For this month's installment, we return to interspecies intimacies. We reconnect with nature's rhizomatic intelligence woven through spiritual intelligence. We celebrate how our daily choices can embrace the interrelationships between Martin Luther King Jr.'s life mission to inspire radical interdependency and the birthday of trees—specifically the Jewish tradition of Tu B'Shevat: “The New Year of the Trees.”[1] We begin with Dr. King's commitment to love. Why would a conversation about intersectional climate justice be a love story? And what does a love story have to do with a Jewish holiday about trees?
Every object has a soul...a story...
I dedicated May's Mother Pelican installment to Rachel Carson (her birth month) and Isidore the Farm Labourer of Madrid (his death month). Reminiscent of Isidore, Leah Sha’rabi, the Mizrahi Jewish "Mystic Mother of the People," believed that everything has a soul, every object is sacred, the most menial tasks are sacred. By referencing Sha’rabi and Isidore's legacies, I am connecting interspecies spiritual devotion with the Jews from Spain, Sefarad. Isidore's sainthood exemplifies many Ladino proverbs: Ande komen dos, komen i tres (Where two people eat, three people also can) and Todo ke tyene ambre, venga y komen (Let anyone who is hungry, come and eat with us). Ladino is the language of the Sephardim and many Mizrahim.
A Sephardic understanding of Tu BeShevat, eating the fruit of the tree, represents how we embrace and internalize the outside world. Ladino, the language of my family, is the ultimate polyvocal language—a reflection of the Diaspora embracing the fertility of difference. Ladino is a hybrid of Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and dozens of other languages–depending where Jews fled after multiple expulsions. It emphasizes that to be fully alive, fully engaged with the world around us, we must first eat from the Tree of Life, only then can we partake in the Tree of Knowledge. Life needs to come before knowledge. Only then can we fully receive Torah, the Tree of Life, “etz chayim.” Only then is one’s inner world rooted in the Tree of Life. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exemplified this vitality, this blessing.
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On Tu BeShevat, when we eat the fruits of the Land of Israel and absorb the lessons of the fruit that include multicultural Jewish traditions and ethical values, we repair the primal “sin” of Adam and Eve, we repair our daily sins of ignoring other's sacrifices for our abundance. I call this negligence, this abuse of ecological and human rights, the violence-of-the-everyday. In contrast with modern industrial civilization and convenience culture rooted in hyperconsumerism, MLK, Jr.'s commitment to nonviolent direct action was a kind of prayer—love in action. Sephardi Judaism similarly encourages us to participate in all aspects of daily life in a way that is ethically integrated. Our everyday lives are sacred. When we eat the fruits as an individual and collective act of prayer, a shared Mindfulness, we generate a kind of spiritual intelligence to help guide us.
Ladino Proverb: Kuándo una puerta sérra syen avren (When one door closes, one hundred open)
Trees are our permaculture teachers...
The gifts Dr. King left us are, of course, abundant. In April's Mother Pelican installment, I highlighted three of his lessons that embody the Tree of Life within the Tree of Knowledge. The combination of these gifts also reflects the wisdom of trees in our natural world. The Judaic Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge are not simply metaphors. This is the third gift of MLK, Jr.[2] Interdependency is a lesson we must learn from the networks of trees and their fungal root systems. We must internalize the intelligence of trees as a daily practice. Trees teach us to slow down, pay attention, be present with various rhythms, listen and learn with all of all our senses. Trees teach us to pray—to be deeply attuned. Like trees, we are all interconnected, interdependent. Trees, too, are capable of empathy and friendship.[3] They communicate with, protect, and nourish one another. Trees use underground fungal relationships, mycelial networks, as learning membranes that share and store food and share knowledge. They have and use kin recognition through mycorrhizal[4] pathways, sending signals that help trees communicate warnings of fire, animal intrusion, or insect invasion through scent, for example.
Tu B'Shevat seder incorporates intentional, explicit blessings that reflect the macrocosm of the earth body in the microcosm of the human/animal body. Like the dynamism of mycelium, blessings are invisible channels that form conduits connecting our bodies, our souls with the earth and the cosmos. Prayer-as-action—the blessings during Tu B'Shevat, these spiritual embodiments of alchemical metaphors—offers reciprocal gift-giving with the earth. Fungi are essentially Kabbalistic.[5]
Similarly, eco-theologian Thomas Berry states: “Reality is relationship...not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects.” These interdependencies are reminiscent of the courageous perserverance of the Underground Railroad. Nature's intelligence models for humans a spiritual intelligence. It is up to us to learn the wisdom of biomimicry—the abundant lessons of the sentient trees. For example, “Plant intelligence, mycelial intelligence, the ability of water to carry information and the complexity of animal communication, lend scientific credence to the idea that nonhumans have subjective agency and inner experience.”[6]
We must fully commit to the now of this felt intelligence—I define commitment as embracing the unknown, embodying the unfamiliar. Life is not about predictable steps or maps, just as biting into the fruit from the Tree of Life means immersing oneself in the creative and ethical unknown.
Ladino Proverb: El mundo se manea, ma no kaye (The world shakes, but does not crumble)
Creative Extremism as Spiritual Intelligence...
We revisit the Sephardic orientation of Tu BeShevat in which we fully commit to living. Tikkun middot (the development of ethical character traits) lays the groundwork for what MLK, Jr. called “creative extremism.” Ethical character development is only “extreme” in the context of a normalcy that dumbs us down and numbs us out—the normalcy of US ethnocentric, consumer-culture both then in the 1960s and now in 2022. We must reject what in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt unravels as the systemic violence-of-the-everyday as society’s normalizing immoral behavior. It is also important to note that the original title for Dr. King's “I Have A Dream Speech” was “Normalcy No More.”
