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Sometimes when I travel from my village to a city, a sad sight awaits me: a box of books resting on a fence or books thrown onto the sidewalk near a trash can, on occasion even inside the trash can. The significance is clear: another elderly cultured man or woman has passed away and no one is interested in the books he or she read and loved during their life. Not their sons or daughters, their grandsons or granddaughters, or the old bookstores or the public library.

Sometimes I rummage through these books and even take one or two, but coupled with my happiness at finding them are unavoidable thoughts of my own library. Many of its books will remain in the hands of my heirs, who are already casting yearning looks in their direction, and—if I may remark—are getting a little impatient. But then my thoughts wander to my second collection, the bulbs and tubers I have sowed and grown or brought here and set in the soil of my garden—what will become of them when the time comes? This is dependent, of course, on what happens to this little house. Who will live here? Lovers of gladioli and squills or fans of grassy lawns? And perhaps the house will be enlarged? Perhaps it will be razed to the ground, and a new and bigger house built on top of it? Will anyone bother to save the bulbs and tubers by uprooting them before construction starts? Some of these bulbs and tubers I myself saved from construction sites and roadworks, before the tractors and steamrollers and cement mixers got there. Who will take them out of the ground and replant them? And where?

I do not consider myself a naturalist, nor do I hug trees or talk to bushes, but even mere amateurs like myself know that plants have mechanisms of sense and response and are more developed and sophisticated than developed and sophisticated mammals like ourselves are willing to attribute to other forms of life. There are many phenomena that prove this, and I will mention a few of them again: seeds that sprout or not according to external conditions, a flower that faces the sun and moves along with it, a creeper that seeks a good grip, a tree that inclines to one side in order to keep its distance from another tree. All these testify to their ability to sense and respond, to move toward and to feel attraction for what is desirable and a repulsion for what is not. But to escape a cement mixer or the bucket of a backhoe is not something plants can do. And the idea that my bulbs of cyclamen, anemone, gladiolus, and buttercup or tubers of sea squill or daffodil might be buried alive under a new house or stepping-stones causes me turmoil and literally makes me choke.

I visualize them sensing the thundering and quaking and pounding and pressure of heavy mechanical equipment, not to mention the penetration of blades and buckets and drills as they helplessly await their fate, because the most significant attribute of the plant is also its greatest limitation: although it is a living, breathing creature that drinks and eats and feels and responds, a plant cannot sprout legs, spread wings, fight, or flee.

Now here’s a sad story: Near the Hemar wadi to the south of the Dead Sea once stood an acacia tree. It was large, beautiful, welcoming, and life-giving. Birds lived among its branches; all kinds of critters enjoyed its shade, from ants to hikers. More than once we stopped there, my friends and I, for a prehike breakfast, until one day we came and found it dead. Together with the egocentric disappointment we felt at that moment was also a sense of shock. There is something terrible in the sight of a dead tree still rooted in the ground, especially a dead tree you knew and loved while it was alive and visited at every opportunity.

The cause of death was earthwork that was taking place less than a mile away. The acacia tree lived on water brought to it by flooding that occurred two or three times a year, and a new crack in the earth was enough to divert the flow of those floods. In a case like this, animals trouble themselves to look for a new source of water, but plants are bound to the ground by their roots, and their fate is sealed.

Among humans, the word “rooted” is regarded in a positive light, but even the most rooted people can move from place to place. This is not so for plants. Their rootedness is their very essence. Everything derives from it, and it is this that rivets them to the ground and makes them so vulnerable, so very passive, easy to take advantage of and manipulate. Birds nest in them, reptiles and insects eat their leaves and their flesh, humans chop them up for their own needs, pick their fruit, tie swings to them, build children’s playhouses in them, stick nails in them, and carve hearts on them. They suffer all this in silence. And in spite of their size and hardiness, they are helpless. They cannot flee or fight back.

In my wild garden there are a few indigenous terebinth trees remaining from the natural forest that flourished here before the village was built. The largest of these grows by the side of the road. Its trunk is split right at the base into two thick sections, its canopy is wide and dense and, I was told by an expert, this terebinth is two hundred years old. The tree and I share a special affinity because a few years ago I saved this tree from death, pure and simple, when I discovered a decision had been made to widen the village road a bit. The tree was to be felled.

