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Celebrating the Tu B’shvat of the Kabbalists

By Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs

When I began to think about Tu B’shvat and all of the trees I associate with the holiday, I suddenly realized that my mind had been transported…willingly and appreciatively to a place in time many years ago.

I thought of my childhood. I did not reflect upon spirituality back then. Spirituality was just what life seemed to be about.

The tree to me at that time was an indelible archetype of my soul. I didn’t know what the word archetype meant, but that’s what it was.

The magnolia tree in the front yard which every year offered me the beauty of its lush green leaves and rich white flowers…the deeply smelled scent of its seeds… opened up a world of amazing glory. When I took the opportunity to pop open the seed….and smell the smells….I knew at that moment as I know today….that when I encounter the Magnolia…I am about to enter an awesome, beautiful place in my soul.

Yes, trees are one of our first comprehensible spiritual experiences.

Whether the child in Texas or the south meets a magnolia, mesquite, or a mimosa tree,

Whether a young urban dweller meets an elm growing in the sidewalk,

Or an infant in the jungle meets myriads of deciduous and non-deciduous trees in her or his rain forest,

Or a mountain youth sees the always-green pine trees that stand in her or his view,

We and the tree, we look at each other as we begin our journeys through life. The tree announces unambiguously to us, "I am here for the whole trek… I am in your world.

I will watch you.

I will provide you shade when the sun is hot.

You may watch my leaves and flowers and fruits come and go with the seasons."

Poets speak to us from our childhood of trees in both ecstatic and in poignant verse.

Joyce Kilmer, who has a way-station on the New Jersey turnpike named for him, wrote,

Robert Frost wrote, speaking to a tree,
Tree at my window…window tree
My sash is lowered when night comes on
But let there never be curtain drawn between you and me.

Ansel Adams and other photographers take pictures of trees that are both stark and fertile showing them in forests and in parks and in deserts; and we place these pictures in our homes and offices.

We walk in the woods in the Rockies, in Yosemite, in the Himalayas, in the Appalachians, in the Ozarks …and we feel ourselves to be part of a soft presence that is both larger than we are and yet a part of what and who we are.

Our religious tradition begins in Genesis…literally begins with a tree of life and a tree of knowledge.

Deuteronomy 20:19 and 20 says that when you are in a war against a city and you must besiege it, you must not destroy its trees. This rather amazing verse speaks about what kind of trees you may cut down to build defenses and what trees you may only use for their fruit…but in its most compelling line it says:

“Are trees of the field humans able to withdraw before you into the besieged city ?” making it absolutely clear that trees are to be shown more compassion than humans because of their incapacity to move out of harm’s way.

Early on in a story we love we learn of Solomon’s commerce with Priam to acquire the cedars of Lebanon that Israel needs for its first Temple…these cedars are the stuff of our Biblical poetry and psalms.

As childhood begins in our preschool years we hear of this holiday that commemorates trees ….Tu B’shvat, and our sensibilities….spiritual, religious, Zionistic, naturalistic all come into play in a major merger inside our hearts of what at that time seems to really matter.

In the 1500s mystical Jews called the Kabbalists, the same people who brought Kabbalat Shabbat into the service, in the beautiful Galilean hills near the town of Tsfat, made Tu B’shvat into a day of deep mystical celebration. These Kabbalists looked at Tu B’shvat and saw all of the spiritual worlds of the Jews ensconced in the tree. It can be of no surprise to us, who grew up seeing the tree as a source of wonder.

The Kabbalists divided the world into four spiritual realms: First: the world of Assiya..the world of our actions; Second: Yetzira…the world of the perfect forms, everything in its most perfect sense; Third: B’ria the world of creation; and Fourth, the highest of all the worlds Atzilut, the highest spiritual world, the spiritual essence of it all.

No surprise that the tree steps forward.

Tu B’shvat comes and we know that we are experiencing a holiday much bigger than we can truly understand as each spiritual world of the Tsfat Kabbalists finds an easy presence in our experiences of the tree.

Assiya, doing, acting….our every day world;

• there are trees planted to keep the soil in Israel alive and vibrant
• trees give us the shade that sometimes seems more important and more necessary –at least when the sun is burning down on your body—than cool water or an air conditioner.
• But even in this first world, this world of action, of Assiya, the tree has a mythic hugeness—a size in our minds and hearts way beyond its utilitarian value.
• The tree is never just a tool or an object.

In the Second world of the Kabbalists, the world of Yetzira, the world of perfect forms BEAUTY, TRUTH...the Platonic representations, that are spiritual experiences in their very formation:

• the redwood and its size and strength becomes a symbol of size and strength in anything;
• the trees at the home in which we were born, they grow thicker as we grow older, sometimes they live and sometimes they die, just like our loved ones, the changes in these trees become symbols of the changes in our own lives;
• woods and forests of our youth or our present become reflections of a deeper presence. As Frost said when speaking about life and death itself “These woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep”

The world of forms and formation is connected to our world of understanding perfection by trees and our concept of their forms.

And the third highest world, the world of Creation, B’ria

• Every year we see and feel and smell fruits and leaves and flowers of trees that are created that year.
• Magnolia flowers that have scents that take our very breath away
• The leaves appear and disappear. The shades of green are created by chlorophyll, who or what created chlorophyll?
• When we watch trees we are transported by the miracle of creation. G-d or surely G-dliness lives in those vessels. If we permit ourselves to watch closely, we understand much more about our own identity with creation.
• In 1993 I sat alone on a red tree stump in a rain forest in Ecuador not too far from the Columbian border. I was hours from the encampment where I was sleeping at night. The trees in front of me seemed to appear as I sat there. I felt that I was in the Garden of Eden watching the most fertile place in the world. I was awed. I wrote,
• “ I don’t want to stay here long. Because it would be simple to want to stay here forever. To join our origins…to connect to the fruits that bore us as their fruit I will say “goodbye” to this red stump seat But part of me will always live and write and Feel right here on this stump.”

On a windy day—or a not so windy day, when you walk or hear in the trees above you the rustling of the wind, when you see the myriad of shades of light emanating through the trees from bright to literally opaque, these touching, tactile reflections strike our retinas in unassuming and assuming ways. They are soft and lovely and deep. They connect our souls to much that we can never understand.

Atzilut is beyond us, beyond any description we can understand. Perhaps the world of emanations, of pure spirit, is not something that human words can be used to describe.

But the trees will teach us a bit about it…They know and they whisper their secrets to us about this highest of spiritual in subtle and ephemeral ways.

Tu B’shvat…Arbor Day………It works………It is a good practical holiday.

We should celebrate trees and nature and their impact …and their transcendent spirits and their meaning in our world.

But while we are conceptualizing the limited things that we are allowed by G-d to conceptualize,

We should also try to imagine the world of the Kabbalists

The world of doing,
The world of forms,
The world of creating,
The world of pure spirit.

And we should know that in our inability to fully understand those worlds…that trees give us much more than our minds can even imagine.

We should celebrate that which we can understand and be grateful for those things,

But more than that, we should be awed and amazed, overwhelmed and uncertain, fragile and vulnerable, and absolutely aware of the presence of G-d in the ineffable wondrousness of trees, of those things we can only begin to imagine.