by rabbi judith seid
I grew up in Los Angeles. When it was spring in Israel, it was spring in Los Angeles, so it seemed reasonable to me that at Tu B’Shevat we celebrated spring in early February.
It wasn’t a big holiday for anyone back in the ’50s and ’60s, really. It hadn’t yet been adopted by mystics or environmentalists, it wasn’t near any great Christian gift-giving holiday, and there were no flashy miracles. Just a tax holiday that had become an occasion for planting trees in Israel.
We didn’t even know then, that it had pagan roots, which would have made it a little bit more interesting, especially to those of us who were budding feminists, as the tree was the symbol of the Goddess Asherah (also called Ashtoreth, whose namesake is Esther in the Purim story).
Then I moved to the Midwest. February in Michigan is miserable: cold, snowy, icy, windy.
At first, Tu B’Shevat made no sense at all to me there. It was not seasonal by any means. There was nothing at all green. The sap was not rising in the trees — it was frozen solid. I’m not a mystic, so discussions of the four worlds left me, well, cold. Earth Day is in April and you can’t clean up rivers in Michigan in January or February except with a Zamboni ice resurfacer.
Then, one Feb. 2, when 2 1/2 feet of filthy, slushy snow covered the ground, I got it. Tu B’Shevat is our Groundhog Day.
On Groundhog Day, Punxsutawney Phil comes out of his burrow and we check for his shadow, which foreshadows six more weeks of winter. Well, of course there’s always six more weeks of winter back East — but that doesn’t just mean there are six whole miserable, cold, gloomy, wet weeks to go.
It means that there are only six miserable, cold, gloomy, wet weeks to go. Spring will come.
That’s what Tu B’Shevat means to Jews in the Midwest and East. That’s probably what it meant to Ashkenazi Jews suffering the rigors of East Europeans winters.
Tu B’Shevat means hope. It means that we can live through whatever we have to if we know spring will come. And we do know that spring will come.
In Michigan, Tu B’Shevat came to be, for me, a holiday of hope — not the desperate kind of hope you have when everything else you’ve tried has failed, but the kind of hope you have when you know you can outlast, outthink, outwork and out-organize your problems.
Now it means that despite the onrush of global warming, we can have hope to change what we humans are doing to destroy the Earth. It means that despite the despoliation of our precious forests and oceans and the extinction of hundreds of species in our lifetimes, we can have hope to restore the natural environment. It means that despite the hatred and genocide and violence in the world, we can hope to create a world of peace and acceptance.
I was afraid that moving back to sunny California would take some of the “tam,” the flavor, out of the holiday. I don’t really need hope, here, that spring will come — I go out to get my morning paper barefoot, my roses are blooming and the lawn already needs mowing!
But I still need a reminder to hope for the rebirth of a human connection with nature, the living in harmony of all people, and the chance that this year the birds won’t eat all the peaches off my tree.
Rabbi Judith Seid is the leader of Tri-Valley Cultural Jews in Pleasanton.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California