National Board Dvar Torah: Tu B’Shevat

Posted on January 25, 2016

Tu Beshvat – An Annual Reminder of Our Purpose

Esther Seif, New York NCSY, National Ambassador of Social Action

Esther Seif, New York NCSY, National Ambassador of Social Action

It’s the dead of the winter – I don’t see any blossoming fruit trees. Just the opposite, for those of us on the East Coast, Snowstorm Jonas just covered any remaining vegetation in over a foot of snow. So what’s up with this strange holiday celebrating fruit in the dead of the winter? Let’s go way back to creation to gain an understanding of this seemingly odd holiday.
According to the Ramchal, the purpose of creation was for us to receive and embrace the good that God has bestowed in this world and by doing that we attain the greatest pleasure of this world – building a relationship with God. Essentially eating the “fruits” of this world, the physical things, enables us to connect with God, by fulfilling His commandment of enjoying the world. The ideal form of living is to receive the pleasure that God offers us and to transform it into a conduit of serving God by accepting Him as the source of all good. This will ultimately lead us to embrace the ultimate joy and good of a meaningful relationship with God.
Although this was the ideal form the world was created in, man has struggled to find his place in it. There is a kabbalistic idea that each day of creation has a hidden meaning in the scripture that foreshadows man’s actions, beginning with the actions of Adam and Eve. On the third day of creation God created dry land, vegetation, and fruits. In the pasuk, the trees are described as “Eitz pri oseh pri”, meaning “a fruit tree that bears fruit”. The sages interpret this as meaning that even the bark and leaves of a tree tasted like the fruit it bore. Yet the next pasuk describes the trees as “eitz oseh pri”, only “a tree that bears fruit”, leaving out the special quality described previously. It is explained that initially, God created all trees to taste like the fruit they will bear but the land rebelled and only bore fruit. This rebellion is symbolic of the one that Adam and Eve were to take part in on Day 6 when they ate from the Eitz Hadaat, the Tree of Knowledge.
On the sixth day of creation, God created man and instructed him to enjoy all the fruits of this world, all but one tree, the Eitz Hadaat. At this time, God was establishing the paradigm for the world and the mechanism by which to become close to Him – use the physical to achieve spiritual connection. Yet God also inserted the necessary warning that people must understand the real source of all God and utilize pleasure for spiritual reasons, not hedonistic ones. This was the prohibition of not eating from the Eitz Hadaat. But just like the trees rebelled against God’s command and did not taste like the fruit they bore, Adam and Eve sinned and ate from this tree. They forgot that their place in the world was to build a relationship with God by receiving His good. The misused the fruits of the world, quite literally.
We are in a constant state of repairing the sin of Adam and Eve. The most effective way for us to do that is to understand the physical as a means to be spiritual and approach the world with that mentality. Tu Beshvat is a day where we can reflect on the sin of Adam and Eve, and in a more relatable way, the sins that we do when we forgot the source of good in this world, God. When we make a blessing on the special fruit from the Eretz Yisrael, we acknowledge God as the source of all blessing. Through this acknowledgment we refrain from enjoying the physical as a separate entity from God, and instead take the physical and enjoy it with God by building our relationship with Him. Not only are we repenting for the sin of the fruit trees on Day 3 of creation, and of Adam and Eves’ on Day 6, we also remind ourselves of the ideal form in which this world was created, and how to take part in it to ultimately achieve the prime joy and pleasure.