for many days, when they become the norm, the air we breathe.  There is danger that we begin to chop down – as if with an axe, as the Torah describes – gradually but surely chop down the tree essence – the still steady presence – that lives inside us.  We can never really destroy that essence, but over time, we can cover it over so completely that we forget who we are and it becomes as if it is lost to us, decimated.   We are so busy with the sieging of life, we are in danger of losing our true tree selves.

We have all, to a greater or lesser extent, been exiled from this pure tree essence since the day we were banished from the Garden of Eden, from the Etz HaHayim, our personal Tree of Life, and from the Etz HaDa’at, our Tree of Self Knowledge.  Since that day, we no longer have complete contact with our True tree selves; we easily wander astray and forget who we are; we are flooded and distracted by our conflicts so that we become like chaff in the wind, not rooted like a tree, but blown about by circumstance and emotion and inner struggle far from our essence and far from our connection to God.  We often live not in a state of calm regal stature, but in a state of siege.  

Part III: Returning to Our Tree Selves

But this is a season of teshuvah, of return; we feel the yearning ache to return to our original Garden of Eden tree selves; it draws us forward –  and backward – to our origins.  Tradition teaches that during this season, hamelekh basadeh, the king – God – is in the field, out and accessible.  At this time we can connect more easily to God, and maybe also to our own etz hasadeh, our own tree in this same field, that particular manifestation of the king that lives inside us, part of the vast divine field of consciousness of which we are a part.  We can return now; we can take our place in the field again. 

And as we return, we bring with us all the warring, sieging parts of ourselves, not leaving them behind, but taking them with us.  We live in this human world of struggle; we do not abandon those energies, but hold them alongside our restful tree essence.  We let the two energies meet each other inside us – the chaff blown in the wind and the steady groundedness of the tree.  We let the energy of struggle get to know the place of peace, and we let the place of peace hold and surround the struggle, so that the struggle can rest in its midst, like a crying baby in the steady, secure arms of her parent, or like the swaying limbs and leaves at the top of the tree that are held fast by the tree’s sturdy trunk and deeply grounded roots.  

Ki ha’adam etz hasadeh.   For a person – even in the midst of war – is still a tree of the field, still steady, majestic and connected.   

Photo by Antony Trivet at Pexels