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E s s a y

Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these.’ (Matthew 6:28ff) This is a passage that, after understanding and learning with a view to commitment and ne cessity, gives us much more: astonishment. I still love putting the fi rst conkers in my coat pocket. How smooth they are and their wonderful deep brown colour. It touches me when my grandchild ren call out: ‘Look Grandma, a butter fl y!’ Or when we look at fl owers together and appreciate their beauty. As long as we can still marvel in our highly technical world, we have not forgotten our reve rence for life. Only out of such reverence can there be commitment for all life and all creatures can grow, be they human, animal or plant. And those who have reverence will take a stand to preserve all that has been created. It is precisely this nature that holds hope in a world in which we are currently shocked to witness that the thirst for power, violence and war will prevail again and again. We are feeling helpless and powerless. I take courage from a song by the Jewish theologian Fritz Rosenthal. Harassed by the Nazis, he left Germany in 1935, aged 22, for Jerusalem and changed his name to Schalom Ben-Chorin: peace, son of freedom. In 1942, while the Shoah was raging, he wrote:

War destroys a thousand-fold, hatred scars the earth, but the day when almonds bloom is a time of birth. Friends, give thanks for almond blooms swaying in the wind: token that the gift of life triumphs in the end.

In the Book of Jeremiah, the almond tree is a sign for God watching over his creation. In view of the mass murder of the European Jews, the song seems naive, unworldly, as if it was ignoring the anguish. But it does not. It shows the de fi ant belief that God is not absent and that the promise given after the fl ood still holds. A small almond tree outside his window be came a symbol of hope for Shalom Ben-Chorin. For it blossoms, even when winter still reigns on the hills around Jerusalem. The story goes that one day this little almond tree had to make way for a supermarket car park. But with the force of nature, a shoot broke through the tarmac. People were so moved by this that the tree now stands carefully protected in Jerusalem, as a sign of hope. I don’t know whether this story is true or not. But it stands for the hope that people can change. That peace is possible. And that we have the ability to shape and preserve our world so that our children and our children’s children can have a good life in it.

Almond trees, renewed in bloom, do they not proclaim life returning year by year, love that will remain? Almond blossom, sign of life in the face of pain, raises hope in people’s hearts: spring has come again.

1 Albert Schweitzer Die Entstehung der Lehre der Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben und ihre Bedeutung für unsere Kultur, in: Id., Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben. Grundtete aus fünf Jahr zehnten, ed. H. W. Bähr, Munich 1966, 10th edition 2013, S. 13ff.

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