Tu BiShvat: The New Year of the Trees

The Mishnah’s Four New Years

The day first appears in the opening mishnah of tractate Rosh Hashanah:

There are four new years … On the first of Shevat, the new year for the tree, according to the words of Beit Shammai; Beit Hillel say, on the fifteenth of it.

As usual the halacha follows Beit Hillel. The Talmud explains why the year of the trees turns in mid-Shevat: “because most of the year’s rains have gone by”, so that sap rising and fruit forming from this point belong to the new season.¹

This “new year” is a date for counting. Several mitzvot of the Land depend on which year a fruit belongs to:

• Ma’aserot (tithes). In the seven-year cycle, the second tithe (ma’aser sheni) is taken in some years and the tithe for the poor (ma’aser ani) in others, and one may not tithe the fruit of one year for that of another. Fruit that formed before 15 Shevat belongs to the previous year; fruit formed after it, to the new one.²
• Orlah and neta revai. The Torah commands:

And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as uncircumcised: three years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you: it shall not be eaten of. But in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy to praise Hashem withal. And in the fifth year shall ye eat of the fruit thereof, that it may yield unto you the increase thereof: I am Hashem your God.

The fruit of a young tree’s first three years is orlah (“uncircumcised”, forbidden); the fourth year’s fruit is neta revai (“fourth-year planting”), holy, eaten in Jerusalem or redeemed. The tree’s age is reckoned from Rosh Hashanah, but the status of its fruit changes at Tu BiShvat.³ The mitzvah teaches patience and gratitude: the first fruit of an orchard belongs to Hashem.

The Trees of the Torah

The seven species

When Moshe describes the land Hashem is giving Israel, he lists its fruit:

A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey.

These are the shiv’at ha-minim, the seven species; the “honey” is understood as date honey. Five grow on trees. They were brought as bikkurim (first fruits) to the Temple (Mishnah Bikkurim 1:3), and the halacha gives them priority in the order of blessings.⁴ Eating them on Tu BiShvat recalls the command that follows: “When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless Hashem thy God for the good land which He hath given thee” (8:10).

“Is the tree of the field a man?”

Even in war, the Torah protects fruit trees:

When thou shalt besiege a city a long time … thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the siege.

The Hebrew ki ha-adam etz ha-sadeh is difficult. The King James reads a statement: the tree is man’s sustenance. Rashi reads a question: “Is the tree of the field a man, that it should go into the siege before you?”⁵ From this verse the sages derived the broad principle of bal tashchit, “do not destroy”: the Rambam rules that whoever needlessly breaks vessels, tears clothing, destroys a building, stops up a spring or wastes food transgresses this prohibition.⁶ Tu BiShvat is a natural day to teach it.

Trees of life and of knowledge

The Bible’s story begins in a garden “planted” by Hashem, with “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:9). The first command concerned a tree (2:16–17), the first sin was the eating of its fruit (3:6), and the way to the tree of life was then guarded by cherubim (3:24). Of wisdom, and so of the Torah, it is said, “She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her” (Proverbs 3:18), words sung as the Torah scroll is returned to the ark.

The righteous as a tree

The first psalm describes the one who delights in the Torah of Hashem:

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

Jeremiah takes up the same picture: “Blessed is the man that trusteth in Hashem … For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river … and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit” (Jeremiah 17:7–8).

From Legal Date to Festival

Early customs

For centuries Tu BiShvat was marked lightly. The Shulchan Aruch records that Tachanun (the penitential supplication) is not said on that day, and fasting is not appropriate; the Magen Avraham, in the late seventeenth century, notes the Ashkenazi custom of eating many kinds of fruit of the tree.⁷ In Ashkenazi lands dried fruits, especially carob (bokser), became the taste of the day. Sephardi communities developed festive gatherings, called in Ladino Las Frutas, with platters of fruits and nuts, songs and readings.

The Safed kabbalists and the Tu BiShvat seder

The sixteenth-century kabbalists of Safed, around Rabbi Yitzchak Luria (the Arizal), taught that eating with intention and blessing could “repair” the world and lift the scattered sparks of holiness. Out of this school grew the Tu BiShvat seder, a meal modelled loosely on the Pesach seder. Its earliest printed form is Pri Etz Hadar (“The Fruit of the Goodly Tree”), first printed in Venice in 1728; the same material appears in the anonymous work Chemdat Yamim, which some authorities later suspected of Sabbatean sympathies.⁸ Tradition associates the seder with the Arizal’s circle, but the full ritual is first documented in print more than a century after his death.

The seder pairs readings from the Tanakh, the Talmud and the Zohar with many fruits and four cups of wine, moving from white to red. Later arrangements group the fruits into those with an inedible shell, those with an inedible pit, and those eaten whole, linked to ascending spiritual levels. One need not accept the kabbalistic system to value a meal of thanksgiving at which Scripture is read and Hashem is blessed for His creation.

