If my dear friend Gary Levine wouldn’t have sent me an awfully hippie Tu B’shvat text message yesterday there is no way I would have known it was time for the holiday of the trees. It just so happens to be that I was mountain biking at Wilder Ranch off the Pacific Coast near Santa Cruz yesterday and there’s this one trail called Enchanted Forest loop which dips down into this amazing little redwood grove and eventually some towering euclyptus, I davened mincha in that little canyon thinking of the beauty and it just so happens that I had a bag of dried mangoes and blueberries from Trader Joes – does that mean I celebrated Tu B’shvat without knowing – thereby getting an accidental mitzvah?
In truth, Tu B’shvat is one of those holidays that doesn’t really exist in most frum folks psyche, it is remembered in my mind because Manhattan Day School would take us to Central Park and we would eat carob and other dried fruits, but the only reason any Jewish person knows what carob is, is because of day school Tu B’shvat celebrations.
It seems that non-religious Jews are more into Tu B’shvat because they can use it as an excuse to talk about the environment, eating organic food and ethical treatment of workers who pick your food – great – but, it’s about the new year for the trees, not the underpaid illegal immigrants picking your food in the central valley of California.
Some folks have a Tu B’shvat seder, I do recall chabad houses always doing something (they probably skip tachnun)and then some shuls will have some sort of kiddush with dried fruit, speaking of dried fruit I’ve been thinking about preservation methods and have decided to move beyond my pickling and sun dried tomatoes (just put in an oven at 200 degrees for a really long time) Maybe dried fruit is next?
What are your thoughts on Tu B’shvat?
your right about non frummies getting into this holiday. The local JCC is all about TuBshvat…but come the holidays where you need to go to shul and daven, well no mention of those
at my universty, the Chabad student house had a pizza and smoothie themed learning evening, it was nice they gave a devar Torah. I guess it was excuse for a theme evening
Only when I lived in California where the yearly weather patterns seem to mirror those of the Israeli desert did it make any sense to think about Tu B’shevat as having anything to do with trees and agricultural renewal. So enjoy it, frumsatire! Now I live in the snowy pickling belt and this day does little more than make me dream of eucalyptus trees in the Hula Valley or in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (did you know that every one of those 1 million trees in GG Park was planted? – crazy).
What about the story about Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai and the carob tree when they were doing that hiding from the major empire in a cave thing?
That being said, why is it a minhag to eat carob? It’s not one of the seven species.
in europe during the winter when tu bishvat falls, they didnt have access to fresh fruit, any fruit they would have eaten on tu bishvat wouldve been dried, or Carob which is semi-dry to begin with.
(just a hunch but it makes sense)
In yiddish it’s called “bohkser”. I never even heard of the word “Carob” till I was around 20.
Also just a hunch, it could just be because it’s an uncommon fruit, so most people can make a shehechiyanu on it.
I’m with Dorot; I get no day off of work and I’m dealing with cleaning snow off my car and walk. I was more into Tu B’shevat when I lived in FL.
We used to get a bag of crappy dried fruit from the sisterhood in YK of Manhattan.
seforimblog has a interesting piece on Tu Bshvat (spoiler alert: We eat the rock hard bukser bec of Shabbsai Tzvi )
seforim.blogspot.com/2011/01/tu-be-shevat-and-sabbatianism.html
we’ve always celebrated tu beshavat..
we go to the park, have a picnic eat dried fruit
but then again… we’re more on the MO side of things on the religous scale
At my uni Hillel was giving out free pots for Tu B’Shevat for planting.
And for Shabbat this week they’re having a “green” theme.
I think for many outside the ultra-O, it’s like a Jewish version of “Earth Day”.
For anyone initiated, it’s the “New Year” of a specific aspect of spititual growth. The part of us which yearns to be a larger and greater servant of G-d, who’s service gradually becomes further reaching, and operates on higher planes. (Which includes the idea of ‘producing’ new servants of G-d who will be properly dedicated to his will.)
This is symbolized by the concept of a tree, and the “new season” for it, begins on Tu Bishvat.
Tu BeShvat, Tu BeAv, & Lag Ba’Omer are the shalosh regalim for potheads