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 they?"
"Carob."
"They take seventy years. You're seventy-eight."
"Seventy-nine in the spring."
The boy did the arithmetic and, being fourteen, said it out loud. "You'll never eat one."
"No."
"So why?"
The old man looked at the far end of the field, where the carob trees were so large that the goats slept under them.
"When I was your age I ate from those. I never once asked who planted them." He pressed the earth around a sapling. "Then I understood that someone knelt in this field before I was born, for a boy he would never meet."
"And that made you do this?"
"That made me ashamed," said the old man. "This is what I did about it."
You are not required to finish the work. You are not free to abandon it either.
Ohananda.com
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 planted for him.
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 lifetime — an illness, an institution, a planet. The demand to complete is lifted; the excuse to withdraw is refused.
What would you begin if you accepted you will never see it finished?
