Out on a Limb

Mark Twain, the famed American novelist and humorist, is known for books set in the bustling river towns and frontier life of 19th-century America. Surprisingly, this oh-so-American writer, with no particular Jewish connection or ideological stake in the Land of Israel, famously wrote one of the most important descriptions of the desolation of Eretz Yisrael before the Jews began returning. In his then-popular travel book, The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, Mark Twain describes his trip through Europe, ending with his time in the Holy Land. Here’s his description:

“A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds… a silent, mournful expanse… a desolation… there was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country….”

His description of the barren land sounds almost Biblical:

“Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes… Palestine is desolate and unlovely” (Chapter 56).

Weeds… desolation… deserted… unlovely — that was the land, until the Jews began returning in great numbers in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the return of many Jews to Eretz Yisrael, the land wearing “sackcloth and ashes” began to blossom. Almost like a welcome-home bouquet, wildflowers began to cover huge areas of the land.

In addition to Jews coming to settle and replant, visitors began coming in greater numbers. In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, a journey to the Land of Israel was a daunting and dangerous undertaking, stretching over months and filled with uncertainty. Travelers depended on sailing ships at the mercy of wind and weather, waited weeks in port, and then faced difficult overland travel upon arrival.

By the late nineteenth century, the picture had changed dramatically. Steamships followed regular schedules, trains carried travelers efficiently to Mediterranean ports, and with the opening of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway in 1892, even the final climb to Jerusalem was no longer an ordeal.

Still, for most, the journey remained a once-in-a-lifetime passage — easier than before, but no less momentous. Which meant that those who did come wanted something tangible to bring back, something to reconnect them to the extraordinary land they had visited.

Wildflowers.

Every economist knows that demand (visitors wanting to bring back a piece of Eretz Yisrael) drives supply (some kind of memento). And happily, the land itself provided that supply. As the land came back to life and wildflowers bloomed everywhere, local entrepreneurs began picking and drying them, and turning them into souvenirs for Jewish and non-Jewish tourists. Some were framed. Others were placed into books, often bound in olive wood, sometimes decorated with captions and pictures.

But more than just souvenirs of a once-in-a-lifetime journey, these dried-flower albums also offered a tangible connection to the Land of Israel for those who could never make the trip themselves.

Rav Moshe Stieglitz of Tarnow — grandfather of Rav Yaakov Ariel shlita, later Chief Rabbi of Ramat Gan — recounted discovering his grandfather’s album of dried flowers from Eretz Yisrael, given in recognition of his support for the pre-State yishuv. The album held thirty pages of pressed flowers, each labeled with its place of origin, facing images of sacred sites: the Old City walls, the Kosel, Kever Rachel, Mearas HaMachpeilah, Tzfas, Meron, and Teveria. When a neighbor borrowed the book and charged local children ten groschen to see and touch it, townspeople lined up and gladly paid — a small price to pay for even a fleeting connection to a distant land.

Out of the Woods

Shakespeare famously claimed that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But for the nineteenth-century scholars who set out to define the flowers of Eretz Yisrael, names mattered very much indeed. To name a plant was to anchor it — to history, to language, to Eretz Yisrael, and, for some, to Torah itself.

One of the most remarkable of these plant-namers was Immanuel Löw of Hungary, a gifted linguist and meticulous botanist. At a time when modern science was classifying the natural world in Latin, he turned his attention to an older source of botanical language: the plants of Tanach, Mishnah, and Midrash. What exactly were the erez, shikmah, and shaked of Chazal? For Rabbi Löw, these were not academic questions, but essential tools for understanding Torah — and for defining the newly flowering landscape of Eretz Yisrael.

Löw’s monumental work, Flora der Juden, traced every plant mentioned in Jewish sources and identified it with its botanical counterpart, weaving together Torah, language, and science. He’s credited with coining the word kalanit, the red anemone, Israel’s national flower, along with about 2,000 other botanical names. Part of the work — over 3,000 pages long — was written when he was unjustly imprisoned for a year in the 1920s, when Hungary was ruled by the anti-Semitic regime of Miklos Horthy.

Low believed that Jewish texts spoke of nature with precision — and that reclaiming that precision was an act not only of cultural, but of spiritual continuity. He also put theory into practice, designing a garden with trees and flowers mentioned in Tanach for his synagogue in Szeged.

Flower Power

In 1951, a program began to connect children from Israel to those in chutz l’aretz. Called “Flowers of Our Country — A Gift from Israeli Children to Children in the Diaspora,” the initiative invited Israeli schoolchildren to go into the fields to pick wildflowers, dry them, and send them with messages on postcards to Jewish children abroad. The program connected Jewish children worldwide to the Land that is every Jew’s inheritance.

But there was a price to pay for the new national pastime of picking wildflowers: By the 1960s, the beautiful, colorful landscape was being destroyed by over-picking. Some species were even threatened with extinction.

In 1968, Israel passed laws protecting certain species of wildflowers. But while changing a law isn’t all that difficult, it’s much tougher to change a culture. And for Israelis, many of whom would go out every Friday to pick wildflowers freely for their Shabbos table, forbidding picking many of those flowers was a major disappointment.

