by Aliza Arzt

Larry Rosenwald, in the April edition of B’Shalom, wrote a wonderful essay where he described Havurat Shalom’s use of both masculine and feminine pronouns to reference God and humans in the liturgy. He went on to explain why he thinks these very careful and thoughtful changes have been so important, allowing us to “. . . change the liturgy so that we can breathe it”.
 
In the 1980’s when we began the process of carefully changing roughly half the masculine pronouns of the liturgy, we felt that achieving gender parity was the ultimate feminist challenge. We have come a long way since then. We now wrestle with the question of how to make the liturgy accessible to those who see themselves as gender fluid or non-binary. This is a much more difficult situation to “fix”. Hebrew is gendered. It’s much more gendered than English, and more gendered than even the European languages (such as Spanish or French) with which some of us are familiar. Consequently, replacing “him” and “her” with “them”, which works well in English, doesn’t work in Hebrew, since Hebrew uses both a masculine “them” and a feminine “them”. 
 
The most consistent and complete solution would be to replace all noun and pronoun references with new, gender-neutral references, such as those provided by the Nonbinary Hebrew Project (https://www.nonbinaryhebrew.com). The project, created by Lior Gross and Eyal Rivlin, makes use of the vowel “ֶ “, (pronounced “eh”), among others, to replace the traditionally “feminine” ending “ah” and to neutralize the male and female pronouns. For example, in traditional Hebrew, “he” is “הוּא” (“hu”), and “she” is “הִיא” (“hee”). The Nonbinary Hebrew Project has changed both pronouns to “הֶא” (“heh”).
 
This is an elegant and well thought out solution. It’s one that we may arrive at some day. At this point in our development, we felt the departure from words that connect us to other davveners was simply too great. We have, however, taken some other steps to be more inclusive in our referents.
 
In order to accomplish this, we have taken advantage of two constructions in Hebrew which are already gender neutral: the infinitive (e.g. “to pray”, “to write”, etc.) and the first person (e.g “I wrote”, “I did”, etc.). In the most recent editions of Siddur Birkat Shalom and upcoming second printing of our Machzor, we have replaced all prayers where the davvener has to choose whether to use the “feminine” version or the “masculine” version with a gender-neutral version. For example, in the very first prayer of the morning service, traditionally the “modeh ani” (I thank you God), we have replaced our previous choice of  “מוֹדֶה אֲנִי - modeh ani for men” or “מוֹדָה אֲנִי - modah ani for women” with a single option - “אוֹדֶה אֲנִי - odeh ani, I thank you God” which works for all genders. We have also been able to redact some short prayers, such as the blessing for those who have come up for an aliyah, so as to eliminate gender references to the blessing recipients, even though God remains gendered.
 
We’ve been working consistently on our liturgy since 1984. We’ve created and adapted prayers in ways that we couldn’t have imagined when we first started. We look forward to continuing our quest for a liturgy that we can all “breathe” and are excited to see what we’ll come up with next.

by Beth Gallaway

In 2017, I did not have a spiritual practice to speak of. A very nice man I met online dating, Josh, disclosed that he was Jewish in our first conversation and I countered with, “I'm a recovering Catholic, formerly pagan atheist who believes in ghosts and reincarnation.” His response was, there’s actually room for all of that in the Jewish tradition!

After a few weeks of dating, Josh was missing his Shabbat dinner practice. He asked if we could do it at my house and I said yes, of course! I prepared a meal that didn’t mix meat and milk (or include pork or shellfish). He brought challah and candles, and was surprised I offered a salt shaker when he did the blessing for the challah. (I’m a librarian; I did my research!) We started lighting candles every Friday we were together.

In mid-August, Josh put me on the spot and asked if I had learned the candle blessing yet while we had a table full of friends waiting to light Shabbat candles. I was surprised--not being Jewish, I didn’t think it was allowed! A Jewish friend led the blessings.

