Parshat Korach 5785
There is a new trend on Tiktok that is very wholesome, and perhaps less of a trend than a very niche type of video that only certain types of people see on their algorithm. The trend is people talking to trees and, shockingly, the trees responding in pretty unbelievable ways. It started with this woman Asia Noel, who started talking to the tree in her backyard in 2022, telling it that it was beautiful, saying thank you to it, etc. Eventually, she started finding ways to test if the tree was listening back to her. “If you’re listening, touch my left shoulder,” she would say sweetly, and without much of a breeze and without Asia moving her body, within less than a minute a branch would bend and bow sometimes an entire foot to touch exactly the spot she had pointed to on her left shoulder. This kept going, and she (with permission from the Tree) started recording herself, showing that indeed nobody was nearby manipulating the branch and the wind was nearly nonexistent. “If you’re listening, touch my nose” and on and on.
These videos started a movement of people trying this at home, speaking to their trees and being shocked when the tree responded. There have been scientific studies that talking to plants helps them grow, whether it be because of the loving content or the the sound vibrations and carbon dioxide, side by side comparisons of plants who have been spoken to vs. not showed measurable differences.
This week’s Parsha, Korach, is full of examples of a living earth that is listening. Most notably, when the Earth opens its mouth to swallow Korach and his mutiny who were protesting the lack of egalitarianism in the Priesthood. We could call this opening of the Earth simply an act of God, like any of the plagues in Egypt–but we would still need to admit that sometimes–if not often–God works Godself through the Earth, speaks to us through the Earth, and is perhaps listening to us through the Earth.
Another word for this is animism, the idea that there is a spiritual essence in all of nature, and that each thing– a rock or a tree included–has a spirit or a soul. The parallel in our tradition might be the Kabbalistic idea that everything has a holy spark that needs to be redeemed, and therefore it is our job to see the divinity in each thing.
In a time that– through our little and big screens, AI, and the ever increasing multitude of distractions, including the overwhelming chaos in the world–is trying to pull us up and away from the Earth more and more, what would it mean, and how might it help us, to connect to God through the earth, the listening, breathing, divine earth that we call our home? How might it be a resistance to the forces that are wanting to move us upwards–towards the intellectual, towards the ethereal, towards the virtual reality instead of reality?
On this Pride Shabbat, when thinking about animism, I couldn’t help thinking about indigenous cultures and the roles that LGBTQ+ people have played. In many cultures that are more connected to the earth, not only are there many ancient and varied terms for LGBTQ people (like two-spirit), but they were and are often revered and believed to hold a special spiritual role in the community. Perhaps when you are deeply connected to the earth, just as you would never tell a flower or a fruit that it needed to be a different way, it might not occur to you that there would be a correct way for a human to be. Each thing– flower, petal, fruit, blade of grass– is divinely created, and it would be quite arrogant for us to say that Divine made a mistake.
We have another example of God working through the Earth in this Parsha when, in order to reiterate God’s choice of Aaron to serve in the Sanctuary as the representative of the Jewish nation, G‐d instructed Moses:
“Take . . . a staff from each of [the tribes’] leaders . . . and write each one’s name on his staff. Write the name of Aaron on the staff of Levi . . . and the man whom I shall choose, his staff will blossom . . .”
Moses placed each staff before G‐d in the Sanctuary. On the next day . . . behold, the sta
of Aaron was blossoming: it brought forth blossoms, produced fruit and bore ripe almonds.
(Numbers 17:16–24)
What would it mean to live as if we were intrinsically connected to a living, breathing, speaking and listening earth? Even without the mouth of the earth opening up and almond blossoms sprouting out of nowhere, we can still listen to what God is communicating to us through the earth, such as with this week’s historic heat wave, wildfires becoming ever too common, and the list goes on. As the world tries to pull us into the virtual and the unreal, may we have the strength to not only stay tethered to this Earth, but to find the Divine there, and to listen. And on this Pride Shabbat, may we use that rootedness to uproot any shame within us about our own differences–whether part of the LGBTQ community or not–and may we know that we are all perfectly imperfect divinely created adornments to this already sacred and beautiful world.
Shabbat Shalom
