We’re coming up to Tu B’Shvat, a holiday that exemplifies why Jewish tradition needs to change and adapt in order to survive.
Tu B’Shvat. That’s that big nothing of a holiday that some Jews are trying to bring back with some hocus-pocus seder ritual from the middle age, right? You eat dates and figs – fine – and bokser (carob). Excuse me, but “feh.” I don’t really want a holiday for eating bokser. And I sure don’t want to mix red and white wine.
The New Year of the Trees, right? What kind of New Year do trees need? Do they put on funny hats and set off fireworks? What is this holiday – and why should we care?
Let’s start with “what is this holiday?” The truth is, it’s April 15. It a tax date. In ancient times, trees that had flowered before that date were taxed for the year before; if the tree had not flowered by the 15th of Shvat, taxes were deferred until the following year. (The IRS has not invented anything new.)
But why that specific date? Almost certainly, the holiday is the remnant of the worship of the goddess Asheret or Ashtoreth (Esther!) to whom groves of trees were dedicated. You can read in the Bible how hard it was for the religious authorities of the Temple to wipe out tree worship among the Hebrews. So they adopted a date that was already a holiday – the first full moon of the early spring – and added the Temple offering, the tax, to it. This is one of the effective techniques of traditions that survive. (The Catholic church, for example, regularly co-opted local holidays, gods and worship practices in the course of spreading throughout the world.) As Jews became urbanized, this form of nature worship died out in the Middle East, and once the Jewish state was destroyed and Temple Judaism ceased to exist, the tax date was no longer observed. Record of the holiday was preserved in our texts, and was revived, much like the Hebrew language, only in modern times.
When first revived, it was a holiday that connected Jews of the European diaspora to Israel, which, although it always had an indigenous Jewish population, was beginning to be seen as a possible homeland for persecuted Jews in Europe. The idea that the sap was rising in Israel while Europe and North America are cold and snowy can be a powerful reminder to us that not all Jews are Ashkenazim – descendants of Jews from Eastern Europe. We have lived everywhere, and we’ve gained from and contributed to almost every culture in the world. That’s a reminder that is needed more as more, as Jews live in fewer and fewer countries of the world and as we have become overwhelmingly Ashkenazic.
The next stage of the revival of the holiday was as a nature holiday. Jews, a primarily urban people, need time in our busy, mostly indoor lives, not only to think about our relationship with nature, but to experience it. Jews began to take hikes on Tu B’Shvat and to start plants indoors for later transplanting. (If you start parsley seeds on Tu B’Shvat, the parsley will be ready for your Pesakh seder table.)
Most recently, Tu B’Shvat has become the Jewish ecology holiday. It has become a day for social action to preserve the environment. Jewish communities clean up shorelines, maintain nature trails and participate in recycling projects.
And as for the Tu B’Shvat seder. It certainly doesn’t have to be mystical – it can reflect all the meanings of the holiday, and after all, it involves food! Who doesn’t like that?
So – A nothing holiday? A made-up event? Not at all! Tu B’Shvat is a perfect example of new wine in old bottles, the use of an old tradition to express our Jewish values in these days: a time to remember and celebrate Jewish diversity, a way to connect with the land of Israel independent of the current political situation, a chance to make your social ethics explicitly Jewish, and, of course, an occasion to eat.