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Summer is almost here. It’s time to learn the Torah of the garden.
This article originally appeared on My Jewish Learning.
(JTA) — My mother died in February, and since then I’ve been caring for her home. At the time of her death, she had over a hundred plants — and that’s only inside the house. Outside, there were hundreds more — roses and lilacs and dahlias, lilies of the valley and irises and daffodils, violets and honeysuckle and sunflowers. They bloom in almost all seasons, from late winter to late autumn. Except when the ground is frozen, there is never a moment when something is not blooming in my mother’s garden. And she celebrated when they bloomed, whether once a season or once every 10 years. They were, in many ways, the great work of her life, and it’s powerful for me to be caring for them now.
I grew up surrounded by those plants. I ate wild strawberries, chestnuts and pears. I used pine needles for doll beds and hickory nuts for toy food. I slept (or pretended to) on carpets of moss and used branches of sumac as scepters. Once, I dug up some daffodils near the creek and moved them to my “garden” in the woods. My mother was furious (though those daffodils still bloom in the woods every spring). But my early plant experiences were mostly good. I planted peas with my father, and watched him guide the young bean plants up their poles. I noted when the violets came out and when the chestnuts fell from their trees. I particularly loved the wild roses that bloomed in June (in fact, they’re blooming now). For me, as for my mother, the plants are their own kind of people — beings I try to nurture, appreciate and understand.
So it’s moving to me that the Jewish tradition sees plants in a similar way — as beings with voices. Psalm 96:12 states: “Let the fields rejoice and all that is in them; let the trees of the forest sing for joy.” Psalm 17:33 proclaims: “Let the trees of the forest sing at the presence of God.” In Psalm 48:8, the fruit trees offer praise. In Isaiah 55:12, the trees clap hands.
Maimonides understood these verses to be metaphors, but the Midrash — writings that fill in gaps in biblical texts — claims that trees do in fact speak with one another and with other creatures, and that they discuss the earth and its well-being. The Jerusalem Talmud too understands these verses expansively, saying that when Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai began to teach mystical secrets, the trees started to sing. The Zohar, the mystical Torah commentary, imagines that when the Creator visits the Garden of Eden at midnight, the trees burst into song.
This description of plants is a reflection of the way many of us experience plants — as alive, and in relationship to us. And it’s likely they reflect how our ancestors did too. Many indigenous spiritual practitioners consider plants to possess intelligence, so it’s certainly possible our ancestors saw plants this way as well. And it might be time for us to be mindful of this too, given that we are breathing in what plants breathe out, and vice versa.
A team of researchers at Tel Aviv University has recently discovered that plants make sounds, albeit at a frequency we can’t hear, and that they make more sounds when distressed. This claim was made long ago in the Midrash, which teaches that when a tree is cut down, its cry goes from one end of the world to the other but no one hears. How differently might we act if we could hear the cries of trees and plants? And how much richer might we be if we could tune into their songs?
Indeed, this might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. In some kabbalistic understandings, we have plant consciousness inside us. According to the mystic Hayyim Vital, plants are a category of beings known as the tzomeach — the growing ones. They exist among four kinds of living creatures: humans, animals, plants and stones (yes, even stones are considered beings). Vital says that the human soul reflects all these kinds of beings, and so perhaps we are kin to all of them. Even God has plant-like aspects: The kabbalists call the structure of the divine personality the Tree of Life, and in the Zohar, the Divine Presence is called the gan, the garden, or the chekel detapuchin kadishin, the holy apple orchard.
My own small New York apartment has many fewer plants than my mother’s home, but I care for them lovingly. Once, while I was away, the cat sitter forgot to water the fuschia and when I came home it was nearly dead and had only five living leaves left. I slowly nurtured it back to health, watering often but not too much, and now, a year later, it has bloomed many times. I may not be able to hear its voice, but I can see its beauty and I can feel the power and persistence of its life-force. As the summer solstice approaches, I invite all of us to celebrate, protect and listen to these green beings, these creatures who eat light and who create the very air we breathe.
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The post Summer is almost here. It’s time to learn the Torah of the garden. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
The post Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure appeared first on The Forward.
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Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so.
A group of Jewish, Hindu and Zoroastrian parents and students are suing a California school district, alleging that a high school program’s field trip to a mosque — and no other houses of worship — violated the First Amendment.
The suit, brought forth by Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools – San Francisco Bay Area, focuses on two trips that were part of a social justice program at Palo Alto High School.
According to the complaint filed in the Northern District of California on August 7: “The district failed to maintain religious neutrality, failed to ensure equal treatment among faiths, failed to protect student privacy and failed to vet, supervise, and monitor religiously divisive outside speakers during the school-sponsored event.”
Community Members for Religious Neutrality in Public Schools nor the Palo Alto Unified School District immediately responded to requests for comment.
The trip was part of Palo Alto High’s Social Justice Pathway, where according to a promotional video, students in 10th through 12th grades take English and history courses “through a social justice lens rather than the standard analytical lens, where facts and dates are memorized.” Palo Alto High started the program in 2014.
