For 3 years the fruit shall be forbidden to you, they
shall not be eaten. In the 4th year, all its fruit shall be holy to praise God.
And in the 5th year, you may eat its fruit and thus increase your crop.
(Leviticus 19:23-25)
While in Crete, we studied the Lubavitcher Rebbe's explanation that the fruit of a tree's first 4 years correspond to 4 worlds of being:
However, the 5th year when the fruit can be eaten anywhere
by anyone is the highest level, higher than holiness that transcends the world.
Action (Asiyah) is our everyday world of ice-cream
delivery trucks, motor scooters and merry-go-round horses. (We took all 6
photos in Crete.)
Formation (Yetzirah) is the world of our feelings and
emotions that manipulate our strings like many dangling Pinocchio marionettes.
Creation (Beriah) is the creative world of mind, of
fresh insights, of deepening understanding, and of growing knowledge.
Emanation (Atzilut) is a holistic world in which
divine light is revealed in transcendent realms.
The highest level is when we draw divine light down into our
everyday world creating delicious deserts from the 5th year fruits.
When a skeptic heard Hasidim telling of their rebbe's ascent
to heaven, he discreetly trailed him as he left the synagogue and walked home.
He saw him emerge from his home in workman's clothes with an
ax in his belt and a rope draped over his shoulder.
The rebbe chopped down a small tree, cut off its branches
and tied them in a bundle that he brought into a shack at edge of the village.
Peering in a window, the skeptic saw a frail old woman. The rebbe put wood in her stove, cooked up a
pot of stew and scrubbed the floor.
When the Hasidim told ecstatically about their rebbe's
return from heaven, the skeptic added, "If not higher than that!"