National organizations began their campaign to protect Israel’s wildflowers, coining catchy slogans and putting up posters, encouraging people to go out and enjoy nature — while leaving the wildflowers untouched. It was a start, but the real success of the campaign, considered one of the most effective ever, came from an unlikely source: the children themselves. These organizations went into kindergartens and elementary schools, focusing on teaching students to appreciate the beauty of the flowers without picking them. The campaign encouraged children to go with their parents to the fields — and to remind Ima and Abba to look without touching.

It must have worked. Take a hike today with a group of typical Israeli sixth-grade boys, and while they’ll be running, shouting, climbing rocks, and jumping over fences, none of them would even think of picking a kalanit or a rakefet.

Deep Roots

Israel was the only country in the world that ended the 20th century with more trees and forests than in the previous century. In 1948, only about two percent of the land was forested, but by the start of the 21st century, forests and woodlands covered approximately nine percent of the country. It looked like the trees that Mark Twain described as having deserted the country had somehow come back.

The Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet l’Yisrael — KKL) was founded in 1901 to collect money from all over the world to buy land and plant trees in Eretz Yisrael. The idea of Jews restoring the land through planting trees became deeply rooted in Jewish lives. People planted trees to mark milestones like bar mitzvas and weddings, to honor loved ones, and to remember those who were gone, often receiving certificates that made the gesture feel both intimate and lasting. Planting new trees, bringing new life to an ancient land, became a worldwide project of the Jewish people. As the tradition grew, Rav Ben-Zion Meir Chai Uziel, Israel’s first Sephardic chief rabbi, even composed a special prayer for planting trees that is still recited today, especially when school and youth groups go out to plant trees on Tu b’Shevat.

The National Library has a number of “Golden Books,” JNF records dating back to 1903, documenting contributions to the cause of buying land and planting trees. One of these “Golden Books,” dated 1920 and published in Jerusalem, records donations from across the Jewish world. One entry notes a New York lawyer, Julius Swartz, who donated $15,000 (a fortune then, about $280,000 today) to purchase 15 dunams for a training farm. A column headed “Terumah” (donation) runs down the page, with amounts large and small listed one under the other, each marked in the currency of a different corner of the Jewish world: liras, dollars, marks, pounds.

Jews from Israel, the United States, Poland, Germany, and Wales marked weddings and bar mitzvahs and honored rabbanim and family members with planting trees.

But not only those countries. Surprisingly, the explanatory pages of this particular Golden Book are written in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language of Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman world, from Turkey and Greece to the Balkans and North Africa. More astonishing still, this specific volume had been looted by the Nazis, survived the war, and was sent back to Israel as part of the Allies’ cultural reconstruction efforts. A book that passed through the darkest years of Jewish history is a quiet witness to memory, hope, and the enduring bond between the People and the Land.

Branched Out

Walk through the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s Shaarei Chesed neighborhood, and you’ll hear the sounds of Torah learning coming from the many batei medrash — and lots of English chatter from the large Anglo community living today in this once quintessential Yerushalmi neighborhood.

You’ll see beautifully renovated luxury homes, and in one corner of Rechov Shaarei Chesed, you’ll see three tall evergreen cypress trees, their slender tips pointing up to the blue Jerusalem skies above.

These trees were planted in the 1930s by my husband’s family. His grandfather, Yaakov Meir HaLevi Horowitz, had left his native Jerusalem decades before, back when the land was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, in order to avoid being forcibly drafted into the Turkish Army. In the 1930s, Reb Yaakov Meir and his growing family left New York and decided to return to Eretz Yisrael, by then under British mandatory control.

They lived in Shaarei Chesed, a neighborhood established in 1909 as a charitable initiative to provide housing for religious families outside the overcrowded Old City. But the one thing my mother-in-law, Miriam, and her three sisters missed from their lives in New York was trees.

The four young girls decided to plant three trees in the bare and unshaded neighborhood. They tended them lovingly, hand-watering them, bucket by bucket, using the restricted amount of water available in the neighborhood at the time.

Today those trees are thriving, and the family’s many descendants who live in Eretz Yisrael enjoy seeing their stately beauty and remembering the family story written not in words, but in roots and branches and leaves.

And that family story really is the story of all of our people: A story of
trees and flowers planted and nurtured, a story of a Land and a People
renewed and blooming. Many of the mitzvos tluyos b’aretz that the
holiday of Tu B’Shevat helps define have gone from words studied on a
page to actions taken in flourishing orchards or fields.

So this Tu B’Shevat, especially if you’re local, make sure to eat a fruit grown on a tree in Eretz Yisrael. Along with the vitamins, you’ll internalize mitzvos like terumah and ma’aser, and with every bite, you can remember a time when the land was bare of Jews and trees alike. Between the seeds of an Israeli pomegranate or the juice of an orange is the story of a people who kept the dream even as all seemed desolate and hopeless.

And while you’re enjoying the fruits of this beautiful land, don’t forget to wish the flowers and the trees a happy New Year!

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1097)