Hashkediyah porachat Veshemesh paz zorachat, Tziporim merosh kol gag Mevasrot et bo hachag. -Tu bishvat higiya Chag la'ilanot. Tu bish'vat higiya Chag la'ilanot. The almond tree is blooming, The golden sun is shining, Birds atop each roof Announcing the arrival of the festival. Tu bishvat has arrived (it's) the festival of trees.Tu bishvat has arrived (it's) the festival of trees.
השקדיה פורחת ושמש פז זורחת, צפורים מראש כל גג מבשרות את בוא החג. ט"ו בשבט הגיע חג לאילנות. ט"ו בשבט הגיע חג לאילנות.
(א) אַרְבָּעָה רָאשֵׁי שָׁנִים הֵם. בְּאֶחָד בְּנִיסָן רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה לַמְּלָכִים וְלָרְגָלִים. בְּאֶחָד בֶּאֱלוּל רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה לְמַעְשַׂר בְּהֵמָה. רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר וְרַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן אוֹמְרִים, בְּאֶחָד בְּתִשְׁרֵי. בְּאֶחָד בְּתִשְׁרֵי רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה לַשָּׁנִים וְלַשְּׁמִטִּין וְלַיּוֹבְלוֹת, לַנְּטִיעָה וְלַיְרָקוֹת. בְּאֶחָד בִּשְׁבָט, רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה לָאִילָן, כְּדִבְרֵי בֵית שַׁמַּאי. בֵּית הִלֵּל אוֹמְרִים, בַּחֲמִשָּׁה עָשָׂר בּוֹ:
(1) The four new years are: On the first of Nisan, the new year for the kings and for the festivals; On the first of Elul, the new year for the tithing of animals; Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Shimon say, on the first of Tishrei. On the first of Tishrei, the new year for years, for the Sabbatical years and for the Jubilee years and for the planting and for the vegetables. On the first of Shevat, the new year for the trees according to the words of the House of Shammai; The House of Hillel says, on the fifteenth thereof.
ראש השנה לאילן. לענין מעשר פירות שאין מעשרין פירות אילן שחנטו קודם שבט. על שחנטו לאחר שבט, דבאילן אזלינן בתר חנטה.
[The notion of new year for trees] is in regarding the tithing of their fruit. For we do not tithe the fruit of a tree which blossomed prior to Shvat, with those that blossomed after Shvat....
[What is the significance of the 1st/15th of Shvat?] Since the bulk of the rainy season is already passed; now the sap begins to rise in the trees. The fruits will begin to blossom at this point.
Rav Yehuda said: One who goes out during the Nissan season and sees trees that are blossoming, recites: Blessed are you oh Divine, Our God Spirit of the Universe, who has withheld nothing from Their world, and has created in it beautiful creatures and trees for human beings to enjoy.
כלומר שנותן שבח והודאה להשי"ת שברא בשביל האדם אפילו דברים שאין בהם הכרחיות לחיי האדם, כמו פרי אילנות. ולכן אין מברכים ברכה זו על זרעים וירקות, דאלו הם כהכרחיות ולא כן הפירות.ומברך בשעת הפריחה, דאז ניכר שיוציאו פירות. ובמדינתינו אינו בניסן אלא באייר או תחלת סיון, ואז אנו מברכין. ואין ברכה זו אלא פעם אחת בשנה אפילו רואה אילנות אחרות, דברכה זו היא ברכה של הודאה כלליות על חסדו וטובו יתברך.
...The meaning is, we give thanks and gratitude to the Creator for those things which humans enjoy and yet were not necessarily obligatory in the cycle of Creation, like the fruit of trees. Therefore, this is only said on fruit trees, and not on seeds and vegetables, which are in fact necessary.
The blessing is recited when the fruits are flowering.
In our lands, however, fruits do not flower in Nissan (ie March/April), but rather in Iyar or the beginning of Sivan (ie May/June), and we wait until that time.
And we only make this blessing once a year.
R. Yaakov Chaim Sofer, 19-20th cent., Iraq and Israel, Kaf HaChaim
"The language of the gemara seems to indicate the blessing must be said specifically during Nissan... it implies that the many blossoms of the almond trees which blossom prior to Nissan would not be appropriate for the blessing...therefore, one should only make this blessing during the month of Nissan itself."
