The Orchard Planter
Short story about work you will not live to finish.
The boy found the old man on his knees in the field with six saplings and a spade too heavy for him.
"What are you planting?"
"Carob."
"Those take seventy years to give fruit. You're seventy-eight."
"Seventy-nine, in the spring."
The boy did the arithmetic and, being fourteen, said it out loud without meaning to be cruel. "You'll never eat from one of these."
"No," the old man agreed. "I won't."
"So why bother?"
The old man looked toward the far end of the field, where the carob trees were old and wide enough that the goats slept in their shade at noon.
"When I was your age I ate from those trees every summer. I never once asked who had planted them." He pressed the soil down firmly around the sapling's roots. "Then, one year, I understood that a man knelt in this field before I was born, working for a boy he would never meet and would never thank him."
"And that's what made you do this?"
"That made me ashamed of myself," said the old man, sitting back on his heels. "This is what I've done about the shame, every spring since. It's cheaper than the alternative."
The boy stayed and helped him plant the last two, not entirely sure why.
You are not required to finish the work. You are not free to abandon it either.
Talmud, Taanit 23a (Honi and the carob tree); Pirkei Avot 2:16
“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
The quoted line is a common English rendering of Pirkei Avot 2:16 (Rabbi Tarfon). The carob-tree motif comes from the Talmudic story of Honi in Taanit 23a; this telling is Ohananda's own.
The Talmud tells of Honi meeting a man planting a carob tree. Seventy years to fruit, says the man; he found the world full of trees his ancestors had planted for him, and simply did the same for whoever came next.
Pirkei Avot supplies the ethic in one line: you are not obliged to finish, and you are not permitted to stop. It is steadying for anything larger than a single lifetime — an illness, an institution, a family, a planet. The demand to complete the work is lifted; the excuse to walk away from it is refused.
Questions & answers
+What is the message of "The Orchard Planter"?
You are not required to finish the work. You are not free to abandon it either. The Talmud tells of Honi meeting a man planting a carob tree. Seventy years to fruit, says the man; he found the world full of trees his ancestors had planted for him, and simply did the same for whoever came next. Pirkei Avot supplies the ethic in one line: you are not obliged to finish, and you are not permitted to stop. It is steadying for anything larger than a single lifetime — an illness, an institution, a family, a planet. The demand to complete the work is lifted; the excuse to walk away from it is refused.
+Is this a true story?
The quoted line is a common English rendering of Pirkei Avot 2:16 (Rabbi Tarfon). The carob-tree motif comes from the Talmudic story of Honi in Taanit 23a; this telling is Ohananda's own.
+Which wisdom tradition inspired this story?
Jewish Wisdom — Talmud, Taanit 23a (Honi and the carob tree); Pirkei Avot 2:16. Argument, blessing, and the work of repair.
What would you begin today if you accepted you will never see it finished?
