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Photographing
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MICHAEL A. JONAS
PHOTOGRAPHY
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Certified Professional Photographer
Specializing
In
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Classic
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1999
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Weddings
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BIRMINGHAM, MICHIGAN
(248) 647-5060
The Difference IS The Difference!"
dates, grapes, figs, and pomegran-
ates — all specially mentioned in
the Torah as part of the goodness
of the Land of Israel.
And the rabbinic tradition began .
to enrich the symbolic meaning of
trees. The Trees of Life and Knowl-
edge in the Garden of Eden story
and the Tree of Life, which Proverbs
likens Holy Wisdom, became pow-
erful symbols for Jewish spirituality.
One biblical reference to trees even
took on halachic importance — the
Torah's command (Deuteronomy 20:
20) not to destroy trees in wartime.
If even the trees of our enemies must
be preserved, the rabbis taught, all
the more the earth and air and
water when there is no war!
Finally, when both Jews and Mus-
lims were expelled from Spain in
1492, a small but extraordinary
community of Jewish refugees reap-
peared in the Land of Israel, settlin
in the tiny town of Sefat in the hills
above the Sea of Galilee. Their set-
tlement can be seen as the harbin-
ger of a new turn in the spiral of
Jewish history.
The Kabbalists
Among the refugees in Sefat,
began another great adventure, one
that still continues. It imagined a
new version of Judaism that embod-
ied a deeper approach to being,
resting and communing. It began
with enrichment of Judaism's mystical
strand — the Kabbalah — and with
an enrichment of Tu B'Shevat.
The kabbalists of Sefat responded
to moderniy by turning back
toward the earth. Perhaps drawing
on their own history of loss, they
addressed the universe as God's
holy vessel — shattered by the
intensity of the Divine energy that
poured into creating it. This shat-
tered vessel, they said, could only
be repaired through their own holy
acts and words, focused on its
reunification and the reunification of
God's Own exiled Self.
Although they knew that tithes
could not begin again until the Tem-
ple stood once more, they had a
vivid sense that counting tithes was
intimately connected with whether
the land was fruitful. And all around
them were those very trees on
which the tithing had been done.
For these kabbalists, trees were
not only a physical manifestation of
God's abundance, but an earthly
shadow of a mystical reality: They
saw God's own Self as the Tree of
Life, a. popular analogy for the
Torah itself.
So a day of tithing trees for the
sake of the earthly poor became a
day for renewing the heavenly
abundance of the One Great Tree.
And they created a seder for the
evening of Tu B'Shevat. It contem-
plated eating even more than 15
varieties of nuts and fruit, in four
courses defined by four cups of
wine. Interestingly, this is the one
ceremonial Jewish meal used no
product of any animal, or even fruits
that required the death of one plant.
This meal of Tu B'Shevat was the
diet of Eden, the Garden of Delight
— the Garden of the Tree of Life.
The four courses each ended with
a cup of wine and represented the
four letters of the Sacred Name
and the Four Worlds of reality, as
the Kabbalists understood the
process of God's creation.
The fruits and nuts were organized
according to how they symbolized
each world, expressed by the rela-
tionships between the hardness and
softness of their skins and their
innards. The courses began with the
"thickest" by eating fruits with thick,
tough outer skins (pomegranates)
and progressed to softer fruits.
For the fourth course, there was
no fruit at all. Being, is utterly per-
meable, untouchable.
In each of the three tangible
courses, the seder of Sefat sought
10 different varieties of nuts and
fruit, representing the 10 Sefirot, or
emanations of God present in each
of the Four Worlds.
,