The Many (Authentic) Facelifts of Tu BiShvat

Posted by Aviva Lauer on February 2, 2025
Topics: Holidays, Tu Bishvat

The focus and message of some Jewish holidays is crystal clear. 

On Pesach, for example, we highlight the dichotomy of slavery and freedom. And so, at my seders growing up we remembered not only that our forefathers were slaves in Egypt but that our grandparents were slaves in Auschwitz and Dachau. For the years when we were locked down in place during Passover, we discussed what physical freedom and health meant to us. And for the past two years in my home, and in countless homes around the Jewish world, we looked at pictures of our brother and sister hostages in Gaza, and asked ourselves and our guests how we might endure while freedom was still denied them.  

On Sukkot each year, we zoom in on the themes of mindfulness and graciousness, as we acknowledge that what we have in this life is not solely a result of our own hard work, but a gift from God.

And on Yom Kippur, we consider what it means to atone and how to step into lives we are proud of leading.

Each of these Jewish holidays has an explicit focus and straightforward message.

But what happens when what a Jewish holiday is all about – its underlying themes and motifs – is not completely clear? Or when what we think of a holiday doesn’t exactly jive with our earliest sources on it? 

Take Tu BiShvat, for instance. What is that mid-winter holiday actually celebrating or commemorating? 

Some will say that it is a day that reminds us to take care of the environment, wherever one lives, because if we don’t then we will end up in a very unhealthy, messed up world. So plant trees! Don’t cut them down! Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!

Others, though, will hone in on Tu BiShvat as a holiday that is meant to cultivate a strong, positive, palpable, physical, fruity connection to the Land of Israel, and not focus on the environment at all. Otherwise, why would HaShkedia Porachat be the (unofficial) Tu BiShvat anthem? 

Altogether others would say that the tree fruits we eat on Tu BiShvat are really just symbolic, and not about anything physical whatsoever. That Tu BiShvat is one of the most God-focused holidays we have.

And yet, if we were to look at the original mention of this holiday in our traditional sources, we wouldn’t find messages about the environment, about Zionism, or even about God, at all.

Can we authentically and legitimately hand our learners a modern Tu BiShvat message about environmentalism, or about a yearning for the Land of Israel, or about a bond with the Divine, when it seems that the original holiday, first mentioned in the Mishnah, wasn’t actually about any of those things? Or putting it more bluntly: if we lean into those themes (even if they feel more relevant to our lives today), are we corrupting the holiday’s true significance? And as such, are we doing ourselves, our heritage, and the holiday itself an extreme disservice?

No. We are not. In fact, it is my sense that not only is it acceptable to teach about the environment in connection with Tu BiShvat, if that is meaningful to you and your community of learners, but it is also completely authentic and legitimate. I believe this to be true because since its first appearance some 2,000 years ago, Tu BiShvat has grown and changed and evolved, and along with it, its themes and big ideas have developed and changed as well. It is almost as if the holiday has shed its skin more than once over two millennia, or undergone a series of facelifts.

In Hebrew/Jewish, the way to say “reincarnation” – when the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, comes back to life in a newborn body – is  גלגול נשמות (gilgul neshamot). Like the Hebrew word for wheel – גלגל (galgal) – the word גלגול means the act of spinning or rotating. In biology, גלגול means metamorphosis or transformation. Essentially, a soul that moves from one bodily incarnation to another is evolving, changing, transforming itself from one thing to another.

Our Jewish holidays – at least some of them – are no different. They also grow and change over time. Along the way, they take on different themes or big ideas, depending on what is going on in the world at that moment and what the celebrators or commemorators of that time period have a need to focus on.

Tu BiShvat is an excellent example of this גלגול phenomenon. One can see, when analyzing the relevant primary sources, that over the past two thousand years Tu BiShvat has shed its skin, had facelifts, or reincarnated itself, at least three times.

Gilgul #1: A Tree’s Birthday or Ancient Israel’s April 15th

Our first introduction to Tu BiShvat is in the Mishnah, Tractate Rosh HaShana, in a discussion about what constitutes the “new year” in the Jewish calendar:

We understand from this mishnah that, according to Hillel, the fifteenth day of the month of Shvat is considered the “New Year for the Tree.” Shammai votes for the first day of Shvat, but like in almost all cases, Hillel’s opinion overrides that of Shammai.

We do not yet technically see the language of “Tu BiShvat” in this mishnah, but we can intuit that Tu (טו) is actually tet-vav (ט”ו), the Hebrew alphabetical version of 15 (if ט/tet=9 and ו/vav=6, then ט/tet+ו/vav=15). So Tu BiShvat literally refers to Hillel’s choice of date for the “New Year for the Tree.”