Over the next two weeks, I learned that candle blessing, and the next time Josh was scheduled to join us for a Shabbat meal, I put a special effort into cleaning the house and making dinner. The table was laid with a cloth and set with matching dishes and cloth napkins and flowers. Josh dashed in, washed his hands and quickly hid the challah under the clean linen dish towel I'd laid out. I picked up the lighter and told him I thought I could do the candle blessing. He looked a tad surprised and said he'd help.

I lit two candles, explaining to my family that one was to keep Shabbat and one to remember it, and then lit four more--one for each of our beautiful and precious children, only one of whom was with us that evening. Josie helped me light hers. I stumbled a bit at “קִדְשָׁנוּ” and we said the rest together: 
 
בָּרוּך אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶך הָעוֹלָם אַשֶׁר קִדְשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָנוּ לְהַדְלִיק נֵר שֶל שַבָּת
 
Josh made kiddush and said hamotzi, and we feasted on the fancy dinner I had made. Later, Josh confided that it totally freaked him out that I lit the candles and said the blessings so well and with such conviction. We had only been dating for about three months and my adoption of this custom didn’t feel to him like the “one day at a time” pace we were trying to set in our relationship.
 
I explained I looked at the blessing as a challenge accepted, but also as something I was trying on to see if it fit. He asked what Judaism meant to me and I did my best to explain it was not, actually, all about him and what he wanted (a life partner to make a Jewish home with). I talked about how spirituality has not always been part of my life, but I have sought aspects of it in many ways through the years, starting with the occult as a teenager; and through paganism as a college student.
 
I found religion for a while through baseball. I went to my first game ever in 2007 and the sensory overload and focus on the field, food and music and rituals (the wave, the seventh inning stretch and belting out “Sweet Caroline”) led me to follow the Red Sox for several more seasons. It felt exhilarating to be part of something bigger than myself and there was an easy camaraderie with other fans.
 
When I was living in Haverhill, a local Methodist church began putting on a monthly Friday night board game meetup. I went for a year and a half. Again, I liked the food, fellowship, predictability, and the activity--but not the Jesus-y, revivalist, “come forward if you’re a sinner” part. And, once established in Grafton, I attended one Simple Church meal that included freshly baked bread and provocative dinner conversation from the pastor’s prompt, in lieu of a sermon. When pressed, I confessed to Pastor Zach I’d loved the people, the music, the meal… “So, everything but the Jesus part?” he asked. Baptized as a Catholic, even as a child, I loved the Old Testament stories more, and never had bought into the concepts of a virgin birth or Jesus as the Son of God.
 
Contra dancing became my ritual of choice for a time, one that involved setting time aside from my regular busy life, putting down my phone, meeting new people, hearing live music, and moving my body. It was meditative and grounding in spite of the noise and the twirling.

I explained to Josh that what Judaism held for me, thus far, was an appealing combination of ritual and routine that I craved throughout my life and more as I grew older. I was keeping an open mind about it, and enjoying everything that I had been exposed to thus far, and I didn’t find anything so far out of line with my own feelings about a greater power in the universe.

Josh and I hosted an “Electric Ferbrengen” on the Saturday afternoon of Labor Day Weekend, with singing, schnapps, and the promise of playing the video game Rock Band--after dark--if there was interest. It was also a housewarming to celebrate his move back home, and I gave him a mezuzah as a gift. Three months prior, I hadn’t even known what a mezuzah was. The standout from that event though, was the Havdalah ritual: joining in the yai-dai-dais, the scent of the spices, the warm smiles of friends in the flickering candlelight, the way the light reflected in our eyes, the hiss of the flame extinguished in wine and the song that drew his sister to come join our basement gathering and join in.
​
A few weeks later, Josh invited me to come to an Open House at Havurat Shalom, where he was a member for over ten years. I said yes, as I was curious. The Friday night before the open house, I asked what to expect. Instead of a short answer, Josh pulled out the siddur (prayer book) and spent about an hour going over the service and the liturgy. The highlights that I remember were: that davening started at 10am, but people would be straggling in for the first hour; there might be talking at the back of room and people coming in and out, bringing in cups of tea while children played and ran around upstairs; that informal but nice dress was the norm, but I could feel free to kick off my shoes and sit on a cushion on the floor; that I was not expected to participate or even follow along; and that the congregation itself was at different levels of observance and participation, but the service would mostly be in Hebrew with some transliteration and English translation. And then he said it was around a three-hour service followed by kiddush and lunch. I gulped. I couldn’t imagine sitting through a three-hour religious service.
 
