Dear NILI Community,
The month of Shvat is perhaps best known for the holiday of Tu B'Shvat. The Mishna in Rosh Hashanah 1:1 describes Tu B'Shvat as the "Rosh Hashanah of the trees" and one of four new years throughout the year. Tu B'Shvat had practical implications, as well, for determining when the tithing of produce yield would begin.
The Mishnat Eretz Yisrael, a twenty-first-century commentary on the Mishnah, writes, "From an agricultural perspective, the month of Shvat is a 'dead' month. On account of the winter, most trees are still in a state of hibernation and only a few have begun to bloom." This reality, he points out, is quite opposite from the popular Israeli folk song, "Tu B'Shvat has Arrived, the Holiday of the Trees," a fanciful imagining of Israel in full bloom. The month of Shvat was chosen precisely because it was a dead month, to demarcate the end of the agricultural yield before the start of the blossoming of the new year when the land was full of unrealized potential. The Mishnat Eretz Yisrael further states that the first reference to Tu B'Shvat as a festive day appears only later, in a response from the Rabbenu Gershom (960-1040) stating that it was forbidden to fast on Tu B'Shvat.
It was not until the Kabbalistic turn in sixteenth-century Tzfat that we see the emergence of Tu B'Shvat as a festive day, with the creation of a Tu B'Shvat seder. The Kabbalists who "As part of the renewal of their ties and attachment to the spiritual and actual Land of Israel," turned it into a holiday; "In the communal consciousness, the holiday has become…an expression of the longing for, and of the attachment to, the Land of Israel" (Mishnat Eretz Yisrael).
Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik writes about these early Kabbalists: "Sitting at their Tu B'Shvat seder - the mystics of Safed prayed for the time when Jewish life in the Holy Land would bloom and blossom, flower and flourish...and when even the deserts, defying expectations, would be transposed into Edens, culminating in an extraordinary autumn and in the celebration of Sukkot when Jews from all over the world would converge on Jerusalem to celebrate the harvest of the land," (Sacred Time).
More than a "Rosh Hashanah of the trees", for the Kabbalists, Tu B'Shvat was replete with symbolic significance about the hope and renewal of the Jewish people themselves being replanted in the Land of Israel. As Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik concludes, "And so they sat at their Seder and pondered the fact that underneath the whiteness of winter, deep within the ground, the resin was gathering, that above the ground the trees were beginning to bud, and that spring was preparing to arrive. So too, they would allow themselves to hope," (Sacred Time).
Tu B'Shvat continues to carry the significance of hope and renewal in our lives today. What seeds of hope and renewal can we plant and nourish today that will help us grow both individually and as a people?
Chodesh Shevat Tov!
No comments:
Post a Comment