When you shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food... Three years shall it be "orlah" unto you: it shall not be eaten. On the fourth year, all its its fruit shall be holy for praisegiving to God. And in the fifth year shall you eat of its fruit, that it may yield to you its increase... (Leviticus 19:23-25)

Thus the fruit tree passes though all three basic Halachic (Torah-legal) states: the forbidden, the sanctified, and the permissible.

The fruit tree can therefore be seen as representative of the whole of creation, which likewise is divided among these three categories. There are, for example, foods that are forbidden to us (e.g., pork, meat with milk); foods whose consumption is a mitzvah---an act that sanctifies the food, elevating it as an object of the divine will (such as matzah on the seder night); and foods that are spiritually "neutral"--eating them is neither a transgression nor a sanctifying act. The same applies to clothes (the forbidden shaatnez; the mitzvah of tzitzit; and ordinary clothes); speech (gossip and slander; the holy talk of prayer and Torah study; talk of everyday matters); sexuality (adultery and incest; the mitzvah to "be fruitful and multiply"; ordinary marital life); money (thievery; charity; legal business dealings); and to every other area of life.

Otherwise stated: there are elements of our experience and environment that God commands us to reject and disavow; elements that we are empowered to sanctify by directly involving them in our relationship with God; and finally, there are elements which, even as they serve as the "supporting cast" for our fulfillment of God's will (e.g. the food that provides us with the energy to pray), remain ordinary and mundane.

In light of this, would it not have been more appropriate for the three stages of the fruit tree to follow an order of increasing sanctity--i.e., the forbidden, followed by the permissible, and culminating in the holy? Instead, the Torah legislates three forbidden years, followed by a year in which the fruit is sacred and its consumption a mitzvah, after which the fruit becomes ordinary food! Even more surprising is the fact that the fruit of the fifth year is presented as the product and goal of the first four: for three years you shall abstain from a tree's fruit, says the Torah, and on the fourth year you shall sanctify it, so that on the fifth year,"it may yield to you its increase." Keep from transgression and sanctify the holy so that you should have a lot of ordinary fruit to eat!

In truth, however, the ultimate purpose of our lives lies in the realm of the "ordinary". Only a small percentage of the world's leather is made into tefillin; only a small part of a community's man-hours can be devoted to prayer and Torah-study. The greater part of our lives falls under the "spiritually neutral" category: elements that, even as they serve a life that is predicated on a commitment to the divine will, remain ordinary and mundane components of a material existence; elements whose positive function does not touch them deeply enough to impart to them the "holiness'' that spells a manifest and tagible attachment to the Divine. But it is in this area that we most serve God's desire for "a dwelling place in the lowly realms"--that the ordinary landscape of material life should be made hospitable to His presence, and subservient to His will.

(The Chassidic Masters)