Being chosen heaves the weight of generations onto my shoulders like a thick, grey, wool cloak. An oath sworn to ancestors that being chosen is the ticket into a covenant between Me and You. Something I’m obliged to receive, and to bequeath. Had my Aunt shown up at my Bat Mitzvah she probably would have told me we were chosen for train or for work camp—pogrommed, branded, shaven, lamp-shaded.

Kicking off the first month of our Hebrew calendar with Nisan’s new moon, we usher in a time of seasonal rebalance and realignment.

Amid a pandemic of untold anguish, grounding in ancestral wisdom and practice becomes more relevant than perhaps ever before. Passover seders at once become more accessible as we shift out of constriction and agitate toward collective liberation. Here’s a reminder: We come from a long line of survivors.

Jewish environmentalists have elevated a minor symbolic mystical ritual of holding a Tu B’Shvat Seder into an annual and provocative communal celebration. This week is Tu B’Shvat – the Jewish Earth Day that is traditionally marked by planting trees and eating their fruits in the dead of winter to symbolize that lifeforce will again rise to bear fruits in what appears dormant.

In spite of Israel's depleted economy, the price of bread has recently been hiked up. In response, several NGO's are packing trucks with baskets of bread to distribute among hungry families up north and in neighborhoods throughout the country, as families can't afford to purchase bread or flour. Meanwhile, down south in the Negev desert Israeli authorities are destroying fields of wheat with toxic chemicals.

In the Negev, when it comes to building Jewish settlements and demolishing Bedouin ones, a few "making the desert bloom" references can go a long way. And when it comes to Arabs, when the Israeli government "thinks Green," it is often in the militaristic sense more than the "greening the desert" sense.

Not long ago, the Baltimore Jewish Times published an advertisement for the Jewish National Fund promoting its Blueprint Negev campaign to “make the desert bloom.” Blueprint Negev aims to bring 500,000 new Jewish residents to settle the Negev in a mere ten-year framework. The JNF advertisement makes mention of the 170,000 Bedouin living in sub-standard conditions in the Negev, and claims that the ‘Blueprint’ will benefit them economically. This is cosmetic.