Nine Days Until Tu BShvat
A list of practices about nature:
(Inspiration: My reaction to someone I met on a Jewish nature trip who left observant life because he felt that it wasn’t a life of nature.)
1) We pay attention to when the sun rises and sets for shacharit and maariv (I never thought about it as much as I do now that I daven every day)
2) Shuls physically need to have windows.Â
3) We change liturgy in the amida depending on the season, asking for rain or just for dew
4) Sukkot is in large part about the harvest and being outside
5) Rosh chodesh - you can look at the moon and know when in the Jewish month we are! (Also, kiddush levana, which I only learned about recently).
6) The second paragraph of the shema. Need I say more?
7) Brachot on food. We have extensive debates about whether certain foods are fruits or vegetables, which makes us think about where our food came from and how it grew.
8) Toveling, which I’ve already posted about a lot on here - it asks you to find a natural, flowing, body of water!
9) Tu BShvat itself - the fact that we have four new years, and one of those four is for trees.
(Sunset photo because we pay attention to sunset!)