R. Avraham Y. H. Kook, Eretz Cheifetz
The land of Israel is not some external entity.
It is not merely an external acquisition for the Jewish people.
It is not merely a means of uniting the populace.
It is not merely a means of strengthening our physical existence.
It is not even merely a means of strengthening our spiritual existence.
Rather, the land of Israel has an intrinsic meaning.
It is connected to the Jewish people with the knot of life.
Its very being is suffused with extraordinary qualities.
The extraordinary qualities of the land of Israel and the extraordinary qualities of the Jewish people are two halves of a whole.
George Steiner, "Our Homeland, The Text"
Locked materially in a material homeland, the text may, in fact, lose its life-force, and its truth values may be betrayed. But when the text is the homeland, even when it is rooted only in the exact remembrance and seeking of a handful of wanderers, nomads of the word, it cannot be extinguished. Time is truth's passport and its native ground. What better lodging for the Jew?
Rabbi Jill Hammer, "That's not Dirt. Its Earth."
...This is also a teaching for our inner soil, the ensouled bodies we have been given to walk this earth. We too need fallow time. We too need to stop the cycles of work, of planting and harvest, of making ourselves produce, and give ourselves true rest. True rest is play. True rest is rediscovering the wild self, the self of dreams and visions and prayers, the self that God invents, not us. I can’t help but think of the artist and author Maurice Sendak of blessed memory, who died this week, and who taught so many of us about the importance of being among the wild things for a while before we go home for dinner. We too need to go back to our original owner, who is not our employer or our customer or even our beloved families or friends, but the holy blessed One. We need to free ourselves from the indentured servitude of our assumptions and routines. We need to remember that the messy stuff inside us is not dirt, it’s earth, and earth grows things.
I want to suggest that there is an even greater mystery in the law of the jubilee year. The freeing of the land and its inhabitants is not only a matter of ethics or of self-discovery; it is also a matter of quantum physics. You can’t own land. The topsoil of this planet isn’t a thing; it is a life-giving mystery permeated with water, air, and organisms. You can’t own space. Space is full of atoms that are mostly nothing; it is an immensely potent and dynamic emptiness. You can’t own souls. What we call ownership and control and inheritance and commerce is really stewardship. The Torah teaches that our interactions with all physical entities, including the earth, need to be touched by humility and by holiness.
Amos Oz, Under This Blazing Light , p. 82-83,1979
The land of the Jews, I said. The land of the Jews could not have come into being and could not have existed anywhere but here. Not in Uganda, not in Ararat and not in Birobidjan. Because this is the place the Jews have always looked to throughout their history. Because there is no other territory to which the Jews would have come in their masses to establish a Jewish homeland. On this point I commit myself to a severe, remorseless distinction between the inner motives of the return to Zion and its justification to others. The age-old longings are a motive, but not a justification. Political Zionism has made political, national use of religious, messianic yearnings. And rightly so. But our justification vis-à-vis the Arab inhabitants of the country cannot be based on our age-old longings. What are our longings to them? The Zionist enterprise has no other objective justification than the right of a drowning man to grasp the only plank that can save him. And that is justification enough. (Here I must anticipate something I shall return to later: there is a vast moral difference between the drowning man who grasps a plank and makes room for himself by pushing the others who are sitting on it to one side, even by force, and the drowning man who grabs the whole plank for himself and pushes the others into the sea. This is the moral argument that lies behind our repeated agreement in principle to the partition of the Land. This is the difference between making Jaffa and Nazareth Jewish, and making Ramallah and Nablus Jewish.)
In a nutshell, I am a Zionist in all that concerns the redemption of the Jews, but not when it comes to the ‘redemption of the Holy Land.’ We have come here to live as a free nation, not ‘to liberate the land that groans under the desecration of a foreign yoke,’ Samaria, Gilead, Aram and Haran up to the great Euphrates River. The word ‘liberation’ applies to people, not to dust and stone. I was not born to blow rams’ horns or ‘purge a heritage that has been defiled by strangers.’