Tumbledeeds?

The purpose of this blog is to protect the Shabbat table ecosystem... Please share...

Do you know how many days til Channukah?

Try asking this at the table tonight:

Did you ever see a real tumbleweed? Do they actually exist?

Or do they only exist in Tinseltown's "Wild West"?

I saw my first real tumbleweeds in 1990. I was on I-10, somewhere near Joshua Tree, heading east across a patch of desert that looked more or less like Wile E Coyote's territory. 

My reaction was, "Cool, tumbleweeds." And that was about the most brain power I ever devoted to the subject.

But what would you do if you came home to this?

Now we know: not so cool. It's a highly destructive invasive species that probably originated in Eurasia and came to North America in the 1800s. And they're now found in Australia and Africa. 

What is arguably cool is the ingenuity of the plant. (Actually, there are many different plants that make tumbleweeds.) The basic idea is that the tumbleweed originates as the flower of plant that dies, dries, and falls off. But inside that tumbleweed is a thousand seeds waiting to be activated. The weed blows around until it finds a resting place moist enough to activate its seeds. 

This is leading to a question for your table.

If people had intentionally brought in this destructive species, we could have someone conveniently to blame, like the pythons in Florida or the Japanese knotweed in England.

Even Antartica is threatened.

But most of the time, it's inadvertent. 

So for your table: Is there a takeaway? Is there a meaningful lesson from the tumbleweed? Is there lemonade to be made from this lemon?

Perhaps - just perhaps - the lesson is to be found in the solution. The only way to tackle this very real problem is massive cooperation, not only within a society but between countries. Is it possible that we will one day look the invasive species as a gift that gave all of humanity a common enemy that could unite us?

Or perhaps the lesson from the tumbleweed in particular is to remind us that when you do an act of kindness for someone, you've sent out a packet of "kindness seeds" that may blow in random directions and take root in unexpected places.

Shabbat Shalom

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