TU B’SHVAT

Tu B’shvat, the new year of the trees, is the only holiday in the month of Sh’vat.  It occurs on the 15th of Sh’vat, the full moon. The main path of celebration is conducting a seder, patterned after the Pesach seder, except there’s no myth to easily relate, unlike the exodus from Egypt.  This is a holiday that has been actively reclaimed by the Jewish environmental and earth based movement as well as amongst many synagogues. Just as with Pesach, there are a lot of Haggadot, or booklets that provide text for the seder. Some follow environmental themes, some follow more mystical themes consistent with the origin of the Tu B’shvat seder, and a lovely one from the Reform movement has no mystical readings at all.  I’m not familiar enough with the literature to have a favorite one I’d recommend—ah, a project for this coming year!

I’m going to discuss five themes connected to the holiday.

• The history of the holiday

•           The relationship of the prosaic and the sacred

• Trees as teachers

•           The symbols of wholeness

•           The symbols of red and white

The history of the holiday is a wonderful example of how to create something new and authentically Jewish in Judaism.  The holiday is listed as one of the four new years in the Talmud. (Rosh Hashanah 2A) The timing more or less corresponds to the flowering of the almond tree, the first tree to flower in Israel. The timing serves two purposes.  One is a tax purpose in determining the age of the tree and therefore what is owed on the tree.  It also is used to determine the age of trees and whether it is permitted to eat of the fruit of the tree.  The basic stewardship idea is that you can’t eat fruit from trees before they are three years old (Leviticus 19:23).  This agricultural principle allows for trees to mature enough before they are stressed to produce.  It’s exactly comparable to not eating strawberries the first year they are planted or not breeding a heifer calf until she is 15 months old, even if she starts to cycle at 7 or 8 months.

The idea of a seder originated with the ARI, R. Yitzhak Luria, in 16th Century Safed.  Luria, the foremost Kabbalist in our history, developed a seder as a practice of eating ten specific fruits and drinking four cups of wine as a way to bring us closer to spiritual perfection.  It has in more modern times morphed into a way to celebrate our connection with Israeli produce, to plant trees in Israel and to dedicate ourselves to environmental justice.  So we have gone from a tax holiday, the 15th of April for trees, to something that is full of meaning. We have thus, in a thoroughly Jewish way, elevated the importance of trees.

What other themes would you like to see celebrated that are currently at best lightly celebrated, but in an authentically Jewish way?  For instance, Rosh Hodesh Elul is considered the tax day for animals, but we haven’t reclaimed that as a day to celebrate the role of mammals other than humans in our ecosystem. I also think of celebrating the importance of agricultural labor which we could do immediately after Sukkot when we read about our earning our living through the sweat of our brow at the beginning of Genesis.

One aspect of Luria’s genius is that he took something that is really prosaic, a tax date, and turned it into something highly spiritual. Again, think of if we turned April 15th into both a day when your taxes were due and some kind of wild celebration of the community which is enabled by the taxes we pay?  Judaism, of course, has a longstanding tradition of lifting up the most mundane details of our life to something sacred—that’s what Kashrut is supposed to be about—you can eat this but not that or this but not with that in order to help the divine maintain the desired cosmic order.

I think part of the challenge for us in incorporating Tu B’shvat in our lives is asking ourselves how we can take mundane things and recognize the sacred in them or imbue them with sacrality that isn’t readily apparent. For instance, how can we praise creation and recognize the sacrality of the squirrels in our backyard?  How can we recognize the sacrality of parenting, not just in some rare moments, but even as we change diapers? What mundane things in your life can you recognize as sacred?  How?

Trees as teachers.   When Abraham is told to get up and go to the Promised land, the commandment is Lech Lecha.  (Genesis 12:1). Lech Lecha can be translated as get going or something more like go into yourself, to dig deep into who you are.  So Abram gets up and goes from Haran and literally the first place he stopped was alon moreh. Alon Moreh, as I learned from R. Zelig Golden, literally means “Teaching Tree.”  I’ve read translations that include the “plain of Moreh (Artscroll) or “terebinth of Moreh” (JPS).  These translations miss the fact that Moreh means teacher.  It’s an easy interpretation to say that Abram is told to go deep into himself, and the first place he stops (along with his whole entourage) is a teaching tree.

