What is Tu B'Shvat?
Wednesday, January 15th, 2003 04:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chanaleh
So on Thursday night I'm running a Tu B'Shvat seder at Tremont Street at 7:30 pm.
Tu B'Shvat means "the fifteenth of the month of Shvat", but what that signifies on the Jewish calendar is "the New Year of the Trees". Supposedly it marks the time when (in Israel, at least) the sap begins rising, heralding the oncoming of spring.
Why should trees have a new year? Originally it had to do with religious laws regarding produce. The fruit a tree produced in its first three years of life could not be used or sold and had to be set aside; thereafter, you had to tithe 10% of the year's produce from each tree to the Temple. Thus, rather than track the ages of individual trees, a date was chosen as the official "birthday" of all trees planted in a given year (the Fiscal Year of the Trees?).
Anyway, so sometime in the Middle Ages, the Kabbalists of Sfat (the same folks who brought us the Kabbalat Shabbat service and the Sukkot custom of the Ushpizin) took this fairly minor agricultural holiday and invested it with several dimensions of cool cosmic significance. They correlated the four seasons with the four Kabbalistic world-levels, and invented a ritual modeled on the Passover seder to express this symbolism -- through eating fruit and drinking wine.
When I started running this seder a few years ago, I put together a composite seder from several fine published sources. You can read the whole thing online in PDF format if you want to know basically everything I learned in that crash course. Jewish Heritage Online Magazine has, as usual, some fine material on Tu B'Shvat. So do lots of other places.
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adamosity, I know you can't make it up here by tomorrow night :-) but anyone local who would like to come is welcome and encouraged. Send me e-mail to RSVP. Cost is $10 at the door, but your RSVP gets you the friend-of-chanaleh discount to $7. ablock and kalessin and I will all be there! {more info | directions}
Tu B'Shvat means "the fifteenth of the month of Shvat", but what that signifies on the Jewish calendar is "the New Year of the Trees". Supposedly it marks the time when (in Israel, at least) the sap begins rising, heralding the oncoming of spring.
Why should trees have a new year? Originally it had to do with religious laws regarding produce. The fruit a tree produced in its first three years of life could not be used or sold and had to be set aside; thereafter, you had to tithe 10% of the year's produce from each tree to the Temple. Thus, rather than track the ages of individual trees, a date was chosen as the official "birthday" of all trees planted in a given year (the Fiscal Year of the Trees?).
Anyway, so sometime in the Middle Ages, the Kabbalists of Sfat (the same folks who brought us the Kabbalat Shabbat service and the Sukkot custom of the Ushpizin) took this fairly minor agricultural holiday and invested it with several dimensions of cool cosmic significance. They correlated the four seasons with the four Kabbalistic world-levels, and invented a ritual modeled on the Passover seder to express this symbolism -- through eating fruit and drinking wine.
When I started running this seder a few years ago, I put together a composite seder from several fine published sources. You can read the whole thing online in PDF format if you want to know basically everything I learned in that crash course. Jewish Heritage Online Magazine has, as usual, some fine material on Tu B'Shvat. So do lots of other places.
adamosity, I know you can't make it up here by tomorrow night :-) but anyone local who would like to come is welcome and encouraged. Send me e-mail to RSVP. Cost is $10 at the door, but your RSVP gets you the friend-of-chanaleh discount to $7. ablock and kalessin and I will all be there! {more info | directions}