Shoftim – Light and trees

The פסוק at the end of this week’s פרשה, when discussing the event of the Jewish army laying siege to a city gives us a mitzva not to cut down the trees surrounding the city and rhetorically asks us, כי אדם עץ השדה לבא מפניך במצור? “is a tree like a man, that it should give way in front of you in a siege?”

Although the פשוט פשט here is that the Torah is asking a rhetorical question, Chazal tell us that this פסוק is in some ways actually comparing people to trees. The most basic and obvious way that people are comparable to trees is in breathing (watch the fascinating parallels here): trees take light from sun mixed with the carbon dioxide in the air and “breathe” it in through their leaves, it passes through the branches, and into the trunk of the tree. The tree then expels oxygen from trunk to branches to leaves and out into the air. The person walking by, breathes the oxygen into his trachea (trunk), it then enters his lungs through the bronchi (branches) and finally gets into the blood through the alveoli (leaves), and he then expels carbon dioxide in the reverse of how the oxygen came in. I’ll try to illustrate the mirrored relationship visually (although it is a little too complex to put on paper) like this:

Light + CO2 (into the tree) > leaves > branches > trunk > Oxygen (out of the tree) into open nature…

Oxygen (into the human) > trachea > bronchi > alveoli > CO2 (out of the human) into open nature…

The only problem is that it seems that one step is missing. At the beginning of the process the CO2 mixes with light and enters the tree, but at the other end, when we exhale CO2 there isn’t any light. Or is there…? Let’s try to find the light at our end of the process.

If you look in a science book the processes look like mirror images of each other, we and the trees have been locked in a breath-for-breath relationship since the beginning of time. Each is dependent on the other for survival, without trees, we wouldn’t have the proper amount of oxygen in the air to breathe properly. It is very easy to get so fixed in this breathing relationship with the trees that one can start thinking that breathing is just a natural process, with photosynthesis at play, nothing outside of the natural. But how far back does our breathing relationship with trees really go?

Way back at the beginning of time it wasn’t a tree who gave us our first breath. בראשית 2:7 tells us that we are made up of two components, “עפר מן האדמה” and “ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים”. Hashem formed us from dirt and then He blew His breath into us and now He continues to blow His breath into us through the trees. Our life began by a breath from Hashem Himself, and continues with Hashem wearing a “tree mask”.

The missing light is hidden in that message. The trees absorb a physical light from the world around it, and we have the capability to let out a spiritual light with something as (seemingly) simple and mundane as breathing into world around us. We do it all day every day, we do it by second nature, and we need to do it to survive. If we realize that Hashem is breathing His breath into us by way of the trees every second and think of what power that gives us to have the Source of reality giving us life in its most fundamental form and we tap into the energy that comes with that, we can let out the true spiritual light and energy while we breathe, every second of every day.

There is one other way we are related to trees, again in a mirrored relationship. Trees have roots buried in the soil and they grow upward almost as though reaching for the sky. If we would have spiritual glasses we would see ourselves as upside down trees. We have roots planted under the כסא הכבוד and we have “branches” sent down to this world. However, we don’t have those glasses and many times it is impossible to see our roots. But just as the trees roots are buried deep, pulsating with life and pulling water from the ground, so too our roots are “buried deep” but they are constantly pulsating with the Light of Hashem and pulling the water of Torah into our lives.