From rabbi jessica K. Barolsky, Director of Lifelong Learning

It’s Springtime?

Every year, Tu BiSh’vat, the “birthday of the trees,” arrives in late January or early February. (This year, it’s February 8.) Every year, religious school teachers and rabbis across much of the country try to answer the question of why we celebrate the trees when it is way too cold to do any outdoor celebrating, let alone have earth soft enough to plant anything. Every year growing up, even in Maryland where winters are comparatively mild to Milwaukee, I heard the same answer: “but it’s springtime in Israel!” While living in Israel for my first year of rabbinical school, I again began questioning the alleged early Israeli spring. After all, in the beginning of the month of Sh’vat, only two weeks before the celebration of the trees, it was still cold and rainy, and I knew the rainy season would continue until Passover, still two months away. I could not understand how, between the rain, the wind, and the cold, we were “supposed to” plant trees any time soon.

Of course, I should have had more confidence in the Jewish calendar. A few months earlier, I had recited the traditional prayer for rain on Simhat Torah, the beginning of the rainy season, having not seen a drop of rain during the three and a half months I had already been in Israel. The next day, it poured. I doubted that Hanukkah was really the darkest time of the year, because sometimes it’s so close to Thanksgiving that we haven’t even started winter yet. But then I noticed that the beginning of Shabbat began to move later again after the end of even an early Hanukkah. Jewish seasonal time was two for two.

Nonetheless, a week before Tu BiSh’vat, I was still unsure that the rain would stop, the sky would clear, and the temperature would rise in time to plant trees and confirm what every religious school teacher had always taught. But then, I woke up one morning and realized that it had not rained in several days, the sky was back to summertime blue, and a scarf and mittens had  become overkill—even for me. The same week, it was in the low 60s in Jerusalem, and I noticed that the temperature fell to about 12 degrees overnight at home in Maryland, and probably another twenty degrees colder than that in Milwaukee. I realized that Jewish professionals in the United States would again be faced with the question of why we celebrate Tu BiSh’vat in the middle of the winter.

As it turns out, there is often a “false spring” in Israel. It gets warm and sunny for a week or even several weeks, but then there is another stretch of cold, rainy weather before the end of the rainy season. I knew that springtime might not have come to stay. But yet again, I was amazed at the rhythm of Jewish time in Israel. Apples come into season the week before Rosh Hashanah. The rainy season starts right after we take down our sukkot. The days get longer when we no longer have a menorah to light up the night. And the sun comes out, even if only for a few weeks, so that we can plant our brand new trees.

The Jewish calendar revolves around the seasons in Israel, and sometimes that connection is hard to find when we are in a climate that is more than a little bit different. But when the holidays make the least sense—like considering planting trees when we would first have to dig through the snow to find the ground—we have to remind ourselves that our calendar did not originate here. Even comfortably settled in Milwaukee, every holiday reminds us that we orient ourselves toward Israel: facing east during prayer, remembering the roots of our people, and when we consider planting trees under yet another snowfall.

Rabbi Jessica K. Barolsky