Thursday, January 28th, 2021

Plates of fruit cover one end of the conference table. One plate has cut up fresh fruit: apples, persimmons, clementines, kiwis, mangoes, bananas, and some I can’t identify. Another has dried fruit: pineapple, raisins, and cranberries. Most are local. I didn’t know that we grew bananas here, but Google tells me that we do. Today is one of the most minor holidays, Tu Bish’vat, the New Year for the Trees. There’s a tradition of a sort of seder for it, but much more casual than for Passover. People mostly just eat fruit and, if they remember, say the blessings for them. Decades ago, I wrote the liturgy for a Tu Bish’vat seder that my congregation in Austin used. I left space in it for people to interject their own thoughts or songs. They did. I was surprised when someone I didn’t know recited something from my first book, which had just come out. Here, we’re gathered more casually. We’re clustered more closely together than usual, so most of us are wearing masks while we wait. The boss brings wine, but we don’t have a corkscrew anywhere. He goes downstairs to the supermarket to buy one. He returns after a while with a small corkscrew, as well as two containers of cookies. He pours wine for each of us. I expect him to say a blessing, perhaps one tailored to the holiday, but he just says “L’chaim.” We drink. We eat. We talk. After a while, we get back to work.