Tu B'Shvat

When developing the first Tu B’Shvat seder, the kabbalists of Tzfat correlated each of the four sections with one of the four mystical worlds. To you, these concepts might be spiritually meaningful or completely unintelligible. We have chosen to include the kabbalistic four worlds in relation to the four sections of our haggadah both to link this Haggadah to that of our ancestors and to provide an opportunity to delve into four specific themes we hope to explore with you: the pandemic, the struggle for racial justice and the fraying of our civic union, the climate crisis, and the spiritual implications of each of these. The chart on the next page sets forth these four worlds, along with corresponding foods, themes, and other materials. 

But this Haggadah is meant for everyone! We invite you to shape this Haggadah, and the festival of Tu B’Shvat as a whole, in a manner that you find meaningful and compelling. 

Meditation practice for Atzilut

As we conclude the important yet difficult conversations we have undertaken during this Seder, it may be helpful to take a few minutes for yourself to process and reflect. In place of physical nourishment for this fourth cup, we therefore offer you the following meditation practice.  

Find yourself in a comfortable, upright, seated position. Begin to sit how you’d like to feel. Feel both feet flat on the ground and feel grounded. Do you want to feel uplifted? Straighten your spine and sit up. Relax and move your shoulders down your back and sit open-hearted. Allow your breath to anchor you. Take a few deep breaths, settling into this particular moment. Remind yourself, 
“this is what it feels like to breathe.” Get curious about the breath. See if you can follow an entire inhale and an entire exhale. Notice when your mind inevitably wanders, and gently bring your attention back to your next inhale. This returning, this teshuvah, is the practice of meditation. Notice when you get distracted and return to your focus, your breath. Now, feel or pretend or imagine being breathed. You can physically lean back a little bit and instead of grabbing after the next breath, let it come to you. Being breathed, resting in our breath, trusting that we are breathed, this is the world of Atzilut. With great faith, we let our breath come and go. We are held in our breath, by the breath of life.

(Pause for a moment of silence.)

May our practice be a source of strength. May any benefit of this practice not just stay here in this room, but let it radiate out into the world, through our thoughts and words and actions. May we be a blessing to the world.

- Courtesy of the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn, jmcbrooklyn.org

The Tu B'Shevat seder is a celebration of our relationship with nature and with fruit trees in particular, and a time for reflection. Today, as we celebrate together, let us envision ourselves as partners in shaping, cultivating, and healing the natural world. The Tu B'Shevat Seder is split into four sections, each reflecting the seasons and symbolizing different aspects of the trees and our own lives. Each section is connected to one of the four worlds of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, and represents the transition from the most physical to the most spiritual. 

Tu B’Shvat falls as the first Jewish holiday of the year. It offers a profound, liminal moment for us to look back on the pain, trauma, and chaos of the past few years while simultaneously looking forward towards our hopes and aspirations for what a new year might become. The traditional “birthday of the trees,” which has been re-interpreted countless times throughout Jewish history, offers us a powerful frame for exploring our connection to our homes, our communities, the environment, and the broader world. But we are also cognizant that, for many of us, the physical, emotional, and spiritual struggles we endured persist. We therefore have developed this Tu B’Shvat Haggadah to be not only accessible from home but also responsive to the context in which we encounter Tu B’Shvat this year.

This year’s Haggadah includes reflections on Covid-19, the renewed racial justice protests, and the fracturing of civil discourse, the climate crisis, and the spiritual connections to each of these. In doing so, we also acknowledge that not all of us were impacted by the same crises in the same ways, nor that these are the totality of crises we have endured. We hope however, that these reflections and resources offer something for everyone as we collectively explore the ways Jewish tradition comes alive today.

We do not take time to link and commemorate each of these crises to become defeatist or bogged down in cycles of misery and suffering. We address them head-on because the Jewish people know what it means to endure crisis, to cultivate resilience, courage, and solidarity, and to emerge stronger because of it. We bring this legacy of redemption from suffering and despair to bear on our present crises. May Tu B’Shvat provide the fertile soil in which we plant our seeds of hope and aspiration, praying and celebrating in community (whether in person or virtual) for a new year of healing, prosperity, and purpose. Hag Tu B’Shvat Sameah!