When I came downstairs the next morning in my favorite blue dress, wearing a white knit kippah with threads of blue, red and gold interwoven, he just laughed and said, “Why am I not surprised? Where did you get that?!” And I shrugged and smiled and said I figured I’d be needing one eventually.
 
Two things stick in my mind from that first service. One is that everyone was kind and welcoming. The second is how at home I felt, and how compelled I was to participate, not just observe, and somehow mostly kept up, pronouncing things correctly and catching on to the tunes quickly. The three hours flew by. 
 
I became a regular davenner, then an associate member, and continued with classes, observance and participation, and converted in October 2019. Due to complicated family bubbles and immunocompromised status, in-person davening has not been something I’m willing to attend during the pandemic. Instead, I go to some Zoom services, support my partner in events at his rabbinic internship, take online classes when my bandwidth is up for it, and maintain my observance in the first rituals I was introduced to: Shabbat candle-lighting, and Havdalah.
 
We set the Friday menu and take turns cooking. Sometimes it’s elaborate, sometimes not. Sometimes we make the challah from scratch, sometimes we don’t make it to the grocery store in time to buy some and end up with two loaves of sourdough. Sometimes we take out the china, sometimes we opt for dishwasher safe plates. Sometimes we eat at 6:30, and sometimes at 8:15 and it has nothing to do with candle-lighting time! A tablecloth and fresh flowers are the constant.
 
The other constant, for me, is the breath--or three--that I take after circling my hands over the candles, before I chant. I imagine myself, a Jew by choice, somehow tapping into a lineage that I don’t have a blood or familial connection to, and draw in the rich history that came before me and breathe out to the future. Only when the energy feels right do I begin. Incidentally, it’s also something I have done at the Hav: imagine myself standing where Art Green, Merle Feld and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi z’l stood, imagining who else will stand in my place in 50 or 100 years, embracing a feminist, social justice, countercultural, neo-Hasadic style of Judaism.
 
We don’t always avoid technology or travel, but Saturday tends to be a lazy day with a cold lunch and a nap. And before bedtime on Saturday, we take out the Havdalah set, tune the guitar, and sing together to mark the transition to the new week. Our Havdalah set was passed on along with an immense library from the estate of philosophers Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam. Since I have no one to inherit Judaica from, it gives me great joy to use ritual objects from a family who rebelled against the antisemitism they experienced during their youth by establishing a traditional Jewish home. When we unpacked it, Josh didn’t recognize it for what it was. I thought it was a havdalah set: look, the wine cup, the spice cup, and a plate with some writing on it… which I shocked myself when I was able to read the Hebrew around the rim: הַמַּבְדִּיל בֵּין קדֶשׁ לְחול  (hamavdil bein kodesh l’chol: Who distinguishes between the sacred and the profane). I think of the Putnams every week when we light the Havdalah candle, and honor not only Shabbat, but their family and legacy.
 

by Larry Rosenwald

One of the important, challenging, quietly revolutionary aspects of Havurat Shalom's liturgy is its feminism, by which I mean chiefly the fact that both God and human beings are referred to sometimes in the feminine and sometimes in the masculine. This is true in the English and still more frequently and more strikingly true in the Hebrew, where so much is gendered, not just pronouns, but nouns, verbs, and adjectives as well.  All of this may well be disorienting to people not familiar with it, as it was to me when I began coming to Havurat Shalom in 2003 – I kept expecting one word and getting another, and I felt as if I were riding some especially unpredictable roller-coaster.
           