We turn to the gemara on this mishnah (and Rashi’s commentary on the gemara) to try and discern why this date was significant and chosen as the “New Year for the Tree”:

From the mishnaic source we can ascertain that the original Rosh HaShana for trees – the original Tu BiShvat – was not a holiday, per se, where something was celebrated or commemorated, but rather a technical cutoff day for tax purposes. Each of the four New Years was, in some capacity, a technical cutoff date. If something happened before that date, it belonged to the previous year. If it happened after that date, it belonged to the new year.

Taxes at the time the mishnah is referring to were not about filling in FBARs or W4 forms, clearly; most people were subsistence level farmers, and taxes were paid, in the form of the produce they raised, to the Temple, in various combinations of tithes.

Tu BiShvat was the technical cut off day for tree taxes. If your trees blossomed and bore fruit before the fifteenth of Shvat, then you started giving your tithes on those trees on that day. For trees that blossomed and bore fruit after Tu BiShvat, one waited for the next Tu BiShvat to give tithes. One might say that this date was both the end and the beginning of the tree farming cycle – that the fiscal year lasted from Tu BiShvat to Tu BiShvat.

Another technical halachic usage for this date concerns the commandments of orlah and neta revaii – wherein fruit from a tree in its first three years after planting is not used, as it is considered “uncircumcised,” and in its fourth year must be taken to Jerusalem and eaten there while one is ritually pure. A year, in these cases, is counted from Tu BiShvat. If a tree is planted before Tu BiShvat, it is considered one year old on that day, even if it is not actually 365 days old. This is the origin of Tu BiShvat as the trees’ birthday, and is similar to the traditional way of looking at birthdays in Chinese culture.

Honestly, though – the concept of a birthday for trees, or even a Rosh HaShana for trees, is a bit misleading. Tu BiShvat in its earliest incarnation was not a birthday on which to give gifts or an anniversary for appreciating trees, necessarily, but rather a marker for taxes. Calling it “Ancient Israel’s April 15th” is also somewhat inaccurate. Our farming ancestors did not have to pay taxes BY this date, as we do on April 15th; rather they could START paying taxes on that date. But describing Tu BiShvat in these ways gives you an idea of the day’s original purpose.

Now, really getting into this non-holiday holiday – essentially, getting excited about tax day – might not come so easy to us. I mean, who likes doing their taxes?! It might make us feel better to recognize, though, that we are not alone in finding it difficult ‘getting into’ this incarnation of Tu BiShvat. Because after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army, no one was ‘getting into’ Tu BiShvat anymore, at all. With no land, and no trees, no tithes were given. With no Temple, there was nowhere to give the tithes either. For all intents and purposes, after the destruction, Tu BiShvat was a dead holiday.

It is true that during the time of the ge’onim, piyutim (liturgical poems) were penned in its memory, and the Jews of Ashkenaz would omit praying tachanun on the date itself. But these were simply acts in memoriam of a now defunct day. For 1,500 years, Tu BiShvat had no meaning and no focus. It was over.

Gilgul #2: Trees and Fruit as Metaphysical Metaphor

But then, some fifteen centuries after the Temple’s destruction, something interesting happened. Tu BiShvat, which had lain dormant for so long like a tree in winter, began to awaken. Its proverbial sap began to rise, buds began to form, and its fruit began to ripen. 

The kabbalists in sixteenth-century Safed reclaimed the day. They reclaimed its soul, and placed it in a new body – one that was spiritual, metaphorical, and metaphysical. They felt perfectly comfortable doing this because, for them, the concept of the “Tree of Life” – kabbalistic code for the path to God – was such a central tenet. And here’s why.

A tree has four parts: the roots, trunk, branches, and leaves. And in Kabbalah, there are four worlds, or four planes of existence, which link our world with the אין סוף (Ein Sof), the infinite, nature of God: the worlds of עשייה/asiyah/action, יצירה/yetzirah/formation, בריאה/beriah/creation, and אצילות/atzilut/emanation.

So for the kabbalists, celebrating a day of trees was actually a way to celebrate their whole belief system of trying to attain closeness to God, trying to attain spiritual perfection, trying to restore cosmic blessing by strengthening and repairing the “Tree of Life.”

Along these lines, kabbalists like Rabbi Isaac Luria created a seder – like that of Pesach, or Rosh HaShana. In this seder, 30 fruits would be blessed and eaten (ten each for the three lower worlds), and four cups of wine would be drunk in a precise order, in order to bring human beings, and the world, to a more spiritually transcendent state. In the words of Rabbi Chaim Vital, Luria’s student, the goal of the seder was “to influence the abundance of the holy tree – the Tree of Life” (“להשפיע את שפע האילן הקדוש – עץ החיים”).

This practice – a metaphysical celebration of trees and fruits, which was actually celebrating the Jewish people’s deep effort to connect to God – spread among Sephardic Jews in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and was Tu BiShvat for the next several hundred years.

