new year for the trees: an explanation of tu bishvat
baffled my parents didn't discuss this with me sooner...
The past few weeks, I’ve been inundated with midterms, ranging from exams to projects and everything between. It was in this academic haze that I started to see things on January 25th about a Jewish holiday that was being celebrated that day.
Unfortunately, I don’t know a lot of Jewish holidays. I probably should, but because of my only being half Jewish, I tend to only celebrate a few: Yom Kippur, Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, and Purim, for the most part. What struck me about this one, however, was its focus on the environment. Let me give you a small dive into Tu BiShvat, which was a few weeks ago.
Tu BiShvat is a minor Jewish holiday. Its name literally comes from the date it’s on which is the fifteenth (Tu) of Shevat on the Hebrew calendar. This changes in the Gregorian calendar, or the one we use, but this year, it started at sunset on January 24th and ended on January 25th.
This holiday is also known as the “New Year of the Trees”. This is mainly because it initially wasn’t a holiday— instead, it was the date when all trees supposedly had their birthdays. When it turned three years old, the fruit upon it would be allowed to be eaten, as said by the Torah. This is also shown through how, in the Talmud, rabbis at the school of Hillel said that the fifteenth would be the new year for calculating the age of the tree.
In the 16th century, kabbalists began to spread the holiday and make it more important, with the idea that celebrating it releases divine sparks of life and growth. From there, it continued to grow, with texts like P’ri Etz Hadar, or The Fruit of the Majestic Tree, discussing it further.
Today, Tu BiShvat is known as a holiday celebrating the Earth and environmentalism in general, with many Jews planting trees and examining aspects of environmental issues and activism (although I don’t agree with some of it, such as how Israel uses the holiday. See one of my prior posts. Many Jews also have a seder, which involves having fruits like pomegranates, figs and grapes, wheat and barley, olives, nuts with shells, wine, and more. This is usually accompanied by prayers and discussion relating to the holiday.
Tu BiShvat is just one example of holidays that involve ecology. Recognizing how the environment is connected to us and our beliefs is extremely important— having holidays like this only aids in that matter. I hope anyone who celebrated had a lovely time, and I’ll be sure to join you next year!
Thank you for reading! Here are my sources:
https://reformjudaism.org/jewish-holidays/tu-bishvat
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3264/jewish/15-Shevat.htm
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/tu-bishvat-ideas-beliefs/
https://aish.com/48965616/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_BiShvat
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/260798/jewish/Tu-BiShvat-Customs.htm
Immergut, Matthew. “Adamah (Earth): Searching for and Constructing a Jewish Relationship to Nature.” Worldviews, vol. 12, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43809372. Accessed 10 Feb. 2024.