I’m not a master gardener – ask my wife – but planting trees in the Land of Israel is never ordinary. Every sapling is a fulfillment of prophecy.
That verse runs through my head whenever I press a young tree into the holy soil of Judea.
A few months ago, a friend gave me a baby fig tree. I had no room in my little yard, so I planted it in a rocky patch of earth by our synagogue in Efrat. Full sun, no shade, thin soil – hardly an ideal location. And it was the middle of the Hebrew month of Tammuz.
Tammuz is not a particularly happy month. On the Jewish calendar, it marks the beginning of the most painful season of the year. The 17th of Tammuz is a fast day, mourning the breaching of Jerusalem’s walls and other calamities. From that day until the 9th of Av – known as the Three Weeks – we remember national tragedies culminating in the destruction of both the first and second temples in Jerusalem.
Agriculturally, Tammuz falls in mid-summer, usually June or July, when the last green traces of spring vanish. The fields are parched, the hills bare, the air heavy with heat. Naomi Shemer, Israel’s beloved songwriter, captured that sense of loss: “A tree dies in the middle of Tammuz, we die in the middle of Tammuz, over orchards orphaned of fruit.” That line sat in my mind as I watered that scrawny fig tree. Honestly, I didn’t give it much of a chance to survive.
But as with everything in the land of Israel, it turns out that fig trees and the month of Tammuz are far deeper than they initially seem.
“Like the first‑ripe fig before summer – whoever sees it, while it is still in his hand, swallows it” (Isaiah 28:4).
During the intense heat of summer, when the landscape has turned brown, dry and hopeless, one fruit appears on the branch – the hardy fig.
The Sages associated figs with summer. In ancient times, kayitz meant “summer produce,” and in the Land of Israel, “summer produce” meant figs drying on racks. So much so that the Sages rule: if someone makes a vow saying he won’t eat “kayitz,” “the summer produce,” he forbids himself from eating figs. That’s how deeply the fig marks this difficult season in our landscape and memory.
Figs do not ripen all at once. They don’t give you the quick, satisfying harvest of a grapevine or a date palm. A fig tree starts small, with just a few early fruits, and then, slowly, more appear, scattered along the branches. First one, then two, then clusters, until finally whole baskets overflow. But that takes time. You can’t strip the tree in one day and be done. You have to keep coming back, day after day, week after week, watching for the next signs of sweetness. The fig demands patience and persistence. It rewards those who keep showing up, who refuse to quit when progress feels invisible. This is the secret of the fig tree.
It is this secret that the infamous ten spies did not understand. According to our Sages, Moses sent the twelve spies to scout out the land of Israel at the beginning of Tammuz. Their forty‑day mission brought them back on the eve of the 9th of Av. Moses’ charge to the spies was simple: look deeply and see the goodness of the land. Tragically, ten of the spies failed in their mission. All they saw in the land was negative – frightful enemies, fortified towns, sun‑blasted hills, and hard soil. They entered the land during Tammuz, the dry season, when the hills look spent and the real harvest has barely started. Instead of seeing the land’s potential, instead of seeing what would soon ripen in the months to come, they assumed the land would always be barren and forbidding.
Joshua and Caleb saw the same land, but their eyes worked differently. They looked past the heat and the hard soil and saw promise forming beneath the surface. They read the season the way a farmer reads a first fig: not as the end of the story, but as the signal of what’s coming. Where the ten spies demanded an instant harvest, Joshua and Caleb trusted the land’s slow strength. They urged the people to hold on, to believe in what would ripen with time. But the people of Israel followed fear instead of faith. That night, the 9th of Av, the nation wept, and the date was cemented as a day of devastation for all of Jewish history. The spies’ failure to understand Tammuz, their inability to understand the lesson of the fig, planted centuries of exile.
The Sages teach: “Rami bar Yechezkel once visited Bnei Brak. He saw goats grazing under fig trees; honey dripped from the figs, milk from the goats, and the two mingled on the ground. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘A land flowing with milk and honey!’” The bounty of the Land of Israel is literally soaking the dirt – if you have eyes to notice.
We in Israel are living through our own Tammuz moment. The war with Hamas, sparked by the massacres of October 7, has dragged deep into a second year, and the heat is unrelenting. The pain of our hostages sears the nation. Some voices say: give our enemies whatever they demand; end the agony now, even if Hamas remains in power; take the deal, any deal. I understand the desperation. Tammuz is like that. When the hills are scorched and the soil looks dead, surrender feels merciful. But that is the temptation the spies fell into. They judged the land in its hardest season and chose despair.
The fig teaches another path. When God plants life in rocky ground, you do not cut it down for lack of instant fruit. You keep watering and don’t give up. We must fight to free our hostages, but not by trading away our future to the people who slaughtered our children. Yes, we are tired, but we must persevere. Step by step, we are defeating our enemies. If we stay on the path, we will achieve the final and complete victory we need to ensure our future.
Back to my little fig tree by the synagogue. I still water it every day, more out of faith than certainty. The sun keeps hammering the slope, and the soil is still harsh and thin. Some leaves have curled, others have opened. I can’t say if it will make it through the summer, but it hasn’t quit yet. And maybe that’s the point. I underestimated my fig. It’s still fighting. And so must we.
