Hostage Crisis and Tu Bishvat: On Having Thick and Thin Skins

On the night before Tu Bishvat, the Jewish holiday of trees, much of the Jewish world sat transfixed to the news, waiting to see if Jewish hostages would make it out of a Texas synagogue alive. I was one of them.

But because I run a paper, and Sundays and Mondays are when we finalize our content, I didn’t have the luxury of thinking only about one story. Tu Bishvat was right around the corner, and so was Martin Luther King Jr Day, and so were all the other stories that comprise the diverse buffet you see every week in the Journal. Oh, and did I mention Omicron?

When different stories collide, we try to find connections. Is there a connection, for example, between the hostage crisis that consumed us Saturday night and the holiday of trees that would start on Sunday night?

It turns out that a Tu Bishvat story from January 2021 by Rabbi Zack Shapiro, one of our regular bloggers, gave us an answer.

“Earlier this week,” the rabbi wrote, “Ron and I discovered that one of our trees was bearing fruit for the first time. They looked like lemons from another planet! They were huge and really bumpy.”

The rabbi and Ron wondered: “Are they etrogim (the citron fruit we use on Sukkot)?”

They called a friend who studied agriculture in college, and he explained, among other things, that etrogim have thicker skins than lemons.

But when the rabbi took the fruit and sliced it in half, he noticed something odd. The fruit looked big and bumpy, like an Etrog, but the skin was pretty thin, even thinner than your average lemon.

Thankfully, rabbis make connections for a living. Reflecting on his citrus episode, Rabbi Shapiro suggested a life insight: In the same way that his lemon looked like it had thick skin but really had thin skin, human beings need both kinds of skin to navigate the world.

“Getting through life often requires a thick skin. We can’t allow ourselves to be bothered by the negativities in the world,” he wrote, but then added: “And yet … our skin can’t be so thick that we become insensitive. We must allow real feelings (be they painful or joyful) to penetrate.”

Tu Bishvat reminds us, the rabbi concluded, that “our lives are interwoven with both realities. There is a moment in time for thick skin to protect us. And there is a moment in time for thin skin to allow for our humanity.”

The night of the hostage crisis, which came on the night before Tu Bishvat, was indeed a moment when we needed both our thick and thin skins.

The terror that the hostages must have felt for more than 10 hours, not knowing if they would come out alive, brought out our thin skins, our knowledge of how vulnerable our lives can be, either to viruses or to violence.

The fact that this clearly was an antisemitic attack also brought out our thin skins. This was no time to be stoic. Jewish lives were at stake, minute to minute. The many statements released by Jewish organizations as the crisis was unfolding, praying for a positive outcome, spoke to this sense of vulnerability.

Here we are in 2022, living in a country where 150 FBI agents fly out on a Saturday night to help rescue four Jewish hostages in a small-town Texas synagogue.

But once the hostages were rescued, our thick skins came out. The successful outcome reminded us that the fight against hate is a fight we can win. It reminded us that despite 2,000 years of persecution, pogroms, a Holocaust and antisemitism that stubbornly continues to this day, we’re still here, we’re still building, we’re still contributing, we’re still celebrating our holidays.

Here we are in 2022, living in a country where 150 FBI agents fly out on a Saturday night to help rescue four Jewish hostages in a small-town Texas synagogue. If our ancestors were looking at the rescue mission from heaven, I can’t help seeing a little smile on their face.

So, as we continue to feel the pain of hate with our thin skins, let’s also feel our collective strength with our thick skins, and show the haters that our Tree of Life is still growing, and it’s as strong as ever.

Happy Tu Bishvat.