I’ve been to services at other congregations, some of them politically progressive ones and self-declaredly feminist ones (those being the ones I like to attend), and in my experience the Havurah's liturgy is unique.  Other congregations add the matriarchs to the patriarchs, other congregations have women leading services and leyning the torah portion.  Some other congregations have English translations of their liturgy that diminish the degree of masculine domination in the traditional Hebrew text – e.g., the Purple Valley Siddur produced by students at Williams College.  But even there, if you turn from the English to the Hebrew, you find God referred to exclusively in the masculine, and human beings almost exclusively so.
           
I’ve thought a lot about this gulf, this asymmetry, I’ve talked about our liturgy recently with friends both sympathetic and critical.  I’m no less supportive of it than I was before those conversations, no less inspired by it, no less in need of it.  But I have a better sense of what’s radical about it.
 
Theologically, it seems to me, we’re on firmer ground than supporters of an exclusively masculine God-language can be.  G-d transcends gender, that seems axiomatic.  It follows that it cannot be just, cannot be adequately capacious, to speak of God exclusively in the masculine, because doing so constrains God within a single human gender category. Speaking of God sometimes in the feminine and sometimes in the masculine does better justice, however imperfect, to the ein sof, the one without end or limit.
           
We are also on firmer ground than those who argue (the focus here being on the language used to describe people rather than the language used to describe God) that of course “he” means “he and she,” “man” means “man and woman,” ish means “ish and ishah.” I was taught such ideas when I was a grammar school student. I was taught the notion of the generic he; I’m familiar with the notion.  But that was a long time ago, and if it was ever true – and I’m not sure that it was – it’s surely not true now (nor do I teach it now to my students).  One fruitful consequence of feminism has been to challenge what used to be taught, even at the level of grammar, to change the ways in which we actually speak and write.  If someone today were writing a Declaration of Independence, would that person write “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”?  (Angelica Schuyler’s response in Hamilton is on the mark: “And when I meet Thomas Jefferson/ I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the sequel!”)  And no translator today, I think, would render the title of Viktor Frankl’s concentration camp memoir as Man’s Search for Meaning;  too much is excluded, too much is distorted.  (And it’s a fanciful translation, which a strict literalist of my sort has to reject on other grounds as well, the original title being, in strict translation, “Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything:  A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp.’)  And the English of the prayerbook needs to be our English, the English of this moment.  Not, to be sure, the slang or perishable colloquial idiom of this moment – nothing goes out of fashion more quickly - but the English we write at this moment to formulate prayer. 
           
All of this seems straightforward enough, to me at any rate, and justifies the Havurah's liturgy on grounds both of theology and of feminism-inspired living English usage in the 21st century.  I would make that argument anywhere, to anyone.
 
But then we come back to the fact that these commonsensical arguments seem to persuade only us, or almost only us, that elsewhere than at Havurat Shalom the Hebrew liturgy remains, with the very moderate exception of the addition of the matriarchs, a masculinist one.  (This is true even in siddurim and machzorim where other aspects of the liturgy are changed for what one might call political reasons, e.g., in the Reconstructionist siddur Kol Haneshama, which alters the Hebrew of the aleynu prayer to eliminate its invidious comparisons between Jews and non-Jews but leaves G-d and the worshipper in the masculine.)
           
Why?
           
For two reasons, I think.  (I exclude sexism as a reason, not because it plays no role, but because, as noted, even self-declared feminist congregations retain a masculinist liturgy.)  First, because of the desire, the principled desire, to be in accord with tradition.  Al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur, “do not separate from the community,” that is a real desire and a real principle, and I respect it. It is wonderful to think that the words one is saying or singing in prayer on Friday night or Saturday morning are the words being said or sung all over the Jewish world.  Changes are made when necessary – few congregations I have visited retain the blessing thanking God “for not making me a woman” – but these are minimal, the goal being not to separate, to have all of us together saying or singing sh’ma yisra’el.
           
A second reason:  because it seems so khutspedik, so insolent, so whipper-snapperish, in oneself or in others, to alter a liturgy established so long ago, by people of great authority and wisdom, who created beautiful and meaningful poems and prayers.  We should be hesitant, the argument might run, to put ourselves forward as empowered to alter what others of greater authority have constituted.  Who are we, anyway?
           
