Sometimes Systems Change Needs a Children’s Story

Tonight marks Tu Bishvat — the New Year for Trees.

I was at Friday night services this week when our rabbi told a story that hasn’t let me go. It didn’t feel like a sermon. It felt more like storytime at the Stanislaus County Library when I was a kid - everybody leaning forward just a little, ready to be taken somewhere.

The story was about Honi and a carob tree.

It’s usually told to children. Which, honestly, feels about right. Because sometimes the only way to talk about complicated, grown-up things - like systems change, justice, healing - is through a story simple enough that a kid could understand it.

Here’s what happens.

Honi sees an old man planting a carob tree and asks why. The man says it will take seventy years for the tree to bear fruit. Seventy. Honi basically says, “You’re not going to be around for that.” And the man replies, “My ancestors planted for me. I’m planting for the ones who come after.”

That’s the story.

And sitting there, I had this quiet, annoying thought: Oh. This is my work.

We talk about systems change like it’s a project plan. Identify the problem. Fix the broken parts. Measure results. Move on.

But that’s not what it feels like from inside it.

From inside it, it feels like planting something you may never see finished. Something that doesn’t respond to urgency. Something that refuses to move at the pace of a grant cycle or a quarterly report.

These systems we work in carry history. They carry habit. They carry harm. They don’t unravel just because we care. And yet, we’re asked for visible progress. Quickly.

There are funding cycles. Deliverables. Community pressure. Donor pressure. Real urgency and real need. The expectation that if money or energy is invested, “success” should show up in a reasonable amount of time persists.

But, the deepest changes rarely operate on that timeline.

So sometimes, without meaning to, we shrink the work. We redefine success so it can fit into something measurable. We smooth the edges. We settle for transaction instead of transformation.

The old man in the story doesn’t do any of that. He plants the tree anyway.

But the part that stayed with me wasn’t even the planting.

After that conversation, Honi falls asleep. Not for a nap. For seventy years!

And I remember thinking, of course he does. I want to sleep too. Because how else do you live inside that kind of waiting?

And it’s not just me.

I sit with leaders and teams all the time who are tired in this exact way. They’re doing real work. They care deeply. And they’re discouraged because they aren’t seeing what they hoped to see by now. They start questioning themselves. Or the strategy. Or whether the whole thing was naïve.

Most of the time, nothing is actually broken. It’s just slow.

In real life, though, we don’t get to disappear for seventy years. As tempting as that sounds some days, our trees don’t grow on their own. They need tending. They need people who stay long enough to water, to prune, to protect what’s fragile. People to nurture conditions that will produce rich soil long after they’re gone.

Honi doesn’t have to watch the sap rise inch by inch. He doesn’t have to sit through seasons that look like nothing is happening. He sleeps.

When he wakes up, the tree is grown. Someone else is enjoying the fruit. They don’t even know his name. There’s something both beautiful and brutal about that.

And here’s the part that hit closer to home than I expected.

I have to remind myself, regularly, that I may not see the full impact of the work I’m part of. That this kind of change is generational. That some of what we are building will only make sense in hindsight.

That is not an easy thing to live with.

I want to quit more often than most people probably realize. I get tired. I get impatient. I want to fast-forward through the messy middle and wake up in the version of the world where it’s all working better.

But I stay. I stay because I was born to do this work. And not alone, but with all of you. I stay because something in me believes that tending matters, even when harvesting is someone else’s job.

Tu Bishvat arrives in the middle of winter, when trees look bare. But under the surface, the sap is starting to move. Life is pushing upward long before fruit appears.

Maybe that’s the invitation. Not to hurry the fruit. But to keep planting. To rest when we need to. And to stay.