This month I saw snow for the first time. I’m 23-and-a-half and I was born, raised and educated in the Sun Belt. I’ve experienced hurricanes, monsoons, record breaking droughts, sandstorms, earthquakes, heat waves, the occasional tornado warning, a cricket invasion and — shockingly — hail. But never snow.
I moved to New York just a few months ago and I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t checking the weather app like a 5 year old everyday looking for signs, any sign at all, that maybe just maybe I would finally get to see the kind of snow that I grew up seeing on TV and in movies. So sue me if, when it did happen, I was so excited that I forgot to put on my gloves and ran to the elevator of the theatre admin office that I work in so that I could fly down the nine floors to the ground and feel the delicate icy sculptures fall onto me. Did I stand on the sidewalk and look up at the sky? Yes. Did it anger a lot of busy New Yorkers on their way back from their lunch break? They took every chance to tell me. It was incredible.
A few days later it snowed in Los Angeles, a city that my family has held close for decades and that I recently attended college in, but this snow was different. It was gray and ashy, more of a warning of the devastation to come than a beautiful display of nature’s fragility. Since January 7th eight different wildfires have made their way through the city of angels while the Palisades fire alone has burned over 23,000 acres of land. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, that’s a bigger portion of earth than the island of Manhattan where I’m writing this article today.
I could keep telling you about the fire and the destruction that it continues to cause. How some of my family member’s homes burned down, about the fear that my alma mater could turn into dust, how much I love L.A. and the people who live there and how it’s really fucking hard to be 2,500 miles away and only be able to give them a phone call.
But Tu Bishvat is nearby. For as long as I can remember the Jewish birthday for the trees and its origins and celebrations, shrouded in obscurity, have always intrigued me. It turns out Torah law prohibits eating fruit from trees within their first three years of being planted, so in order to determine a “tree year,” or a tree cycle, Tu Bishvat was born. Still, it’s technically not a Torah holiday, nor is it based on an entertaining story, and it doesn’t have any proximity to widely celebrated Christian holidays (I’m looking at you, Hanukkah.) As such Tu Bishvat often gets cast to the side. Growing up I, like many Jews, celebrated the New Year of the Trees by going outside and planting some seeds. Maybe I would eat a new fruit if my mom found one on her grocery trip, but it wasn’t until college that I learned there’s such a thing as a Tu Bishvat seder where you eat seven species of fruits and grains. The bounty serves as a reminder that we are meant to partake in all aspects of life.
This year Tu Bishvat feels especially pressing, eerily but not shockingly relevant. Its withered winter branches are set to blossom, as they always do, in the near spring. More than Jewish Earth Day, it is a recognition of cycles.
Recognizing cycles isn’t necessarily easy, especially when they’re just a fact of life. Many of them are a fixed part of nature that we must learn to live with, like the solar cycle. Many of them though, the human made ones, are so deeply ingrained in our society and ourselves that we wouldn’t dare think to break them. Most of us follow some sort of routine from sunrise to sunset, week to week, month to month. To break harmful cycles is, I believe, the first step in mitigating these climate disasters — a duty that we have as Jewish people according to Maimonides.
As I walk past the climate clock in Union Square during my daily commute, I’m reminded that Americans like me, on average, have a carbon footprint five times the size of the average person. When I sit down to work I watch people use Generative AI to write emails, a tool that already uses as much energy as a small country. On my way home I step over various piles of litter — plastic bottles still full of water, a smattering of papers dropped by some intern, half-smoked cigarette butts from my neighbor who just can’t quit that cycle — all of which no doubt double as a duplex for Fievel Mousekewitz and his small family, before, you know, ending up in a landfill or a trash patch in the ocean.
It’s easy to see all of these tragedies and hear all of these statistics and fall under the trap of climate doomerism, to constantly remember that 71 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from major corporations and feel like there’s nothing that little old me can do to change anything. But did you know that the Ozone layer is on the mend because of collective political and scientific action? That going just one day without eating meat and dairy can lower your carbon footprint by eight pounds? That you have the power to break the cycles that be, and the only person stopping you from doing so is yourself?
Yes, the fires are still burning. The friends I made in La Jolla this Summer recently faced evacuation orders and had to leave their homes. Yes, it’s still New York’s coldest winter in 13 years. But this Tu Bishvat I will partake in eating the seven species with hope for our future. My life will not be solely dedicated to solving climate change, but part of it will. My life will not always be amid scenes of disaster, but part of it will. My life will not always be lived under the beauty of snowfall and new experiences, but part of it will. Among all of the flames there is still a world to enjoy — a world worth saving.