One possible interpretation is that Alon Moreh refers to a sacred place where one can learn great mysteries.  The place is made sacred by the sacred grove.  Sacred groves as places of mystery and learning are common in indigenous practice.  It is also possible (and these are not contradictory possibilities) that the place is named after a tree who teaches.

If you have never learned from a tree—now is a great time to learn this practice.  Wander in some woods and find a tree to which you are drawn.  Ask permission to sit and hang out with the tree (that’s good manners—you shouldn’t walk into someone’s house and start talking without being invited).  Be with the tree.  Share back and forth.  It will feel a bit silly, but stick with it.  Another practice is to sit in the woods and ask yourself what you can learn from the trees around you. How do the trees be in the world?  What are the lessons for you?

Lest you think this is too weird and not Jewish, the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria believed that trees were resting places for souls.  He performed a tree ritual in the month of Nisan to redeem souls who were caught in trees. (Howard Schwartz Tree of Souls, p. 165.) Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav, the originator of Hitbodedut, was once staying in an inn and cried out loudly enough in his sleep that he woke up the whole place. He asked the innkeeper if the walls were made from trees that had been cut down as saplings before they were mature, and the innkeeper said yes. Then Rabbi Nachman said: “All night I dreamed I was surrounded by the bodies of those who had been murdered.  I was very frightened.  Now I know that it was the souls of the trees that cried out to me.” (ibid) So if talking and listening to trees is good enough for the Ari and Nachman, we too can be with trees and listen to them.

Nachman asserts that trees have souls, just like humans. That they can be murdered, just like humans. This is a statement of the philosophy of Animism, that all beings are alive and have equal ontological status, we are all just differently bodied.    Imagine if we lived in a world where the clear cutters of a forest could be tried in court for murder of premature trees, or the different kind of creepy crawlies that depend on a diverse age forest.  That would be a different world.

How can trees be teachers for us? Do you believe that trees have souls? What are the implications of believing that they do and what are the implications of believing that they do not?  If you’ve ever engaged in a conversation with a tree or a grove, what did you learn?

The four cups of wine (or grape juice if you don’t drink alcohol) aren’t all the same in the seder.  The first cup is pure white, the second cup mostly white with a dash or red, the third cup mostly red with a dash of white and the fourth cup is pure red. We’ll talk about the symbolism of red and white below, but I want to share here something about the fact that it is precisely four cups.  Four, as I’ve been learning reading Jungians, is a number that characteristically represents the wholeness or completeness of the soul.

The idea of these four cups representing wholeness is buttressed by the fact that the full range of possibilities of mixing white and red wine is included in the four cups. The four possible mixes are all necessary to the whole AND none of them by themselves make the whole. 4 cups of red won’t redeem the world or make us whole, but the world also can’t be whole without the red—in its absence, in a minority presence, a majority presence and in total fullness.

What does wholeness look like for you on a personal level?  Communal level?  In relationship to the more than human world?

Red is the color of blood and white is the color of purity.  Blood is the life force—that’s why you can’t eat it (Leviticus Chapter 17:11).  Instead, blood is supposed to be used for atonement for our sins in sacrifice.  Blood is also a powerful form of protection magic, as we learn from the story of Zipporah when she saves Moses’ life by circumcising their son and applies the blood, presumably to Moses to save him from YHVH who wants to kill him.  (Exodus 4:24-6) We also see the protective nature of blood during the tenth plague when the Israelites protect their homes from YHVH and his destroyer by putting blood on the lintel and the two doorposts of their houses.

White is the color of purity.  We dress in white for Yom Kippur to mark our commitment to purity and perfection.  We are buried in a plain white shroud as all of our imperfections are put aside when we die. It is important to note that we don’t dress every day in white; when we live in the world, we strive to live in the world and recognize our imperfections.

 What, if any, are your magical protection practices?  Do you utilize blood in any practice? What kind of purity practices speak to you?

QUESTIONS

• What other themes would you like to see celebrated that are currently at best lightly celebrated, but in an authentically Jewish way?  

• What mundane things in your life can you recognize as sacred?  How?

• How can trees be teachers for us? Do you believe that trees have souls? What are the implications of believing that they do and what are the implications of believing that they do not?  If you’ve ever engaged in a conversation with a tree or a grove, what did you learn?

• What does wholeness look like on a personal level?  Communal level?  In relationship to the more than human world?

• What, if any, are your magical protection practices?  Do you utilize blood in any practice? What kind of purity practices speak to you?