Gilgul #3: JNF Boxes and Buksar, or the Yearning for Eretz Israel

Three Hundred Years Later…
While the kabbalists’ sixteenth-century take on Tu BiShvat was a profound and spiritual one, at the end of the 1800s, some Diaspora Jews began returning to the land of their forefathers after almost 2,000 years of dispersion. In their homegoing, they placed a very high value on physically planting trees and concretely building up the land. After so much time away from an authentic agricultural lifestyle, these 19th-century Jews finally began to look at trees as actual trees again! A tree was no longer a metaphorical, metaphysical concept; it was a real, living thing that could be planted and harvested and looked at in pride. In other words, a tree was just a tree, and yet represented so much more in a time in history that seems almost miraculous when looked back at from the vantage point of 150 years on.

On Tu BiShvat, 1890, one of the founders of the Mizrachi Religious Zionist movement, Rabbi Ze’ev Ya’avetz, took his students out of the classroom to plant trees in Zichron Yaakov, at that time an agricultural colony.

This custom of tree planting with one’s students on Tu BiShvat was adopted 18 years later by the Jewish Teachers Union, and some time after by the Jewish National Fund as well.

By the early twentieth century, Tu BiShvat became synonymous in Eretz Israel with a physical and agricultural revival – the beginnings of a renaissance of the Jewish people in their own land. The almond tree – the shaked – one of the earliest budding trees of the winter season, came to symbolize renewal and regrowth of all types.

In this vein, many of Israel’s important institutions chose Tu BiShvat as a day for laying their cornerstones. Hebrew University was inaugurated on Tu BiShvat 1918, the Technion of Haifa on Tu BiShvat 1925, and the Knesset on Tu BiShvat 1949.

For the few Jews living in Eretz Israel at the time, this new incarnation of Tu BiShvat was clearly relevant and significant – representing their tireless work to build up the land. But what about the people who lived outside the land? Could it hold some meaning for them too?

Of course it could. Tu BiShvat was treated as a tangible focus for their yearning to return to the Land of Israel. They put money in their JNF pushkas, they ate buksar (carob – the only fruit they could get from Israel at that time that wouldn’t spoil), and dreamed of having the chance of visiting Eretz Israel one day. 

Gilgul #4: Judaism’s Earth Day

For seventy years now, not only have Jews been able to visit the State of Israel, they’ve been able to choose it as their home, if they want to. And for us – 21st-century Jews whose relationship with the land of our forefathers is often fraught and always emotional – Tu BiShvat might offer the opportunity for a particular type of exploration of that relationship.

At the same time, what is the most recent reincarnation of Tu BiShvat? As the Western world has become increasingly, and necessarily, concerned with the environment, many Jews have turned Tu BiShvat into a day to highlight the need for preserving the environment. People have created Tu BiShvat seders and initiatives that focus on the environment – essentially, Judaism’s Earth Day.

It is important to note that while this gilgul feels modern and of crucial significance in our day and age, it actually echoes an ancient Jewish value. At its heart and soul, Judaism is and has always been an environmentally-focused religion. The Midrash, a genre of Jewish text that was written more than a millennium ago, includes a piece in which God gives Adam and Eve a tour of the Garden of Eden. God exhorts the first humans to take care of the earth, because once they let it go, there will be no one left to take up the mantle. World leaders. Decision makers. Companies. Listen up. God is talking to you. 

Conclusion

Authentic Jewish living necessitates authentic and objective reading of our texts. Conjuring up the way you want to practice a ritual or a mitzvah out of thin air – just because it feels good to you – isn’t authentic. It’s just conjuring. But sometimes, a close, deep reading of our primary source material will demonstrate that a ritual or holiday has undergone evolution after evolution, whether due to sociological changes, political changes, or some combination of the two, which leave that ritual or holiday open to a variety of readings, a variety of focuses, and thus a variety of messages from which to choose. And to that, I would say: Le’chaim! What a blessing!

Happy Tu BiShvat 5785 – and may all of our beloved hostages be home by this year’s Rosh HaShana for trees.


Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on January 18th, 2008 and has been updated on February 2nd, 2025 for accuracy and relevance.

About Aviva Lauer

Aviva is the Director of the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators. She majored in Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, and earned a Masters degree in Midrash at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies. Aviva is a Jewish educator with over twenty years of experience in curriculum development, classroom teaching, school administration and educational consulting. Upon making Aliyah in 1996, Aviva developed formal and informal educational materials for Melitz and at the Leo Baeck Education Center, where she also gained experience in teaching pluralistic Judaism. She then served as the head of the department of Jewish Studies at Immanuel College, London. Working at the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators since 2009, Aviva has been a teaching coach, director of recruitment, director of the Summer Curriculum Workshop, and Assistant Director of PCJE before taking on her current role in 2017. Click here to read more.

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