We’re marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel with a year-long celebration! Keep an eye out for “Memphis Celebrates Israel at 70” branding at your synagogue, at events around town, and online. In this My Israel Story series, we’re asking Memphians to tell their personal Israel stories. Do you have a story to tell?
Today’s My Israel Story celebrates Tu B’Shevat, the “birthday of the trees” which begins at sundown on Tuesday, Jan. 30 and ends at sundown on Wednesday, Jan. 31.
When I was a little girl growing up in Memphis in the 1950’s, I filled our little JNF blue box with nickels, dimes, and quarters to help plant trees in Israel. Oh, how I wanted to go to Israel. I yearned to see those pioneers who were settling the land and making the desert bloom – and to find where my trees were planted.
It wasn’t until years later in 1977 that my husband and I took our first trip. We left our small children in the care of my parents, and off we went. Our tour bus was heading south of Jerusalem, past Rachel’s tomb, along the foothills of the Judean desert dotted with trees and boulders. I smiled as I remembered how I once hoped to find my very own trees in Israel.
We arrived in Gush Etzion. Then I saw it – a lone oak tree standing off the side of the road. The trunk was larger than I could wrap my arms around; the bark was rough and wrinkled, and its branches shimmered with newly green leaves.
Its roots seemed to sink deep into the earth. In a quiet voice, our tour guide Chaim told us the story of the tree.
In 1945, young men and women escaping after the Holocaust built a kibbutz in the shadow of the lone oak tree. Every day, they would pass the tree as they built their houses and planted gardens, and the tree flourished as it had for centuries. Then in 1948, after Israel had been declared a state by the UN, the Arab countries surrounding the new state marched against it. The people on the kibbutz prepared to defend themselves. Most of the women and children were sent to Jerusalem to be safe, and when the Jordanians attacked, the kibbutzniks fought hard, but the odds were too great. After they surrendered, most were killed, and the Jordanians captured the area.
Those women and children were now widows and orphans. Every year they would climb to the highest point in Jerusalem and gaze southward toward that oak tree. They could see it in the distance, standing all alone.
Then in 1967, during the Six Day War, Israel took back that land. The children who had lived on that kibbutz were now grown. These orphans asked to return and rebuild the area – to the home they had known as children – to the place that their parents had built. And so they did.
As those grown children were returning to their home, they passed Rachel’s tomb, and echoing in their ears was the voice of the prophet saying:
A cry is heard in Ramah
…Rachel is weeping for her children…
Thus says the Lord…
There is hope for your future…
Your children shall return to their borders (Jeremiah 31:15)
When they came home, the lone oak tree was still standing tall with its roots deep in the ground and its branches reaching up to heaven.
After we left Israel, I carried the image of that lone oak tree back to Memphis. A number of years later, we took our children on a family trip to Israel, and after their high school graduations, our son and daughters returned to learn there.
Our daughters learned in Midreshet Lindenbaum and Nishmat in Jerusalem, and our son studied in Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shvut near the place where the lone oak tree still stood, that we had visited many years before.
Our son made Aliyah, met his wife in Israel, and they lived in the shadow of that tree. Our first grandson had his brit milah in the shadow of that tree.
We would be blessed to return many times to Israel to celebrate and share in every life cycle event – both happy and sad – with our family and friends. Although I never did find the trees that my nickels, dimes, and quarters planted, I know that each tree in Israel, along with that lone oak tree, carries the message of return and belongs to us all.
Lynnie Mirvis is a community storyteller and Maggid-Educator in Memphis.