Field trips around the Bay Area are a hallmark of the program, including travels to Angel Island, where many Asian immigrants arrived in the U.S. in the early 20th century, and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Students also have heard from a variety of speakers, including a Holocaust survivor and a Cambodian refugee.
The field trips to the mosque happened in 2022 and 2025. The plaintiffs include three Jewish Palo Alto High students, at least one of whom took part in the Social Justice Pathway.
The parent plaintiffs allege that the school had not fully informed them that their children were going to participate in “religiously inflected activity.”
According to the complaint, female students were encouraged to observe the customary dress code of wearing head coverings inside the mosque. They also observed a midday prayer, interacted with participants of a Quran memorization program, received Qurans as gifts and were “taught that Islam, in particular, promotes social justice,” the suit says.
“[The plaintiffs] belong to religious traditions that practice social justice,” the suit says. “The government’s endorsement of Islam in particular as a social justice faith denigrates their respective traditions and their identities as members of faith communities due equal treatment and appreciation within the District, State and country.”
The plaintiffs allege that the visit violated the First Amendment, since the public school was promoting a specific religion, and the 14th amendment, for elevating one religion over others.
A student at Palo Alto High who is part of the Social Justice Pathway disagreed, describing it as part of a broader religion unit.
“There was never a point on this trip where I felt in any way that the mosque or the school was trying to even suggest conversion,” he wrote in an Instagram comment on a local news post about the lawsuit. “The goal was obvious to us: Learn about an underrepresented religion present in our community.”
But plaintiffs also objected to the history of one of the speakers. Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who has faced allegations of antisemitism.
In 2019, Billoo was removed from the board of the Women’s March for past remarks she had made. She faced criticism for a 2021 Facebook post, where she warned against “polite zionists” like Hilllel and the Jewish federations, saying “they are not your friends.” A tweet of hers from October 7, 2023, following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israel, also has faced scrutiny: “Pray for Gaza. We are witnessing decolonization,” she wrote.
In an emailed statement to the Forward, Billoo wrote, “Public schools have an obligation to remain neutral toward religion, but neutrality does not mean shielding students from learning about religion or religious communities.”
“Visiting a mosque, observing Muslims practice their faith, or learning about Islam is not the same as being compelled to practice Islam,” she wrote. “We are concerned that this lawsuit risks turning ordinary engagement with Islam and Muslims into something suspicious and could have a chilling effect on educators who want their students to learn about the diverse communities around them.”
But plaintiffs said allowing Billoo to speak with the students demonstrated negligence on the part of the school.
“Ms. Billoo was allowed unfettered access to students to advocate personal religious and political views without balancing perspective or adequate supervision.”
The school also allowed photos of the high schoolers to be taken at the event without parents’ permission, the suit says.
The post Did this field trip to a mosque violate the First Amendment? A group of Palo Alto parents think so. appeared first on The Forward.
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Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found
(JTA) — The remains of Yehuda Katz, the last Israeli soldier still missing from the 1982 Battle of Sultan Yacoub during the First Lebanon War, have been recovered after 44 years, the Israeli military said Tuesday, bringing to a close one of the country’s longest-running missing soldier cases.
Katz, a 22-year-old tank gunner and yeshiva student who disappeared just 10 days before he was due to complete his military service, was one of three soldiers whose fate was unknown for decades after Israeli forces became trapped by Syrian troops in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on June 11, 1982.
Twenty Israeli soldiers were killed and dozens more were wounded in the battle, with six initially listed as missing. Three were later returned or confirmed dead, leaving Katz, Zachary Baumel and Zvi Feldman as the only soldiers whose fate were unknown. The remains of Baumel and Feldman were recovered in separate operations in 2019 and 2025.
Katz’s remains were located during a special overnight operation carried out by the IDF in cooperation with Mossad and based on intelligence obtained in recent months. They were returned to Israel and military representatives informed Katz’s family of the discovery Tuesday morning.
For the soldiers who survived Sultan Yacoub, the news ended a wait that had followed them for much of their lives.
Avi Rath, who fought alongside Katz, said the unresolved fate of his comrade had stayed with him for decades. “The look on the family’s faces stays with you your entire life, a look that says, ‘You didn’t finish the job,’” Rath said in an interview on Tuesday with KAN public radio’s “Kalman Liberman” program. “Thank God, this closes a circle and resolves some of the uncertainty, but there is also great pain. It weighs on our conscience.”
Katz had studied in the Hesder program at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, combining Torah study with military service. According to the yeshiva, he slept barely four hours a night while immersed in his studies. He had planned to become a rabbi and teach at a yeshiva after completing his military service.
On the night before the battle, Katz gathered fellow soldiers around him and taught them Maimonides’ laws governing the conduct of Jewish soldiers in battle, the yeshiva said on its website. He then led them in singing Psalm 23, including the verse about walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Remains of last Israeli soldier missing from First Lebanon War’s Sultan Yacoub battle found appeared first on The Forward.