I feel the force of both these reasons;  but they are in my judgment not so much reasons to refrain from altering the liturgy as reasons to alter it in some ways and not in others.
           
Regarding the first reason, I would quote Joel Rosenberg’s colloquial and wise extension of it:  “al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur except when you have to.”  Necessity, that is, should be our guide, not caprice.  We should change the liturgy not when we casually dislike it, when we have a problem with, when it’s not to our taste;  we should change it when we must, when the language makes the prayer an obstacle to praying, a diminishing of ourselves, of the persons and energies we bring to davening, when the prayer as written sticks in our throat, and I mean that almost literally, when we cannot breathe it out.  And for me, and for the long train, di goldene keyt, the golden chain, of our liturgy-makers, the exclusively masculine characterization of God and the worshipper has exactly those effects.  We change the liturgy so that we can breathe it.  Nishmat kol chay tevarech et shemech we sing, the breath of every living thing will praise your (feminine) name, and for that to be true, we too have to be able to breathe.
           
Regarding the second reason, I would say that it should stimulate us to think about our relation to the authority of the past.  I might not go as far as Emerson does, lover of Emerson as I am:  “meek young persons grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero . . . Locke . . . Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young persons in libraries when they wrote these books.”[1]  I would go as far as Mordecai Kaplan did, who said often and in various forms, “the past has a vote, but not a veto.” I would also go so far as to say that it is intellectually and emotionally unhealthy to think that all wisdom is in the past, is in those who happened to come first, is in those men who happened to come first. Mayn neshome iz nit keyn rozhinke, my soul is also no raisin – or, more colloquially, and shifting the metaphor from fruit to meat, “what am I, chopped liver?” 
           
We should in remaking the liturgy certainly hold ourselves to a high standard, philologically and literarily.  We should not presume that replacing old formulations with new ones is easy, that Hebrew can be easily made to say with authenticity what we wish to say.  We should look with humility as well as pride on the new liturgy we have made, and change it when we need to.
           
​But if those are the criteria - acting from necessity not from caprice, rewriting with a judicious mixture of philological humility and human self-reliance – then the liturgy we make new, our mutkan liturgy, fixed and healed and restored, will be an essential element in the fruitful multiplicity of Judaisms, the seventy faces of Torah. Or rather it already is.
 
[1] http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar, accessed September 26th, 2017.

by Aliza Arzt

by Bev Schwartz

by Ruth Abrams

I can make an eight-strand braid and an eighteen-strand Jewish star. I’ve learned to make sourdough challah, challah with no eggs, and challah with no salt. But so far I haven’t tried making gluten-free challah. There is a good gluten-free recipe that another havnik, Josh Shalem Schreiber, adapted, and he gave it to me to share with people. (But he can share it with you himself!) I’m not an expert in challah dough sculpture and I usually don’t add exciting fillings, but I have done those things a little. Once I dyed the dough with gel food coloring to make rainbow challah for the week we read the story of Noah. 

I could just buy loaves of nice bread instead of baking Ashkenazi-style braided loaves. I have done that. My kid is in college. I don’t eat tons of bread during the week. Slices of challah fill my freezer. Why do I keep baking?

On days when I feel a little blue, it’s hard to say. It’s difficult to want to bake when I can’t have guests or potlucks. I got super excited that we were going to be able to have guests in the month or so after vaccinations were available to everyone, and then we got slammed with the viral variants. It felt even worse after that. 

For me, Judaism means doing the same things all the time, as well as I can. Sometimes my voice is too rough for singing or I’m too tired for Talmud or Torah study. I want to do my best and pay attention, but I sometimes have to do the action whether I am ready to do my best or not. Even if I’m the only one who will eat the bread, I try to bake it anyway. 

