Tu Bish'vat higi'a

[David Seidenberg]

Tu Bish'vat comes upon us, no matter what the terrifying political circumstances we are confronting. And now more than ever, we need to learn to be resilient like trees in a forest.

Please take advantage of the Tubi resources on neohasid.org, haggadot, prayers, songs, and Torah, at: neohasid.org/resources/tu_bishvat/

I also want to put out a call for any prayers people have composed that connect Tu Bish'vat/sap rising/full moon before spring/trees to what is going on right now. If you send me anything by tomorrow midday I will share it and include it in the resources available on neohasid.org.

In the erstwhile, some brief reflections on the blessing from the first published Tu Bish'vat seder:

The blessing rides on two themes. The first is the idea that the upper and lower worlds are mirrors of each other, and that we can reach the higher through the lower:

"Please God who creates the higher worlds, and in whose form and pattern you created their model on the earth below—You made all of them with wisdom, higher above and lower below, "to join [together] the tent to become one" (l'chaber et ha'ohel lihyot echad לחבר את האהל להיות אחד Exod 36:18). And You made trees and grasses bloom from the ground in the shape and pattern of what is above, to make known to the children of Adam the wisdom and discernment in them, to reach what is hidden."

The teaching here is easy to overlook: Creation in its wholeness is the Ohel, the sacred tent of meeting. This is related to why the teaching that blessings give us permission to eat compares taking without blessing not to stealing (geneivah), but specifically to stealing from the sacred (me'ilah).

Second, the blessing rides on a pun: that the root שרפ can refer to both fire angels (saraf) and to the sap in the trees (s'raf). 

"May it be willed by You, YHVH our God and God of our ancestors, through the power of the merit of eating the fruit which we now eat and bless, and through our meditating upon the secret of their roots, that their supernal sap/angels upon which they depend will be awakened / yit`or'ru s'rafeihen ha`elyonim, to cause the flow of desire and blessing and free energy (shefa) to flow over them, to return again to make them grow and bloom, from the beginning of the year until the end of the year, for good and for blessing, for good life and for peace."

If you have a transcription of the blessing, you might find sharsheihem in place of s'rafeihen. Earliest editions have s'rafeihen, their sap; later editions have sharsheihen, their roots, but we know that שרפ makes sense because in P'ri Eitz Hadar, the author describes sap, שרף (a cognate of syrup) rising in the trees after Tu Bish'vat, in their introduction to the seder. The two words would look almost the same to a scribe: שרפיהן שרשיהן, and the word "their roots" also comes right before, so it was an easy error to make. 

I have no doubt that the author intended the double entendre of sap and angels. 

S-appy Tu Bish'vat,

David

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Tu Bish'vat on neohasid.org: http://www.neohasid.org/resources/tu_bishvat/

"Kabbalah and Ecology: God's Image in the More-Than-Human World" - read sections and learn more at: neohasid.org/KAE/.