Reinventing Tu B'Shvat

We'd like to tell you a bit about the JVP Tu B'Shvat seder and how it was developed. 

What most of us who've ever been to a Tu B'Shvat seder have experienced is a more-or-less Kabbalistic ritual marking the unity of the "four worlds" -- drinking cups of red and white wine intermixed, eating combinations of nuts and fruits with hard or soft insides or outsides, listening to readings about the four elements (earth, fire, water, air), and how these relate to four different kinds of thoughtfulness and action in the world.

However, this is not the only kind of Tu B'Shvat celebration in Jewish tradition. During the era of the Mishnah, the rabbis marked Tu B'Shvat as a tax day for trees, before which all produce was allocated to the year before, and after which all produce was taxed during the following year. This date mattered, because all who owned gardens were required to set aside a portion of their harvest for the benefit of the poor and landless. This marking of the holiday as an act of tikkun olam was unknown in Torah, and its establishment as such was very much an act of social and economic justice.

The Tu B'Shvat seder of the Kabbalists was entirely a mystical experience,  part of a set of year-long rituals designed to repair the devastation wrought when humans were originally expelled from the Garden of Eden. This seder, was, in its own era, also completely new in the world, proposing a cosmic tikkun olam unknown to the rabbinical tradition or to earlier Kabbalists.

With the coming of Zionism, Tu B'Shvat was again reinvented, this time as a nationalist holiday designed to link diasporic Jews to the land of Palestine.  This celebration was, again, a completely new way to mark the date, and borrowed heavily from European cultural rites celebrating spring and May Day. Songs and games for children were composed, and all families were encouraged to go to the land, picnic, and plant trees to make the desert bloom.

For our marking of Tu B'Shvat as Jews opposed to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, we have joined the Jewish tradition of re-making tradition.  Our seder is built on entirely new symbols, linked, as was the original, to values of social and economic justice.  The binding metaphor of our seder is that of the cycle of the olive tree -- the seed, the bloom, the fruit, and the harvest.

How do these four parts of our seder explore what trees have meant in Jewish history throughout the centuries and in particular in Israel- Palestine?

In "Seeds" we give some background into the rich place of trees in generations of Jewish thought.

In "Blooms," we consider the dreams of those who wanted to reclaim a homeland, and who gathered pennies for this in small blue boxes for the Jewish National Fund. 

We then examine the "Fruit" of these blooms as we explore the ways that trees planted in Israel served as place-holders for the Jewish people in a tragically contested land.  As these trees were planted, other trees that grew on that land for hundreds and hundreds of years were and are being uprooted as part of the violent struggle for this territory. 

And finally, in "Harvest," we consider what we can glean from what we have learned, and what seeds we want to plant for a more just future.

So why do this learning as a seder, and not just send the info and ask for donations?

Because a seder is a ritual that makes an idea tangible.  On Passover, we use all of our senses to transform a trip to the dinner table into a journey of liberation.  We eat horseradish in order to really taste the bitterness of slavery; we drink wine to experience in our bodies the giddiness of freedom.  We tell the story of the exodus from Egypt so that we have words to understand these sensations intellectually.

The intention of this Tu B'Shvat seder, too, is to make an idea concrete.  The idea is this:  that the beautiful dream of "greening the desert," which was such a central part of the Zionist vision for settlement by Jews in Palestine throughout the Twentieth Century, had what Uri Avnery has called "a dark side not registered in Zionist consciousness." That dark side was, and remains, the appropriation of land from native Palestinians, destruction of livelihoods and of the economy of the community, uprooting of ancient orchards and trees in a false quest for "security," and damage to the eco-system of Israel-Palestine.  We will come together on January 21 to acknowledge the harms done to the trees and to begin the painful process of repairing the damage, even as we celebrate the role that repair -- tikkun olam -- can play in healing our world and our relationships with our neighbors.

How are we planning to repair the damage? 

In three different but linked ways. 

First, the Tu B'Shvat seder will launch the Trees of Reconciliation project as part of Swords Into Ploughshares, raising funds for replanting of olive trees in the West Bank through the Palestine Fair Trade Association. 

Second, the seder will allow us to join with other Jews and activists by taking a deep look at the history and reality of what trees have meant in Israel-Palestine as a kind of t'shuvah for ourselves and our communities.

Third, and perhaps most important, we hope the seder and the Trees of Reconciliation work will help spark important conversations both within and outside the Jewish community about the Occupation, the economic and political devastation of Palestine, and the role that Jews -- particularly U.S. Jews -- can and must begin to play in the process of bringing about an end to the Occupation and peace between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.