New Year for Trees

The fifteenth of Shvat in Hebrew is Tu B’Shvat. This year it is on Monday the 2nd of February.

Two thousand or so years ago, the Mishnah in Rosh Hashanah said

“There are four New Years. The first of Nisan is the New Year for festivals and kings. The first of Elul is the New Year for animal tithes. The first of Tishri is the New Year for years and for starting the seven-year cycle of Shmita and the fiftieth year Yovel, for when one takes tithes for plants and vegetables. The first of Shvat is the New Year for Trees. But Beit Hilel says it is the fifteenth.” We follow Beit Hilel.

We have always had differences of opinion and arguments about almost everything. But this is the first mention of Tu B’Shvat. It was the cut-off date, the time you started to count the new year for trees, when the sap began to rise.

Trees have a very special place in the Torah. In the Garden of Eden, there were two special trees: the Tree of Life, in the middle of the garden and the Tree of Knowledge, good and bad. And of course, we all know what happened with the snake. If the tree of knowledge was the one that caused all the trouble with Chava and the fruit, and if the punishment for eating from it was that they would die if they did, what then was the purpose of the Tree of Life? And if the penalty for eating from the first Tree of Knowledge could be commuted, why not the second? But sometimes there are no good answers. All we have for certain is the text. And clearly, trees are very important.

In Devarim (2:19), there is a law about not destroying fruit trees when one besieges a city “Don’t take an axe to a tree that you can eat of.” But then the text goes on to say, obscurely, “Do not cut it down for a human being is like the tree of the field.” This sounds rather improbable. What am I? No more than a tree?

I understand this as saying that humans and trees are both valuable and vulnerable. Both can nurture and sustain. Both can easily be destroyed. Just as one should cherish human life and avoid its destruction, so one should cherish the tree and nature in general and make sure it is not degraded.

From a legal point of view, according to the Torah, the fruit of a new tree cannot be eaten for the first three years of its growth. Its status during this period is called Orla. Orla also means the foreskin as in the Brit Milah. In other words, it means something not yet completed or perfected. And this was why the mystics let their son’s hair grow uncut for three years. In the fourth year, in Temple times, the fruit called Neta Revai was dedicated to God and could only be eaten in Jerusalem. No reason is given. One assumes its origin was to give the tree the chance to grow strong and produce fruit in abundance.

Poetically, in the Torah, a tree symbolises the ideal of spirituality. “The good person shall be like a tree planted near streams of water, giving its fruit at the right time, its leaves will not wither” (Psalms 1). A tree with healthy roots as well as strong leaves, able to survive the bad times as well as thrive in the good, became a symbol of Torah. Perhaps also a symbol of us. The Tree of Life, Eytz Chayim, is one of the popular names given to Yeshivot, places where Torah was and is studied in depth. They are also the words used for two wooden scrolls in the Sefer Torah and the words we use when we carry the Torah back to the ark.

Agricultural laws of the Torah fell into disuse for a long time in exile. But the return of Jews to Safed in the sixteenth century brought them back into focus with nature as part of the Kabbalist revival, spearheaded by Rabbis Cordovero and Luria. In their holistic, mystical worldview, they wanted to integrate every aspect of human physical life into the religious. In Kabbalah, the Tree of Life symbolises the human relationship rooted on earth but reaching upwards and outwards spiritually.

Tu B’Shvat became a major mystical festival in which a special meal was celebrated with the fruits of the new season, especially those seven mentioned in the Bible and associated with the land of Israel. And years later, Tu B’Shvat was adopted by the Zionist pioneers and the secular Kibbutzim as a non-religious way of celebrating their ties to the Land of Israel.

Now we live in a world in which nature, climate, and ecology all figure large in our consciousness. There has been an increasing tendency to see Tu B’Shvat in this context too. And I welcome that. But the emphasis on trees in the Torah tells me that trees are more to Judaism than simple botanical phenomena.

Trees are beautiful creations, decorative but also essential to maintain the ecological balance.
Our blessings over food are designed to urge us to think before and after we eat to appreciate the gifts of the world. So too our festivals, whether Biblical like Sukot or Rabbinical like Tu B’Shvat, are there to remind us of how beautiful our world can be and how fortunate we are that we can enjoy it. But they should also remind us of the fragility of our natural world and that we should protect and defend it.

Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.