As with prayer or study or any other part of Jewish religious life, baking challah involves repetition. You get to know the ingredients and the finer points of the process. This obviously applies also to Torah study, to prayer, to everything we do. There is always something new to notice, something important to do, something essential to contribute. I do the same things all the time, but I am never the same and the conditions are never the same. Every mitzvah is a fractal, through which we see ourselves very large and very small, again and again, shaping Jewish life. ​

by Heidi Friedman

One of the many things that I love about Havurat Shalom is that it makes it easy to combine my favorite things. Right now, we’re in the midst of our 2nd annual crafts project / winterwear drive, where we both knit hats and scarves and also collect donated ones to give to people in need. I’m knitting my hats out of donated yarn – knitting and upcycling ‘trash’ being two of my favorite things. Maida and Aliza, who had never knit before last year’s drive, are using knitting looms – in the Havurah spirit of learning new skills and DIY, more of my favorite things. And several of us attend the Somerville Public Library’s weekly crafts Zoom to work on our hats and scarves – combining the library – everyone’s favorite thing! – as well as the Havurah’s emphasis on social connection. At the end of January, we’ll donate all the winterwear we’ve made and collected to local organizations that support unhoused people.

Some years ago, Havurah member Todd built a Little Free Library for his front yard. The moment I saw it, I knew the Havurah should also get one. I got the LFL built as a time trade – one of my most favorite things! – out of scrap lumber (upcycling trash!). And voila, the Havurah is helping to circulate free books – everyone’s favorite things – in the neighborhood. When we were inundated with donated books,  Merit started curating the LFL, slowly putting books of different types and topics out in it for passersby to peruse. More recently, Meryl read about a project to diversify the books in LFLs so that they better represent all of us. Now the Havurah is purchasing some new and some used diverse children’s books, and slowly stocking them in our LFL. We’re funding the diverse books project with money that was donated in memory of Reena Kling, z”l, always a staunch proponent of tzedakah and tikkun olam.
​
Finally, when a Little Free Pantry appeared in my neighborhood, I again thought that was something that would be in the Havurah’s sweet spot. I had no idea how it would take off! I wasn’t able to get it built as a time trade, but a former Havurah community member, Nathan Rome, built it as a volunteer. That people who came to the Havurah even decades ago continue to love it is one of my favorite things. Meanwhile, Todd had gotten active in supporting Somerville’s community refrigerators, and Monica had reached out to Saint Clement Church in Medford as part of a Sukkot ushpizin program, to invite guests into the Havurah sukkah. These two streams have combined so that the Saint Clement congregation is donating LOTS of food to the Havurah to distribute through the LFP and the community refrigerators.

I love these projects that the Havurah has undertaken, and the processes through which we work on them, the people who nurture them and the results of the Havurah being a good citizen in the neighborhood, knitting the local community together a little bit more snugly. I love that they combine so many of my favorite things, and of course, as you can see, the Havurah itself is one of my very favorite things.

Heidi Friedman is a long-time member of Havurat Shalom and on the board of one of the local time banks, the Time Trade Circle.

by Todd Kaplan

by Larry Rosenwald

In recent years, I’ve often led the musaf service on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and whenever I do that, and come to the shofarot service, I recite Kadye Molodowsky’s poem der bal-tekie, The Shofar Blower. It’s heartbreaking, and might seem at odds with the joy we often feel hearing the shofar, and especially at the end of Yom Kippur, when the tekiah gedolah calls us back out of the fast to our amended lives. For me, though, the poem’s melancholy and the joyousness of the sound are in counterpoint, each reinforcing the other.

​Which is enough from me.  Here’s the poem, transliterated Yiddish and my translation side by side.

(Translation by Lawrence Rosenwald, with admiring acknowledgment of Kathryn Hellerstein’s beautiful earlier translation, from which he learned much.)

​Let the Shofar Sound
 
Let the shofar sound
Calling birds from their nests,
soldiers from their tanks,
music from flutes lying discarded.
 
Let the shofar sound
waking those who live in nightmares,
piercing the fog of confusion,
dispersing the myth of apathy.
 
Let the shofar sound
enticing us to dance,
forcing us to witness,
wringing tears from eyes tired of weeping.
 
Let the shofar sound
heralding our march to freedom,
ushering in an age of peace,
purging oil slicks from our souls.
 
Let the shofar sound
in mourning for the lost and the wasted,
in celebration of effervescent hopes,
in acknowledgment that we are here.

