One afternoon, as my wife and I watched a summer lightning storm from our front steps, she noticed some perfectly round green apples hanging from the thin tree branches outside our front window. All summer long, I had been gazing at the beautiful apples hanging from the tree across the street from us, their red skins dazzling like rubies in the sun, set against the deep green of the tree’s thick leaves. Now, I was smitten with child like wonder at the gentle intrusion of these green apples on our property. We had never planted any apple trees in our front yard, and I could not even identify for you any of the flora that guard the front of our house. Where did these fruits come from? How could we not know that an apple tree was alive and well in the tangled growth that we thoughtlessly passed by every day? Though two of our three children actively farm, my wife and I limit our agricultural consciousness to buying the best local produce that the supermarket has to offer. Our serendipitous apples became for me a source of fascination, and they are currently competing for my attention with their juicy red cousins in our neighbor’s front yard.
As with all opportunities for wondrous surprise, I was unprepared for this small miracle that, like the giant plant in the biblical book of Jonah, seemed to grow up out of nowhere, the product of not one bit of our efforts. Jonah’s love for his plant, which shielded him from the sun before dying suddenly, was one based upon distorted priorities. Angry at God for not destroying the evil city of Nineveh even though its residents repented their sins, Jonah took comfort from the searing Middle Eastern heat in the plant’s shade. When God made the plant wither, Jonah became angrier and sought refuge from his rage and disappointment, in death. God then used the plant’s brief life to teach Jonah a lesson about forgiveness. Jonah wanted God to mete out strict justice to the Ninevites for their evildoing, with no recourse for them to repentance and the reversal of God’s threatened punishment. Yet if Jonah could be so distraught over the withering of a mere plant which had grown up suddenly and which he had done nothing to cultivate, how could he be so quick to demand that an entire city of human beings vanish in order to fulfill his rigid insistence upon revenge?
Also like Jonah’s plant, the fruit outside my window will rot in the hot August sun or, at best, freeze to death in the Autumn frost. But its mother tree will persist in hibernation until the next Spring and the yielding of new apples. As I stare at those luscious, jade-green globes outside my window, I think about how Summer is again yielding to Autumn and Winter. We Jews read the book of Jonah on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, precisely around this transitional moment in the year, when we confront once again mortality, time’s constant flight, and the urgency of human forgiveness and kindness. We grow up rapidly, flash momentary, verdant beauty upon the world, then die. Writing about the corrosive effects of toxic anger, the poet William Blake imagined his anger at his enemy as a poison tree that grew to the point where it bore a bright apple of lasting, fatal hatred. With so little time given to us to enjoy the fruits of this life before everything withers, I am going to try to keep cultivating my capacity for love and my courage to forgive and ask forgiveness, thus bearing a very different kind of fruit.
Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.