Rebirth in the dead of
winter.
by P. David Hornik in PJ Media
This Wednesday evening and Thursday mark the Jewish holiday of Tu
Bishvat (the name refers to the 15th of the Hebrew month of Shvat).
Also known as the New Year of Trees and as Israeli Arbor Day, it’s a minor,
nonbiblical holiday, its source in the Talmud. But quite a to-do is made about
it in Israel.
The Talmud specified Tu Bishvat as the day on which the annual
agricultural cycle begins. Considering that the holiday falls in January or, at
best, February, this—the middle of winter—may seem a strange time for
agricultural rebirth. It is, though, the time in the Land of Israel when—amid
the cold and damp, but with sunnier intervals—you start to see the first white
and pink almond blossoms.
You also see packages of dried fruits (dates, figs, apricots,
pineapple) and nuts, especially almonds, everywhere. In the Diaspora, Tu
Bishvat was marked by eating fruits of the Land of Israel. In the European
Diaspora with its cold winters, that meant dried fruits. Now, back in the Land
of Israel, they’re ubiquitous at this time of year.
But on a deeper, more ideological level, Israeli Tu Bishvat has
become a day of massive tree planting. The custom began in 1890, in the early
days of Zionist settlement. A bit later—about a century ago—it was adopted by
the Jewish National Fund, which made Tu Bishvat a day to fight malaria by
planting swamp-draining eucalyptus trees.
By now the Jewish National Fund has planted over 240 million trees
in Israel, adding 12,500 acres of new forest every year. On each Tu Bishvat it
holds tree-planting events in forests; about a million Israelis take part in
them including large numbers of schoolchildren.
Mark Twain, touring the
Land of Israel in 1867, not long before Zionist settlement began, described it this way:
…[a] desolate country whose
soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds—a silent mournful
expanse…. A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the
pomp of life and action…. We never saw a human being on the whole route….There
was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere….
He wouldn’t recognize it today.
“Making the desert bloom” is a central metaphor of the Zionist
movement and Israel. Entering the 21st century, Israel, a global
leader of reforestation, was the only country with more trees than it had at
the start of the previous century.
It was not only land that was brought back to life. As the Jewish
population grew, Tu Bishvat and other agriculturally based holidays like Shavuot and Sukkot evoked
special celebrations and inspired new songs and poetry.
What was being revived, along with Hebrew as a language of
everyday use, along with the intimate connection between the Jewish calendar
and the cycle of seasons in the ancient habitat, was the organic national life
that had once fructified in the Bible and been suspended for two millennia. To
plant a tree was—and still is—not just an affirmation of nature’s vitality but
also of the almost incomprehensible perseverance of a culture and people.
Much of the Diaspora, meanwhile, was in deep winter as persecution
of Jews mounted in European and Arab lands. The Zionist enterprise in the Land
of Israel was not able to rescue European Jewry from an ultimate, heretofore
unimaginable descent. It did, though, symbolize the fact that, even after dire
catastrophe, life could be planted anew.
As the Talmudic sage Yochanan ben Zakkai put it two thousand years
ago:
If you are holding a sapling in your hand and someone tells you,
“Come quickly, the messiah is here!,” first finish planting the tree and then
go to greet the messiah.
Planting comes before
anything else.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in
Beersheva and author of the new book Choosing
Life in Israel. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/
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