The Organic Jewish Supermarket

The supermarket tells the story, brilliantly.

It wasn’t a great day. Something I didn’t want in my “lift” came anyways. The compulsion to fit too many tasks in too short a time. The disemboweling frustration of inevitable failure.

So I walked into the supermarket. Mind locked in frustrated self-absorption, body robotically readying for another task. Ready to tip over.

If not for the tree, right there at the entrance to the supermarket. Not literally, but in every other sense. The Tu B’shvat display. I had never seen a Tu B’shvat display in a supermarket.

Dried fruits hanging off the tree, with special marked-down prices. Nuts galore. Apricots, mishmish. Cashews, cashews. Companies competing for your almond shekels. The quintessential Tu B’Shvat mix of dates, figs, prunes, and carob. At the entrance to the store. Displacing cereal, cookies and the rest of that nosherai.

Smiles all around. On me too. Returned, delightfully, to an integrated humanity. And to the flow of a society celebrating the rebirth – seasonally, existentially -- of its trees, its flora.

It was, in a moment, a magical sense of what it is to be here. In the organic Jewish supermarket.