In honor of Earth Day, I wanted to share a little something I wrote a while back. Below is a brief recap followed by my personal thoughts on Shel SIlverstein's The Giving Tree
. If you haven't seen it, check out the original motion picture narrated by Shell Silverstein (below).
“There once was a tree… and she loved a little boy.”
The little boy played games in and with the tree, napped in her shade, and ate her apples.
“And the Boy loved the tree… very much. And the tree was happy.”
The boy grew and had different needs as he aged.
The tree is always happy after giving, but the story never again mentions the boy’s love for the tree.
Eventually “the boy,” now an old man, wants a boat to sail far away.
The tree selflessly suggests he cut down her trunk to make a boat.
(He has already taken her apples and her branches in his younger days.)
Here the narrator admits, “And the tree [now a stump] was happy… but not really.”
He eventually returns as a very old man, and lucky for the tree, all he wants is a place to rest.
Shel Silverstein clearly left the story open to interpretation. After my husband read the book to my children, my daughter said “It’s a mitzvah tree,” a tree doing good deeds. I had so many other ideas; I had to write some down. Maybe this story illustrates that we should do good deeds and charity work until it hurts a little, but stop before we have nothing else to give.
The story got me thinking about renewable resources. As soon as my daughter made that comment, I wanted to say, “Stupid tree! Had she quit after only giving her apples, she would have had more next year!”
For Passover this year I made gefilte fish. From scratch. Why? First, our family follows the Chasidic custom of not eating wet matzoh (gebroks in Yiddush, Shruria in Hebrew). That means we don't eat matzoh balls or matzoh bri on Pesach. We also don't eat most processed/manufactured foods during Pesach for kosher and health reasons. Second, I like a little food adventure, especially in traditional food making techniques.
