A Season of Growth: Understanding Tu Bishvat through Learning and Action

Tu Bishvat is when I was first introduced to buxer, carob, as an edible part of a tree. To my young mind, it was something only my father deigned to eat, and only on that day. I would come home from school, and my mother would take out the sectioned Tupperware tray and fill each compartment with different dried fruits. Since Tu Bishvat generally falls in the dead of winter in Brooklyn, NY, everything was dried rather than fresh. There were dried apricots, pineapple, buxer, dried apples, and that is as far as my memory extends. We kids, I’m one of six, would grab something from the tray and go off to do our homework, and that was the extent of the holiday celebration. 

The Talmud teaches that there are four days that serve as a new year in the Jewish calendar. The first is the first of Nisan, which establishes the order of the festivals, making Pesach the first holiday of the year. The second is the first of Elul, the new year for animal tithes. Any animals born before that date were considered part of the previous year and tithed accordingly. The third is the first of Tishrei, the new year for counting Shemitah and Yovel, the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. The final new year is the fifteenth of Shevat, the new year for the trees, known as Tu Bishvat. Like the others, it is tied to tithing and to the moment when a tree’s fruit is considered to belong to a new agricultural year.

Each of these new years asks us to notice something we might otherwise overlook. In an agricultural society centered around the Beit Hamikdash (ancient temple in Jerusalem), where tithes supported the Kohanim (priests), the Levites, and those in need, these moments of attention made practical sense. Time was not abstract. It was structured around responsibility, obligation, and care for others. The calendar shaped how people lived, worked, and gave.

But once the Beit Hamikdash was no longer the center of Jewish life, the question shifted. What happens to these markers of time when the system they supported no longer exists? Tu Bishvat, in particular, seemed at risk of fading into obscurity. Without land, without tithes, without a Temple, it could have remained little more than a date on the calendar.

Instead, it was taken up by the Kabbalists of the Middle Ages, who infused the day with mystical meaning. They connected the growth cycles of trees to the inner life of human beings and created a Tu Bishvat seder that mirrored Pesach. Through fruit, wine, and text, the holiday became a meditation on growth, repair, and the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds. Later still, with the rise of modern Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel, Tu Bishvat was reinvigorated yet again. It became a celebration of land, rootedness, and return, marked most visibly by the planting of trees.

In Israel today, Tu Bishvat is a lived, embodied holiday. Schools send students out into the fields, shovels in hand, to plant saplings whose fruit they will never personally harvest. What began as a legal boundary for tithing has become a national language of responsibility. It is about caring for land not because it will immediately benefit you, but because you are part of a longer story. In that sense, modern Israeli observance feels less like a reinvention and more like a return to the holiday’s original purpose. The calendar once structured obligation through law. Today, it does so through action.

Here at Hausner, we place ourselves within that same unfolding story. Tu Bishvat was marked in our classrooms through seders and learning that connect text, tradition, and season. Our lunch offerings reflected the fruits of the land, inviting us to notice what we eat and where it comes from. And on our own campus, our students planted a rimon, a pomegranate tree, adding something living and lasting to the space we share.

Like the dried fruit trays of childhood or the trees planted across Israel, this is a small act with a long horizon. Tu Bishvat reminds us that Jewish time is not only about marking what has already happened, but about committing ourselves to what is still growing, even when we will not be the ones to enjoy its fruit.