Tu B’Shevat: Stop and smell the roses — but keep on planting, too

My Israeli-born friend, Ofer Raveh, assures me that Tu B’Shevat is celebrated and important in the Jewish state. “Trees are planted everywhere,” he told me. “And we eat fruits, especially from the kind that Israel is blessed with and are mentioned in Torah: grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates.”

My experience with the birthday of the trees here in Los Angeles has been less engaging. Some years, when my children were in school, there was a trip to the environmental nonprofit TreePeople. Other years, there were songs about Israel, and paper plates of nuts and dates for a children’s version of the kabbalists’ Tu B’Shevat seder.

In the United States, Tu B’Shevat is often called the Jewish Arbor Day, after an American holiday created in the 19th century. It’s also called Jewish Earth Day, after the holiday created in 1970.

In talmudic times, the holiday had an important purpose: It helped people keep track of the age of their trees. Leviticus 19:23-25 requires that no one in Israel eat a tree’s fruit for its first three years. In the fourth year, the fruit must be dedicated to God, and in the fifth, the fruits can be eaten by everyone.

That’s all there was to Tu B’Shevat. Like many Jewish rituals and observances, it has been repurposed and reimagined over time, but it is still called the Rosh Hashanah L’illanot or the new year of the trees.

There are four new years on the Jewish calendar. On the first of Tishrei (Rosh Hashanah), creation turns a year older, while the months actually start from the first of Nisan. Cattle get older on the first day of Elul, and the trees mark their new year on the 15th of Shevat.

So Tu B’Shevat was a day of counting trees, of considering the success of human stewardship, before it became a day of planting. There’s plenty of evidence in Jewish texts that our tradition is very pro tree planting. First-century sage Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai said, “If you have a sapling in your hand, ready to plant, and the Mashiach comes, plant the tree first and then go to greet him.”

Planting trees has been seen as a sure way to make the world a better place since long before the modern ecology movement. We want trees in the desert and the parkways of our city streets, on the banks of our rivers, in our parks and on our playgrounds. They breathe out, we breathe in.

The phrase bal taschit, from the admonition in Deuteronomy not to destroy trees in a time of war, has been taken up by Jews concerned about the future of the planet. Do not destroy. There’s an implication in it of caution. A proposal to revive the first of Elul as a new year of the animals imagines a day to pay attention, as we prepare for the new year of life, to our relationship with the other living beings here. It would be a day to stop, to notice what’s going on and then to start over.

In the information-overloaded 21st century, it might be useful to have a day, like Tu B’Shevat, to stop, to just be in the world and see ourselves as part of a whole. Not to stop planting altogether, but to take purposeful notice of what is before we determine what will be.