I love the idea of this blog btw, I hope it grows into something splendid!

Todah! (Thanks!)

Today is Tu B'Shvat (at least it's still tu bishvat in the Americas and the Pacific this side of the international date line, sorry to those of you in other places for not getting this posted earlier)

Tu is simply the Hebrew numerical indicator for the 15th day of a month. You may have encountered it in Tu b'Av, the fifteenth of Av, another minor festival. Other holidays known simply by their hebrew date are the fast days of Tisha (9th) b'Av and Asara (10th) b'Tevet.

So what is Tu b'Shvat? It's New Year's Day. For trees!

But we had New Year back in Tishrei? Well, yes. The talmud lists 4 Jewish New Years, three of which coincide with the new moon (Rosh Chodesh) and then this special one on the full moon.

The main religious New Year, Rosh haShana, actually wasn't the new year at all until we were exiles in Babylon and adopted their month names and their autumnal new year's cycle. It was still a holiday before then, the day of sounding the shofar, to remind the community to prepare for Yom Kippur. But in the Torah, Tishrei is not the first month, it's the seventh month.

That's thanks to New Year 2, Rosh Chodesh Nisan, the month haShem delivered us from the narrow places of slavery in Egypt. In the Talmud, the sages call this one the New Year of Kings/Sovereigns and claim that before the exile the years of the reigns of kings of Judah and Israel were counted from Nisan. Also, as noted above, in the Torah when it says "the first month" that's Nisan and then the count goes on from there to Adar being the twelfth month, which is why it's still Adar that gets doubled in leap years and not Elul.

Speaking of Elul, there's New Year 3, the New Year for Livestock/Herdbeasts. This is basically a fiscal New Year for shepherds and other livestock farmers, so animals born since the Rosh Chodesh Elul were counted for tithes to the Levites in the days of the Beit haMikdash. In the absence of the temple it's no longer very relevant but it's still officially on the books.

And then there's today, Tu b'Shvat, the New Year for Trees. Which started out as a fiscal year for orchards and tree fruit parallel to Rosh Chodesh Elul being Rosh HaShana l'Behemot, with all fruit that grew after Tu b'Shvat being eligible for tithes on the harvest. It was conveniently in the dormant months between the harvest finishing and the trees putting out new buds, and some people say it's the day when the sap first moves in the trees to prepare them for spring. So why is it still celebrated today instead of being a footnote like the Sheep and Goat New Year?

It's the kabbalists, in particular the Arizal himself, Yitzchak Luria, who gave this holiday an unexpected revival, drawing a connection between the literal fruit trees in orchards that the new year originally marked a new start for, and the mystical kabbalistic etz chayyim (tree of life) that the kabbalists used to symbolize their ideas about the interplay of divine forces (sephirot) and realms of existence through which they sought spiritual enlightenment.

The Arizal and his students instituted an allegorical Seder for this mostly ignored minor holiday in which different kinds of fruit and different mixtures of white and red wine represent a journey up the branches of the tree of life to the realms of pure possibility, in order to attempt to draw themselves and with them the entire world into alignment with the divine.

The focus on fruits and harvest in the middle of winter, suspended between the abundance of harvest at Sukkot and the fresh greens of the Pesach table makes Tu Bishvat a sort of mirror to Sukkot, where we celebrate not a harvest already gathered, but the assurance that there will in fact be future harvests to look forward to. It accepts the need for times of dormancy and acknowledges the chaotic nature of our world while holding onto hope for a transformed future with justice and abundance for all. In its kabbalistic form, Tu b'Shvat is likely the holiday most focused on yearning for olam haba (the world to come) not as an afterlife but as a total transformation of society, a fulfillment of the promise of tikkun olam (the repair of the cosmos).

In the past century, as ecological concerns have risen to the forefront for many of us, Tu b'Shvat has also taken additional shape as a Jewish Earth Day/ Arbor Day, with tree plantings and other projects focused on ecological restoration giving a newly practical form to the kabbalistic fervor for a repaired world.

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תהא נשמתו צרורה בצרור החיים, Isaac Luria.  Considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah, his school of thought, the Lurianic Kabbalah, gave a new interpretation of the nature of the Zohar, developed during the time, from roughly age 22 until his death on this date in 1572 in his mid-30s, that he lived the life of a recluse in a hut on the banks of the Nile.