rear pew mirror • doug brook
A Tree By Any Other Name January Seventeenth, Twenty-Twenty-Two. Why is this day different from all other days? It’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, commemorating an historic icon whose dream is probably rolling over in his grave with him lately. It also would have been Betty White’s 100th birthday, being commemorated with a nationwide cinematic party. (As of this writing it’s not known if they’ll continue with it as a commemoration. There was originally something funny in this paragraph, but sadly she passed just before publishing. The CDC says that this column didn’t jinx her.) Third and last… (Yes, the opening alludes to The Four Questions — which are really four answers to one question, if you read your Haggadah more closely this April — but, due to holiday season postal delays, only three questions arrived in time for this writing. So, third and last…) … it’s also Tu B’Shevat. The Jewish New Year for the Trees. Yes, this holiday exists. After all, trees are people, too, and we have to care for them — it’s not like they grow on trees, you know. Despite what its name sounds like, Tu B’Shevat is on the 15th of the Hebrew month of Shevat, not on the second (“tu”) of Shevat. (Editor’s note: That’s funnier spoken than in writing. Please read it out loud, react accordingly and, if that reaction didn’t include ripping this page from the magazine and pouring kerosene on it to stoke your winter fireplace, continue reading.) (Editor’s note: The editor didn’t actually write the previous editor’s note. Or this one.)
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January 2022 • Southern Jewish Life
So, why would Judaism have its own Arbor Day, and in one of the coldest months of the year? Talmudic scholars spent so long debating this that they didn’t even have time to write their debate into the Talmud. But the holiday itself does go all the way back to the Talmud. It’s not some post-modern vegetarian environmentalist plot. The Mishnah mentions four new year’s days in the Jewish calendar, of which Tu B’Shevat is one. (This column has previously presented all four, as nearly a couple of you won’t recall that you read over the years.) Tu B’Shevat isn’t as well-known as some other Jewish holidays like Chanukah because, while its name has numerous debatable spellings, none can be morphed into nearly as many variants as the name of the annual Maccabean memorialization. Trees have a long presence in Judaism despite so much of early Jewish history being in deserts. All the way back in the Garden of Eden, there was the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge — which both lasted thousands of years until George Washington famously chopped them down because Martha was making cherry pie for dessert that night. The biblical big-fish story of Jonah less famously concludes with Jonah’s anger at the Almighty over the death of a tree he planted. (Bet you’ll go back for Yom Kippur afternoon this year to know what that’s about, won’t ya.) But no text records the definitive origin of Tu B’Shevat — at least, the origin according to the world’s most revered unknown rabbinic botanist, Pinchas “Pine” Cohn. For the first time ever in print, here’s his heretofore unheralded Talmud-esque treatment about this winter holiday’s historic provenance. Cohn says that a central tenet of Judaism is Tikkun Olam, literally “repairing the world” because, as the Talmud says, “if it ain’t broke, you’re continued on previous page
Celebrating trees? In the middle of winter?