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New dusters of trees also
became a way of marking the new
Jewish settlements, distinguishing
them from previous Arab towns and
villages. So planting trees became
both the practical means and the
symbolic representation of planting
Jewish communities in the Land of
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In the Diaspora, under the aus-
pices of the Jewish National Fund,
the day became a day of focusing
on collecting money to plant trees in
the Land of Israel. After Israeli inde-
pendence, as Eastern and
Sephardic Jews gathered alongside
Ashkenazim in the State of Israel, the
kabbalistic tradition of a Tu B'Shvat
seder became known among West-
ern Jews, just as the notion of tree
planting for Tu B'Shevat became
known to the Easterners.
Then Diaspora Jews in America
began to learn about and experi-
ment with a Tu B'Shevat seder. By
the early 1970s, the many-layered
Jewish imagery of trees — biblical,
kabbalistic, and Zionist —became
especially important to American
Jews seeking an explicitly Jewish
and Torah-centered way to address
American or world-wide political
and social issues.
In America, one group focused
on ending the Vietnam War. To
them, the destruction of Vietnamese
forests, a violation of the Torah's
prohibition to not damage trees in
war, was particularly striking.
Out of this they developed a
Campaign for Trees and Life for
Vietnam. They raised money for
reforestation and reconstruction of
devastated areas of Vietnam, sym-
bolically planting trees of peace in
such places as the lawn of the U.S.
Capitol. Often these plantings were
done on Tu B'Shevat.
Meanwhile, some American Jews
and others were becoming more
concerned with dangers to the
earth that had reached alarming
levels. This helped bring about the
creation of "Earth Day," a time for
public recommitment to protect the
planet.
This brought together a new con-
figuration in the history of Tu B'She-
vat. The holiday had begun with
the earthy questions of tithing and
the regrowth of trees in wintertime.
It had become a cosmic moment in
the mystics' calendar, earth and
spirit coming together.
And so in the mid-1980s, there
appeared in America a wave of
new haggadot, or narrative story
books, for Tu B'Shevat that joined
the mystical and ecological per-
spectives. Most of these works
drew on the pattern of the kabbalis-
tic seder while giving it a midrashic
turn in a new direction. For exam-
ple, the Four Worlds of the Kabbal-
ah were fused with their symbolic
referents — earth, water, air, and
fire, all aspects of the planet's web
of life, all in need of healing as
aspects of the wounded physical
body of this planet.
And only three years ago, the
Coaliton on the Environment and
Jewish Life,.formed in 1993, defined
Tu B'Shevat as a kind of Jewish Earth
Day, urging it as a time to act on
behalf of the wounded earth.
This revivification of Tu B'Shevat
comes in a dark moment of earth's
history; the web of life is for the first
time endangered by one of its own
species — the human race itself, its
most intelligent and self-conscious
species, the one most fully grown to
bear the Image of God.
So deep winter, when trees and
other vegetation must struggle to
begin again, may be a specially
appropriate moment to commit our-
selves to renew the nature's flow of
life in our own generation.
This article is adapted from
"Trees, the Earth, and Torah: A Tu
B'Shvat Anthology," edited by
Arthur \t\/askow, Naomi Mara
Hyman, and Ari Elon and soon to
be published by the Jewish Publica-
tion Society.