Tu b’Shvat and the Jewish Love Affair with Fruit, Flower, and Foliage

Today is the minor Jewish holiday of Tu b’Shvat, or the “new year of the trees.” Having originated as a financial deadline on the ancient calendar of tithe-collection, it has, over the years—particularly in the hands of 17th-century Jewish mystics—morphed into a more general celebration of trees and their fruit. Alan Zelenetz explains why these plants deserve special consideration (2014):

[The book of Deuteronomy] offers one of the most celebrated examples of the Torah’s ethical and ecological sensitivity, “Do not destroy [fruit-bearing] trees by wielding an ax against them, for from them you will eat, do not cut them down.” Based on this proscription, Judaism derives an overriding moral principle known as bal tashḥit, prohibiting any random destruction or wanton waste in all walks of life. . . .

[The] Jewish love affair with fruit, flower, and foliage has, indeed, been an eternal one. We can already discern the strains of a love song in talmudic times when the sages teach how to bless the trees “who” share our lives: “Tree, O tree, with what should I bless you? Your fruit is already sweet. Your shade is plentiful. . . . May it be God’s will that all the trees planted from your seeds be like you.” . . .

[I]n Jewish thought and practice a tree is no simple metaphor. The trees of Tu b’Shvat are at the essence of our understanding the interrelatedness of God’s world. The Torah, in fact, makes the comparison over and over. In both the book of Psalms and the Talmud we find fruit trees and cedars breaking into songs of praise for God. And the prophet Isaiah declares explicitly, “For as the days of a tree shall be the days of My people.”

Read more at Seforim

More about: Environmentalism, Jewish holidays, Judaism, Religion & Holidays, Tu b'Shvat

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society