Although regarding boksers I don’t give two hoots,
about the carob trees on which they grow my mind’s not shut,
appreciating what helps them to grow like me, their roots,
my roots not just midrashic explanations of me, but peshat,
a process which midrashic explanations hardly moots,
both tastier than boksers I don’t eat on Tu B’Shvat,
enjoying both midrashic explanations and peshat as fruits
that aren’t dependent on a kashrut label such as glatt.
I’ll add to this an explanation why the tithing laws
whose fiscal years begin on Tu B’Shvat apply
only to fruit that grows in Israel because
law-hanging fruit digestion depends on divine wi-fi.
All commandments, according to Ramban, Nahmanides,
must be performed in Israel, as if beyond
its borders they are comparable to words of ditties
that we don’t fully comprehend however much of them we’re fond.
In “Why Jews Used to Eat Dried Carob on Tu b’Shvat: Bokser smells like Limburger cheese. It’s also an embodiment of Jewish vitality and endurance,” mosaicmagazine.com, 2/4/15, Meir Soloveichik writes:
In the Talmud, the holiday of Tu b’Shvat commemorates nothing more than one in a series of halakhic deadlines related to the obligation to offer tithed portions of the year’s crops to the Levites in the Temple. For fruits in particular, the end of one fiscal year and the beginning of the next was marked by Tu b’Shvat, the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Shvat. Because these laws of tithing applied only to produce grown in the Holy Land, celebrating Tu b’Shvat became throughout the centuries a way of connecting to the land itself. For Ashkenazi Jews, that meant eating one fruit: carob, whose name derives from the Hebrew haruv and whose Yiddish name, bokser, is short for the German bokshornbaum, the tree with ram’s-horn-shaped fruit…..
The last verse provides a midrashic explanation for the fact that the tithing laws whose fiscal year begins on Tu B’Shvat only apply to fruit that grow in Israel. These fruit generate what the rabbis call מצוות תלויות בארץ, whose literal meaning is “commandments hanging from the land,” the word תלויות midrashically implying that commandments which only apply to the land of Israel, hang on this land as decoratively as low-hanging fruit on branches of trees, inspiring my wordplay “law-hanging.”
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
