Jacob 5

You ought to recall the story Zenos tells. It’s obviously an allegory for Israel and the present scenario:

God says to Zenos, Imagine you’re a cultivated olive tree, Israel. This tree grew in a man’s vineyard for years but, as trees do, got old and started to die. The man—let’s call him “the master,” since that was the social class structure then— saw this and decided to take a shot at reviving the tree with more water, dung, and trimming.

He did this and it worked a little: a few new shoots came up from the roots. But the treetop started to shrivel up. So the master told one of his servants to get some branches from a wild olive tree for grafting. Also, break off the dead branches of this tree and burn them. Then graft the wild ones in where you broke the dead ones off. And the servant did that.

Then more work around the tree’s roots to encourage them. Some tilling, more dung, the works. The master was obviously fond of this tree, which he’d admired for so long.

On a hunch, to insure the tree would live on in some form he took good branches from it and grafted them onto other trees all around his vineyard.

A patient man, busy too, he let things grow for a long time before checking on them. When he walked down to the vineyard again with his servant, they saw that the wild olive grafts had taken hold and those transplanted branches had olives on them. The master explained to the servant the horticultural basis for this outcome and concluded that, of course, they had done the right thing.

Next it was time to check the branches grafted all over the vineyard. Winter was coming on. The trees with the grafts looked great. The master had his servant pick the olives and preserved them. A great harvest for these odd transplants.

The master was, of course taken with the success because, well, he loved that original tree. So he had to love these mutants. Especially because the branches swayed heavily with fat olives.

The servant questioned the master about one tree because it was in a pretty bad spot—poor sun, rotting surroundings. It takes a lot of attention, the master explained. Then he showed the servant another grafted tree in an even worse spot. More olives, more baskets, more hauling. Then another tree, more olives, more smiles at the fruits, literally, of close attention.

Then he took his servant to the best-located grafted tree. Unfortunately, despite his care, the tree had half cultivated olives (like his original tree) and half wild (like the graft-tree itself). He had his servant break off the wild olive branches and burn them.

Always trying to please his master, he suggested another round of tilling, dung, and trimming. “Why not?” the master said. Again, a period of patience and the master walked his servant down to the vineyard. Growing season was almost up.

That last tree, the one they refurbished, had a motley batch of olives throughout the branches. The master tasted it: all bad. “What a waste of time,” he told his servant. His high hopes were dashed. “What do we do to get more good olives out of that tree?”

“Well, the roots are still good. We know that,” the servant said.

“So what,” the master said. “Roots don’t mean anything without fruits.” It was good to keep them alive. But the wild nature of the tree took over. Next step: check to see if the other grafts had turned out bad this time. The verdict: all bad olives, one tree dead.

Now, understand that the master, though a slaveholder, was sentimental. He actually cried at the essential loss of all the olive trees in the vineyard. Because olive trees without olives aren’t good for anything but shade. That’s something, of course, but not enough to justify the work to keep them alive.

The master reviewed, one by one, these small horticultural disasters.

He even asked who he could blame for the failures of his trees. The servant listened as he was chopping down them down. “Maybe you grafted too much,” the servant said. “More branches than the roots could sustain.”

“Cut them all down and burn them,” the master said.

“How about a little more patience?”

And the master relented. He decided to take the grafted branches from around the vineyard and substitute them for the wild olive branches he’d grafted into his original, beloved tree. The roots were still good. Maybe putting the right branches back with their original tree would enhance the whole plant system of the tree. (Again, he was quite fond of this tree. Boyhood memories, maybe.)

So he did that,

except the master decided to leave the less bitter wild branches. Another round of trimming, etc., all predicated on the hope that this reversal of the mutations would come out better than the cross-grafting experiment.

Growing season being about up, he got some migrant workers to come in and do extra work— more hoeing, fertilizing, extra water— trying to get the most olives he could from these trees. “Do this all carefully, gradually,” the master said. These trees had been through a lot. Too much shock could kill the trees. He didn’t work on the trees himself. But he stayed pretty hands on. This project had arguably overgrown his life. But we should note that he ployed the guest workers with a promise of a share of the harvest if they’d get him a good one and clean up the vineyard, haul away and burn the discarded branches.

It worked. He not only paid the guest workers with money and olives,

he blessed them in a quasi-patriarchal way. If you work together, focused on executing a plan, you become family.

The master made a final vow, though. If bitter olives came back, he’d harvest the sweet ones and then burn down the whole vineyard.