When the authorities speak, I generally bow my head to them. Not because I am naturally obedient, but because I am aware of the life span of men and women in Israel, and there are pursuits I am not prepared to waste my energy on, nor the time remaining to me on this earth. This is not the case when someone tries to hurt those I love, particularly defenseless creatures such as the terebinth. As I mentioned earlier, trees cannot flee or fight back. A person with a saw and an ax in his hand can overcome the strongest and largest of trees.

The Bible relates to this matter in the following beautiful phrase: “Because man is a tree of the field.” Many are familiar with these words, written by the poet Natan Zach and set to music by Shalom Hanoch, but it was not Natan Zach who coined this phrase. He took it from Deuteronomy, and today, thanks to his poetry, these words are an expression of feelings of identification and love for trees by man. Zach even stressed in his poem the points of resemblance between man and trees: both grow, both are eventually cut off from life, both are thirsty and burn. All this is well and good, not to mention intriguing, but the intentions of the author of Deuteronomy are not the same as those of the poet, and it is worthwhile examining them.

The full verse deals with a law forbidding the cutting down of trees around a city under siege, as is written: “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by wielding an axe against them; for thou mayest eat of them, but thou shalt not cut them down; for is the tree of the field man, that it should be besieged of thee?”

It is common knowledge that there are no punctuation marks in the Bible, and even the question mark at the end of the verse does not appear in the original Hebrew. When it is inserted here—as Rashi did so many years ago—it becomes apparent that the word “the,” coming before “man,” is not the definite article, as Natan Zach interpreted it, but the interrogative participle, and the verse does not describe the resemblance between man and trees but quite the opposite—something completely different. “Are the trees people, that you should besiege them?” In other words: Is the tree like a man, who can flee his enemies and find shelter behind walls? The answer is no, of course. Man is not a tree of the field, and a tree of the field is not a man, and the law forbidding the cutting down of trees around a city under siege is intended to save them.

Theoretically, this is the place to praise the Torah and admire its statutes, but unfortunately this is not so, and we cannot award ourselves the title “Righteous Among Trees.” Reading on reveals that the prohibition on the felling of trees does not stem from concern for the fate of the tree but from the needs of man. The legislator of Deuteronomy adds: “Only the trees of which thou knowest that they are not trees for food, them thou mayest destroy and cut down, that thou mayest build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee, until it fall.” In other words, the law forbidding the cutting down of trees applies only to fruit trees, because those trees may nourish the army during a time of war and be a legacy for the conquering nation, whereas non-fruit trees may be cut down to build instruments of siege.

Parenthetically, I would note that there is no difference between the Bible’s essential conception of nature with man as the crowning glory and all the other creatures, plants, and animals meant to serve man and to be used by him. This appears in the words of God to Adam in the first chapter of Genesis, and also in Genesis Raba’s Midrash, on the verse from chapter 2. Exactly like “man is a tree of the field” it opens beautifully with the following words: “ ‘No one to converse with [siah, which also means “bush”] in the field’ (Gen. 2:5). All trees converse (mesihim), as it were, with one another. Indeed, one may add, all trees converse with mortals.” But here, too, it continues badly: “all trees—created, as trees were, to provide pleasure for mortals.”

As for me and my terebinth, from the moment I realized its life was in danger, remembering that biblical law will not stand by it since it does not bear fruit, I took it upon myself to save the tree from death. First, I hid a lock and shackle between its branches in order to chain myself to the treetop when they came to chop it down. Second, I practiced climbing the tree in order to get to the top in nimble fashion. And more important: while the road wideners prepared to cut down the tree, I cut deals—I approached everyone I possibly could at the Jewish National Fund and local council and the Ministry of Agriculture, and it became clear that sitting in all these places were people with God in their hearts, and no less important: they had the power which the terebinth and I lacked.

But why beat about the bush? The terebinth and I were shown mercy and its life was spared. To this day it stands at the end of my garden, green and full in summer, gray and bare when leaves fall in winter, with a myriad of cyclamens I planted blossoming around it. And sometimes, when the tree gets a little too big for its boots in the garden and its branches bow downward and stop me from walking straight-backed under it, I allow myself to give it a friendly prune, the same way the tree allows itself to scratch my balding pate.