It occurs to me that Sunday night will be the Tu B'Shevat Show for Backbone Radio. There's absolutely no reason to take up air time talking about this, but that's what blogs are for.
Tu B'Shevat is, literally, the 15th of Shevat, and it's the New Year for Trees on the Jewish calendar. What on earth does that mean? Trees, they're so important, they get their own calendar? Well, it turns out that, not surprisingly for an agricultural economy, there are a whole lot of rules about produce, especially the kind that grow on trees. You can't actually eat a tree's fruit for its first three years, so Tu B'Shevat is meant to answer the question: when do we start counting the year?
Plant a tree before Sunday night, and on Sunday night it's one year old. Plant a tree after sundown on Sunday, and you're going to wait an extra year for those delicious peaches. Needless to say, if the weather was good, a lot of trees got planted just before Tu B'Shevat, earning it the nickname "Jewish Arbor Day," although not in Russia. Because of the ecological associations, it's gotten a lot of attention from environmentalist-types, and it's a little in danger of turning into Jewish Earth Day, which would be a shame.
There are no real rituals associated with the day, but leave it to the mystics and the Chassidic Jews to try. There was a somewhat neglected tradition of the Tu B'Shevat Seder that's come back over the last decade or so. It involves drinking grape juice (or wine) and eating a variety of tree-produce, like fruits and nuts, and it's popular even outside of California. Because it's one of the few areas of the religion that hasn't been tightly scripted, it's also one of the few areas where there's a fair amount of innovation, even among the Orthodox.
I guess I'll bring some trail mix to the studio, after all.
