|
Tu B’Shvat 5785
Tu B’Shvat (the 15th of Sh’vat) will be celebrated on Thursday, February 13, 2025. It is a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, but it provides a significant object lesson: how the meaning and form of a holiday can change over time.
Tu B’Shvat first appears in the Mishnah (~200 C.E.) as an administrative calendar “place keeper” to determine which trees should be counted in any given year for the mitzvah of ma-aser (the tithing of fruits; Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:1). Once the Temple was destroyed and the Jews sent into exile, ma-aser ceased and Tu B’Shvat became a date without a real function.
Tu B’Shvat was celebrated as a more general festival of fruits in the Middle Ages. Those same fruits were invested with cosmic symbolism by the 16th-century Kabbalists of Tz’fat, creators of the Tu B’Shvat Seder.
18th-century Chasidim saw Tu B’Shvat metaphorically, relying upon the Biblical verse “... for are the trees of the field human beings ...” (Deut. 20:19) to equate trees, which connect the nurturing earth to the ripening fruit, to humans who can bring the sanctity of God’s realm down to earth.
The early labor Zionists seized upon the holiday as a rallying point for their mission to revive the land. The Keren Kayemet L’yisrael (Jewish National Fund) made the holiday a worldwide event through the proliferation of the “Blue Box” in Jewish homes and the custom of planting trees in Palestine/Israel in people’s honor and memory. In more recent decades, Tu B’Shvat has served as an anchor point for the Jewish environmental movement.
While trees always play a central role in Tu B’Shvat observances, the evolution of the holiday’s focus over time serves as an example of the creative tension between tradition and change and a case study in the making of meaning.
| 
