With Rabbi Pete Tobias, of the Liberal Synagogue, Elstree.

Well Chris I’m pleased to say that we’ve just had another Jewish festival. Yesterday was the New Year for Trees. Not bad eh – we had January 1st, then a couple of weeks back the Chinese New Year and now it’s the trees’ turn.

How do trees celebrate a new year? Were there champagne corks and party poppers going off yesterday? Well it’s not actually the trees who are celebrating. It’s supposed to be us celebrating them. How do we do that? Jewish tradition at this festival is to plant trees but that’s not easy when there’s so much snow lying on the ground.

The real purpose of having a New Year for trees is to encourage us to appreciate them and the natural world we tend to ignore. Because we do take so much beauty for granted. And it’s not just trees…

A few years ago the Washington Post arranged for a violinist to play for an hour at a Metro station in America then observed who stopped to listen. The only people who paid any attention to him were children whose parents hurried them on. The violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the top musicians in the world who two days earlier had played a sell-out concert in Boston – average cost of tickets was $100. He was playing a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

The paper reported that one of the possible conclusions from this experience could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

Maybe trees are among those things. I’m not suggesting we should rush to the nearest tree, wish it happy new year and give it a hug. But perhaps at some point today we might take a moment to stop, look around and take a moment to appreciate just one of the many things whose beauty we so often ignore.