Reimagining Tu B’Shevat – Our Highest Holiday!

I remember as a boy hearing grownups ask each other, “What will you be doing for the High Holidays?” and I used to wonder, “What are the low holidays?” I never heard anyone use that expression, but assumed they were the minor ones – Lag Ba’Omer and Tu B’Shvat, the New Year of the Trees.

Increasingly students and younger friends have told me, in the face of growing climate challenges, that Tu B’Shvat has become for them our most important holiday – and I agree! As a Californian, sharing community with Coast Redwoods – I hugged one this evening! – who can grow to be more than 380 feet tall – the tallest trees in the world – I now think of Tu B’Shvat as our “Highest Holiday.”

In ancient times our ancestors worshipped the goddess Asherah, the wife of their chief god El. She was represented by a big tree or a wooden pole, and her main holiday was in this season. While her worship was forbidden in the Torah, she often had a shrine in the first temple in Jerusalem, and scholars link the memory of her to our ideas about the Shekhinah, the female indwelling presence of God.

The observance of Tu B’Shvat grew out of a line in the book of Deuteronomy: “Every year, you shall set aside a tenth part of the yield,” and another line that instructs us to not eat fruit from trees less than 3 years old. To know how old trees were, our ancestors would count from the season when they were most often planted, which, spiraling back to Asherah and her main celebration, happens now in the Middle East.

Trees have a sacred role in Judaism, starting at the beginning of the Torah:

And God planted a garden in Eden to the east, and set the human It had formed there. Then out of the soil God grew trees pleasant to the eye and good for eating, and in the middle of the garden, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and bad.

There’s a story I love in the Babylonian Talmud:

Once a long time ago a man named Honi saw a young man planting a carob tree. Honi said, “A carob tree takes 70 years to bear fruit. Do you really think you’ll be here to eat from it?”

The man answered, “There were carob trees here when I was born and now I’m planting this one for my offspring.”

Honi sat down and fell asleep. As he slept, a small cave formed around him, hiding him, and he slept there for 70 years. When he woke, he saw a young man who resembled the one who was planting a carob tree. This young man was gathering carobs from a big carob tree spread over them both.

Honi asked him, “Do you know who planted this carob tree?”

The young man answered, “My grandfather planted it.”

“I must have been dreaming for 70 years!” Honi exclaimed.

We read in the Jerusalem Talmud –

It is forbidden to live in a city that does not have greenery.

Our ancient sage Yochanan ben Zakkai, is quoted in “The Sayings of Rabbi Natan” –

If you’re holding a sapling in your hand and someone tells you, “Come quickly, the Messiah is here!” – finish planting the tree, and then go to greet the Messiah.

In the 17^th century mystics in Safed created a Tu B’Shvat seder loosely modeled on a Passover seder, inspired by a verse in Deuteronomy – “When in your war against a city you have to besiege it for a long time in order to capture it, you must not destroy its trees, wielding the axe against them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down,” and they were also inspired by a later midrash on that verse: “If not for the trees, human life could not exist.”

The custom of eating fruit and reciting psalms for Tu B’Shvat was connected to the Kabbalistic conception of “The Tree of Life” – “Etz Chayim.” They taught that the Creator moved from pure beingness to physicality through ten spheres, ten sephirot, one for each of the ten commandments perhaps, with twenty-two pathways between them, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. They created a diagram of the spheres, and taught that we could embody them, feeling the presence of the ten sephirot in ten different places in our body. If you don’t know about this, please do some reading on it and look at versions of the diagram.

Following their teachings, I’d like to guide you through a short meditation to be practiced every day, and especially on Tu B’Shvat:

Place both your hands on the top of your head, as you are able, or focus your attention there. This is the first sphere. Close your eyes and feel the energy there, the glowing of your timeless soul and its connection to the Source, the Creator, All That Is, HaShem, Shekhinah.
Place one hand on the left side of your head and one on the right, the 2^nd and 3^rd spheres, and feel the energy there, of your luminous wisdom.
Now rub your shoulders. They are spheres 4 and 5, and feel the energy there, your capacity for change and growth.
Rest your hands over your heart, and feel the centrality of sphere 6, your core, the seat of love, alive and beating beneath your two hands.
Put both hands on the very top of your hip bones. They’re spheres 7 and 8. Feel the power of movement in your body, of advancement.
Place your hands on your lower abdomen, below your belly button. This is Sphere 9. Feel the energy of this place, the seat of your innate creativity.
Place both hands over your pubic bone. Sphere 10. Feel the energy here, the seat of your connection to physicality and to the Earth itself.
Feel your breath. And feel the pathways of energy connecting these ten places. And know that we all embody the Tree of Life, growing together to do the sacred work of connecting heaven and Earth. We, and the trees.

In 2012 I invited climate journalist Mark Hertsgaard to speak with my community, and I remember something he told us. That we could solve the climate crisis – by planting 15 billion trees – in the next five years. I don’t have to tell you that that didn’t happen!

There are many versions of Tu B’Shvat Seder haggadadot, and if this holiday hasn’t been a part of your life, or a major one, I invite you to start thinking of it as our Highest Holiday. This year I went to two To B’Shvat seders, one in the redwoods. In the face of growing climate challenges, and the need for us to plant and tend billions of trees – native to their regions – I invite you to ask yourself:

If you have a yard – Have you planted new trees, or are you planning to?

Are you involved in the care and planting of trees in your neighborhood?

What tree-support organizations are you involved with, donate to?

What parks do you like to visit, to be among the trees?

Do you use recycled paper that doesn’t require cutting down more trees?

What do you commit to doing for the trees in the coming year?

Please support organizations that are working to reforest the world, like Save the Redwoods, Greenpeace, Earthjustice, Trees for the Future, and Friends of the Urban Forest. And get your hands in the dirt the Torah tells us we were made from. Plant trees. Care for them. Bow to every tree you pass, thank it for existing, apologize for the harm we’ve done to it and its relations, and tell it we’re working to heal the world – as a way of observing the New Year of the Trees all year – to connect heaven and earth – and help bring about the coming of the messianic age.