As I stood in solitude one quiet morning on Paradox Lake in the Adirondacks, wisps of mountain fog glided toward me like gentle ghosts. Each fog swirl appeared to beckon to me to join it; the mist spirits approached me from all sides as if searching for a sure footing with me in this world before disappearing into the air.
With the sun’s light and heat growing stronger, the fog rapidly dissipated, taking its gracious but rootless wraiths with it. No sooner had the mist yielded to the bright morning, than a loon swimming by began its distinctively plaintive call, a haunting sound. My wife and I had lain awake the night before, listening to the loons who made their nests on a small island of rock and trees not too far from where we were trying to sleep. Hearing and watching this one on its morning search for its mate, I realized that loon is an onomatopoeia, a word or name that imitates a sound. Loooooooooon!” the water bird cried. The call was so heart-rending and the poor bird seemed so solitary, I forgave myself for thinking I heard it cry, “Alone!”
I was alone, but I wasn’t lonely at that moment, as I prepared for morning prayer without a minyan - the quorum required by Jewish tradition for communal worship. My wife and our friends, all tangled in three decades of shared experiences, were slowly waking up. But even if they hadn’t been there, I could still feel the presence of my Jewish ancestors who recited, century after century, the same words I would soon recite: a prayer quorum connecting me through time. A mere few minutes earlier, the creeping fog and the ululations of that loon had given me the feeling of being surrounded by ghosts. Now, my first words of gratitude to God helped me remember that I was being lifted by souls: the people from the past, sharing with me our ancient heritage, who are in fact present continuous to me.
But then I realized with quiet awe that I had also been joined by a quorum from an even more ancient congregation: thousands of trees around the lake, descendants of plant life that preceded the first humans by three hundred million years. Modern botany has demonstrated that trees slowly evolved, well before us, to communicate and cooperate with each other. They have become a kind of minyan – a supportive quorum - for each other. But they have also become a quorum for humans, having co-evolved with us for our mutual survival. We exhale carbon dioxide that is indispensable for trees to produce their food photosynthetically. They exhale the oxygen that photosynthesis produces, without which we would die. This struck me as profoundly miraculous, precisely as I reached the end of Psalm 150 – the last one in the biblical book of Psalms:
Let all that breathes praise God.
That morning, the trees and I stood together as a minyan, a natural community made whole by our mutual breaths, the most basic liturgy we could utter. We prayed together, as it were, inhaling and exhaling God given forces of life with and for each other. The fog and the loons earlier had reminded me that, in a very powerful if nonliteral way, the spirits of our pasts are always close by, paradoxically when we feel most alone or lonely. The trees now reminded me that our shared lives in the present and the future literally depend upon spirit, a term derived from the Latin words for breath and breathing. We, this vast quorum of diverse living things, our limbs of flesh and wood extended in mutual embrace, need each other, and breathe for each other.
Experts on human wellness have begun sounding warnings about a national crisis of loneliness which will only be healed when people are helped to overcome alienation from their fellow citizens. Every person needs a minyan – a quorum of others for support, strength and love. One possible cause of our global climate crisis is the lonely alienation of human beings from our fellow citizens of the natural world, the trees especially. Can we re-train ourselves to relate to them as more than merely useful wood or nuisances to be clear cut for development? Can we re-learn to treat them as the “more-than-human-beings” that share our air and have so much ancient wisdom to share as well? It seems that the time we have for answering these questions is rapidly running out. Standing surrounded by my minyan of trees that morning on the lake, I prayed that we find a way back to the quorum of nature before we all become what Flannery O’Connor called lonely ghosts in the trees.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom in Albany, NY. He is the author of Cain v. Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama. (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
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