- by Cindy Blank-Edelman

by Monica Holland

Do you wrack your brain, wondering what more you can do to slow global warming and respond to the extreme weather we’re already experiencing, like the crazy heat waves we’ve had this summer? Or think about what you can do about urban heat islands, which the EPA says “occur when cities replace natural land cover with dense concentrations of pavement, buildings, and other surfaces that absorb and retain heat”? (https://www.epa.gov/green-infrastructure/reduce-urban-heat-island-effect) One of the best ways to forestall, or even reverse, the effects of urban heat islands is to enrich the tree canopy! With this in mind, and in conjunction with Communities Responding to Extreme Weather (CREW), the head the City of Somerville Urban Forestry Division spoke with us July 27 about how we can contribute to the vitality of young trees in Somerville.
 
Vanessa Boukili, the inaugural urban forester of Somerville (now Senior Urban Forestry & Landscape Planner in the Public Space and Urban Forestry Division), has for five years been leading a concerted effort to plant and care for street and park trees. Tasked with planting about 350 trees each year, Vanessa works closely with contractors and the Department of Public Works to select trees appropriate to the sites, carefully prepare the sites, and after planting, monitor the watering, mulching and pruning of these trees in their first years.
 
In addition to showing us some lovely oaks recently planted in Nathan Tufts Park, Vanessa gave us quite a bit of useful information about how we can help.

• Adopt a tree close to where you live or work. Each young tree has a green tag you can scan for information about it, and an explanation of what it means to “adopt” it.
• Water your adopted tree on a regular basis, weekly during dry periods in the summer months. Ideally, fill up its gator bag with a garden hose. (Here are filling instructions.) The gator bag allows water to slowly seep down to the roots and prevents runoff. If you can’t reach it with a hose, give the tree some water when you can. The city hires contractors to water trees in dry summer weeks for two years. After that, it’s up to us to give them water if it’s dry. Keep watering 3-5 years out.
• Zip the gator bag around one of the tree’s stakes, not around the trunk. All that moisture around the trunk can promote disease and rot. If it’s around the trunk, move it to a stake, preferably the uphill stake so the water can slowly flow downhill to the rootball.
• Keep weeds out of the tree well so the tree isn’t competing with the weeds for water and nutrients. Also, remove trash which can adversely affect the soil.
• Place 2”- 4” of mulch around the tree (though not within 6” of the trunk!) if the city’s contractor has not. This will help the soil retain moisture and nutrients.
• Remove suckers growing at the base of the tree if you are very careful not to injure the trunk. If the trunk is engulfed in suckers, call 311 and DPW will get on the case.
• Refrain from applying fertilizer around the tree.
• Refrain from pruning the tree. This is done by professionals three years after it’s planted, both to remove dead wood and to shape the canopy for optimal structure.
• Refrain from locking bicycles to trees. If you see a bike chained to a tree, call 311. A call to 311 is also a good way to: request a tree be planted by your house; ask that a dead tree be taken down; ask that a tree to be pruned; or register concern about the health or condition of a particular tree.
• Refrain from putting posters on trees, either with staples or nails. These can harm the tree.
• Try to encourage dog owners to steer their dogs away from peeing on young trees. Because dogs are carnivores, their urine is acidic and can burn plants and their root systems.

 
If you’re really into trees:

• Consider joining Somerville’s Urban Forestry Committee next time there’s an opening.
• Check out Somerville’s first-ever Urban Forestry Management Plan

•  If you’re interested in identifying the species of trees in Somerville, see the inventory map. Also, if you want to know what the City’s planted recently and what they’re planning on planting this fall, see https://www.somervillema.gov/departments/ospcd/psuf/urban-forestry.
• Join with friends and family to fund a memorial tree. The cost is $1,000, and trees come with ten years of care and a commemorative plaque.

By the way, have you noticed those large gaps in the newly poured sidewalks along College Avenue, adjacent to the Havurah? The City will be planted a number of trees on our block this fall! Perhaps we can adopt one or more of them.