-Rabbi Josh Ratner and the Hazon Programs Team

We begin our Tu B’Shvat seder by considering our own personal relationships with the physical world. For more than twenty centuries, Jewish tradition has revered land and place; whether we are turning to face Jerusalem when we pray, expressing a desire to return to the Promised Land, or sharing a meal in a sukkah. This past year has brought a new, confusing, and often isolating understanding of place. Covid-19 has brought with it quarantines and social distancing, Zoom religious services and the ersasure of work-life borders. In this section we will consider our individual relationships with land and place.  We are guided by the questions:

What is my relationship to my sense of home? How do I affect it and how does it affect me? What lessons can I take from this past year of isolating in place that I want to apply to my post-Covid life, from the food I eat and the purchasing decisions I make to the way I get from place to place and negotiate my work-life balance?

The first cup we drink at the seder is pure white, like winter. For the kabbalists, it represents the beginning spark of divine creation; the time when creation began with the separation of light from darkness. White can also represent a seed or sapling, waiting patiently beneath the winter snow to fulfill its potential and grow into a beautiful tree. In a contemporary context, we might think of the white coats of physicians who have been on the front lines caring for the sick or scientists in laboratories.

We each fill our cup fully but will only drink half of the wine or juice in the cup. In so doing, we can ask: 

What does white wine represent to you on this day?

In what ways might our symbolic cups, our individual selves, be half full or half empty?

The Blessing Over the First Cup
We each fill our cup with white wine and say the blessing together:

Baruch ata Adonai, eloheinu melech ha olam, borei p’ri hagafen.

Blessed are you Adonai, our God, ruler of the universe, creator of fruit of the vine.

We conclude with the blessing traditionally recited on special occasions:

Baruch ata Adonai eloheinu melech ha olam, shehechiyanu v'kiy'manu v'higianu laz’man hazeh.

Blessed are you Adonai, our God, ruler of the universe,  who granted us life, sustained us, and brought us to this day.

For the Kabbalists, the first cup was the world of Assiyah- the realm of the concrete, the physical. It’s about protection, about shields and defenses. By removing the outer shell, we enable ourselves to open up to those around us and to enjoy the sweetness inside. We, too, have erected countless defenses to protect ourselves from COVID-19 over the past year. May we be blessed this Tu B’Shvat, and throughout the coming year, to taste the sweetness of health and the renewal of physical proximity to our loved ones.

This world is represented by fruits or nuts with an inedible outer shell and an edible inner core, such as: almonds, bananas, coconuts, durians, papayas, passion fruit, pecan, pineapples, pistachios, pomegranates, pomelos, sabras, and many more. We each find a fruit from the first category, remove the skin or shell, say the blessing together, and then eat.

Baruch ata Adonai, eloheinu melech ha olam, borei p’ri haetz / borei p’ri ha adama.*

*Note: On most fruits we recite the blessing borei p'ri haetz, creator of fruit of the tree. This blessing is reserved for fruits whose trees have a trunk and branches that remain even after the fruit's removal, and grow new fruit each year. Other fruits, like bananas and pineapples, grow on bushes or trees that whither and regenerate each year, and therefore the blessing for them is borei p'ri ha adama, creator of fruit of the earth.

Our seder continues as we explore the relationship between the individual and community. Connection to community is an integral component of what it means to be Jewish, from the prayers we can only say within a minyan to the role of community in caring for the needs of its members. This past year, we have seen our understanding of community—  whom we include, whom we exclude—challenged as never before. To be sure, COVID-19 placed physical limitations on when, where, and with whom we could interact. But that is only one of many ways our communities have fractured.

The police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and far too many other People of Color revealed not only the ugly disparities of systemic racism but also how far we still need to go to understand the everyday realities of marginalized communities. Our election cycle, too, displayed how divided we are as a society and the lengths we are willing to go to promote our views and denigrate the views of those who disagree with us.

In this section we will think about our relationship with community.  We are guided by the questions:

Who is a part of my community? How do they rely on me? How do I rely on them? What does it mean to be an effective ally to other members of my community? Who might I be excluding from my community?

When was the last time I listened, with an open mind and open heart, to someone who disagreed with me or looked different than me?