Planting in the Land

In the late nineteenth century, Tu BiShvat took on a new meaning in the returning Jewish community of the Land of Israel. Ze’ev Yavetz, a teacher and writer in Zichron Yaakov, took his pupils out on Tu BiShvat to plant trees; sources date this first planting between 1887 and 1892, most often to 1890.⁹ In 1908 the Teachers’ Association adopted the custom, and the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet LeYisrael), founded in 1901, made it a national practice, planting millions of trees in a largely deforested land.

On Tu BiShvat 5709, 14 February 1949, Israel’s Constituent Assembly, which became the first Knesset, opened its first session in the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem.¹⁰ Tu BiShvat is still regarded as the Knesset’s birthday.

The Talmud tells of Choni the circle-drawer, who saw a man planting a carob tree, which takes seventy years to bear fruit. Asked why, the man answered: “I found the world with carob trees; as my ancestors planted for me, so I plant for my children.”¹¹ A teaching in Avot de-Rabbi Natan, attributed to Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, goes further: if you have a sapling in your hand and are told that the Messiah has come, first plant the sapling, then go out to greet him.¹² Both set the tone for Tu BiShvat: faithful labor, and hope without date-setting.

Messianic Witness: Roots, Branches and Fruit

The olive tree of Romans 11

Israel is called “a green olive tree, fair, and of goodly fruit” (Jeremiah 11:16). Paul builds on this image to describe the relationship between Israel and the Gentiles who come to faith in Israel’s Messiah:

And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.

The passage rebuts replacement theology. There is one olive tree, Israel’s, rooted in the patriarchs (11:16, 28). Gentile believers are wild branches grafted in among the natural branches; they do not become a new tree, nor does the old tree die. Some natural branches were broken off “because of unbelief” (11:20), but Paul insists that “God is able to graff them in again” (11:23), and that “how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree?” (11:24). Israel remains “beloved for the fathers’ sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (11:28–29). Grafting a wild shoot into a cultivated olive is, Paul admits, “contrary to nature” (11:24): it is grace, and it leaves no room for Gentile arrogance.¹³

Known by their fruit

“Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit … Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:17, 20). The test is obedience: the next verses warn those who say “Master, Master” but do not do the Father’s will (7:21–23).

The true vine

The vine is a classic image of Israel (Psalm 80:8–15; Isaiah 5:1–7). In John 15 Yeshua says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman” (15:1). As Mashiach he embodies faithful Israel, the vine bearing the fruit Hashem looked for; he represents his people rather than replacing them. His disciples remain in him as branches, and the purpose is plain: “Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit” (15:8). The glory goes to the Father.

The fig tree: an honest reading

Mark records that Yeshua, hungry, approached a fig tree in leaf, found nothing on it, “for the time of figs was not yet”, and said, “No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever” (Mark 11:13–14); the next day it had withered (11:20–21). Since the tree was not in season, the best explanation is that this is an enacted prophetic sign, like those of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Mark frames Yeshua’s action in the Temple courts with it (11:15–19), and the prophets used the fruitless fig as an image of judgment (Jeremiah 8:13; Hosea 9:10; Micah 7:1). The sign warns against leaves without fruit, in every generation of believers. It is not a curse on the Jewish people, who were Yeshua’s own people and the first community of his disciples. Luke’s parable of the fig tree given another year of care (Luke 13:6–9) shows the patience of the Gardener.¹⁴

The Prophetic Horizon: When the Land Gives Its Fruit

The prophets describe the redemption as a renewal of the Land’s trees:

For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree.

Ezekiel speaks to the mountains:

But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth your branches, and yield your fruit to My people of Israel; for they are at hand to come.

On this verse the Talmud records a striking saying: Rabbi Abba taught that “there is no more manifest sign of redemption” than this, the Land giving its fruit again to the people of Israel.¹⁵ The flourishing of the Land after centuries of desolation belongs to the pattern of Hashem’s faithfulness the prophets foretold: “they shall plant vineyards … and I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up” (Amos 9:14–15). We rejoice in it without turning it into a calendar of the end.

The Bible’s last vision returns to the first garden. Ezekiel sees a river flowing from the Temple, lined with trees whose fruit does not fail, “and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine” (Ezekiel 47:12). John’s Revelation takes up the image:

In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

The way to the tree of life, closed in Genesis 3, stands open in the resurrection and the Olam Haba, when every man will sit “under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4).

Keeping Tu BiShvat

Tu BiShvat is a single day everywhere, with no second day in the diaspora:

1. Eat the fruits of the Land, especially the seven species: grapes or raisins, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates, with wheat and barley in bread or cake. Say the proper blessings, and Shehecheyanu over a fruit not yet tasted that season.
2. Hold a simple seder: four cups of wine or grape juice from white to red, fruits in three groups, and readings from Genesis 2, Deuteronomy 8, Psalm 1, Jeremiah 17, Ezekiel 47, John 15, Romans 11 and Revelation 22.
3. Plant a tree, at home or in the Land of Israel through a tree-planting organization.
4. Practice bal tashchit: waste less, repair rather than discard, care for the creation entrusted to us.

See our calendar for the date.