Some examples of “creative extremists” include the Dakota activist Waziyatawin:
The battles we're fighting are overwhelming, but we know things won't get better if we do nothing. Our only hope is enough people intervening and taking action, people willing to risk something now so we all don't lose everything later. [H]opelessness means an embracing of victimage and complete powerlessness. Here the salmon have much to teach: either they make it upriver to spawn, or they die trying.
Fred Shuttleworth who co-organized the Birmingham boycott with MLK, Jr. stated: “you have to be prepared to die before you can live;” as well as John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.”
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Fulfulling the Gandhian principle “Fill up the jails...”
Inevitably treading on thin ice—because that's where “creative extremists” (Martin Luther King, Jr.) or “strange attractors” (Tyson Yunkaporta) so often venture—we, too, must model courage and speak out about how ecological, political, and cultural crises are intricately bound. Following centuries of colonialism leading to cultural erasure and ecological domination, manufactured consent is more insidiously woven into our Orwellian lives than ever before. We must interrogate the treacherous nature of corporate-capitalist systems as a form of indoctrination—complicity in our own backyard.
We must shift from framing nature as a resource—something useful to society, something that fulfills our consumer desire (under the guise of “needs”). When we recognize plant intelligence and the sentience of all objects, we cultivate knowledge through spiritual intelligence. Reminiscent of Rachel Carson, Isidore, and Sha’rabi, Yunkaporta urges us to remember that “[t]he whole is intelligent, and each part carries the inherent intelligence of the entire system.” He describes how all objects become “embodied extension[s] of our neural processes.” Congruently, David Suzuki reminds us: “The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore...if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other special are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity—then we will treat each other with greater respect.”
As MLK, Jr. suggested, “Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists”(101). I suggest the Sephardic understanding of Tu BeShevat elicits “creative extremism” in which we can fully receive Torah. This includes prayer as nonviolent direct action. We can more thoroughly access these lessons through prayer. Prayer as collective action can fortify our “deliberate civil disobedience." MLK tells us that this nonviolent direct action is the “refusal to cooperate with injustice [and] was an ancient and honorable tradition” (18). This kind of prayer was modeled by both Dr. King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Prayer is action-based, not passive.
Like love. Love in action.
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King describes nonviolence as a path to “transform systems designed to abuse people. He explains how all African Americans involved in our own liberation struggle came to embody the dignity of moral conviction that heals the oppressed as well as the oppressor. Rather than simply expressing hurt, anger, and victimhood, oppressed people can experience the healing necessary for bringing about the Beloved Community” (Dorothy Cotton's introduction to MLK, Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait, xii). A colony of trees is also a “Beloved Community.”
Ladino Proverb: Una mano lava lo otra, I las dos lavan la kara (One hand washes the other and together they wash the face)
When MLK was jailed following the boycott of the Birmingham business community, he knew he was not alone. Like a seemingly solitary tree standing alone in the middle of a barren landscape, his roots reached for miles in all directions—intermingling with others' roots whom he might never meet, but whose lives he would change forever. The tree doesn't “act” in isolation; but in “beloved community.” Making a critical distinction between conformity and interdependency, MLK described a similar kind of extraordinary diversity in nonviolent approaches to the boycott: “The fact that different organizations place varying degrees of emphasis on certain tactical approaches is not indicative of disunity. Unity has never meant uniformity.” The Occupy Movement was a brilliant example of this unity within diversity.
Zazu as a 7-month old at Oakland Occupy and as an 7-year old at an Interfatih Environmental Justice Rally.
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Dr. King's understanding of unity is central to how we must now embrace the interrelationships between cultural diversity and biological diversity. An evolution toward ecological justice is rooted in spiritual practices and everyday-life choices. Intellectually, structurally, and spiritually, we must integrate with our natural environment, rather than compete with it. MLK Jr.'s life practice reflects the wisdom connecting The Tree of Life with The Tree of Knowledge. On Tu B'Shevat we celebrate this wisdom.
Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed: “A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”
Ladino Proverb: Ken mete kara, toma marido! (Those who take risks accomplish the most!)
Notes
[1]Tu B'Shevat is traditionally celebrated in January. On January 17, 2022, Tu B'Shevat fell on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.
[2] See last month's Mother Pelican,“MLK, Jr. and Environmental Justice: 'Order Before Justice,' " in which I explore Dr. King's first two gifts: his nonviolent confrontation of the twin specters of prejudice and poverty and his analysis of institutionalized tokenism as it maintains structural racism.
[6] Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar, Federico Demaria, and Alberto Acosta, eds., Pluriverse: A Post-Capitalist Dictionary, 160.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work engages feminist embodied theory, and has been the subject of several documentaries for international public television and film. In addition to critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era (Eifrig Publishing, 2017), her books include: Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014) and Climate Justice Now: Transforming the Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era (Routledge, forthcoming). She has published dozens of interdisciplinary essays in eco-literacy, environmental justice, epigenetics, philosophy, performance-studies, art, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies’ journals/anthologies. Her pedagogical practices, work as program director of Jews of the Earth, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Her photographs/performances have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, Artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in numerous collections including SanFrancisco MoMA, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Cara is a former professor of Performance & Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Critical Philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. She teaches, performs, parents, and lives a creative-zero-waste life. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com or via her websites, Cara Judea and Zazu Dreams. See also this article: Social ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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