AJRCA Spotlight: Rabbi Bill Kaplan

Tu B’Shvat Higiyah

Tu B’Shvat arrives quietly. No shofar, no matzah, no fast, no dramatic historical rescue. Just trees. Just sap rising. Just the patient, persistent work of roots beneath the surface, doing what they have always done: drawing life from hidden places and turning it into something that can one day bear fruit.

And yet our tradition insists that this is a New Year.

Not the New Year of kings or commandments, not the New Year of freedom or judgment, but the New Year of growth.

Our sages chose to mark the moment when the trees, though still bare, begin their internal renewal. In the middle of winter, when the world looks dormant, something essential is already happening. Tu B’Shvat teaches us to trust in processes we cannot yet see, to honor beginnings that do not announce themselves with blossoms, to believe in life that is quietly gathering strength.

That teaching feels especially resonant in a time when so much of our spiritual and communal work is slow, incremental, and often invisible. We live in a culture that celebrates the dramatic and the immediate, the viral and the visible. But the Jewish calendar gently pushes back. It sanctifies patience. It reminds us that not all transformation arrives with thunder. Some of it rises, drop by drop, through narrow channels, until one day it appears as sweetness.

In the language of the Kabbalists, Tu B’Shvat is not merely about botany or even ecology. It is about the flow of divine energy through the Tree of Life, from root to branch, from the hidden realms to the world of action. They imagined sap as shefa, sacred abundance, moving upward when the channels are open. Our task, they taught, is to clear the blockages — through blessing, through learning, through ethical living, through mindful eating — so that life can circulate freely.

This is a deeply hopeful vision. It suggests that the world’s brokenness is not only a matter of absence, but of obstruction. Blessing is already present. Holiness is already flowing. The work is to become conduits rather than dams.

Tu B’Shvat also carries a gentle but insistent ethical voice. “For is the tree of the field a human being?” the Torah asks in the context of war. Our sages hear in that question an invitation to see ourselves in the trees and the trees in ourselves. Like them, we are vulnerable to forces beyond our control. Like them, we depend on stable soil, clean water, and a climate that allows us to thrive. Like them, we can be wounded, cut down, or, with care, restored.

To celebrate the birthday of the trees, then, is to affirm our responsibility for their future — and for our own. In an age of ecological anxiety, Tu B’Shvat is not a quaint agricultural relic. It is a spiritual call to attention. To bless a fruit is to acknowledge the miracle of interdependence: sun and rain, earth and time, human labor and divine generosity, all woven together in something as simple and astonishing as a fig or an olive.

And there is another layer still. Trees do not grow for themselves alone. They offer shade they will never sit under. They bear fruit they will never taste. They plant seeds for forests they will never see. There is a quiet moral grandeur in that. A tree is, by its nature, an act of faith in a future beyond its own lifespan.

So too with much of our spiritual work. We study, teach, build, pray, and organize not only for the sake of the present moment, but for generations we will never meet. We invest in institutions, in relationships, in values, trusting that what we nurture now will one day shelter and sustain others. Tu B’Shvat sanctifies that long view. It tells us that planting is itself a form of prayer.

The calendar places this New Year in the heart of winter. That, too, is a teaching. When the branches are bare and the days are short, when the world seems paused, even discouraged, the tradition whispers: do not be fooled by appearances. Life is stirring. The sap is rising. The future is already being prepared.

In a time when it is easy to feel overwhelmed by what is broken, Tu B’Shvat offers a counter- narrative of quiet confidence. Growth is happening, even now. Healing is possible, even now. Renewal does not always announce itself with blossoms. Sometimes it begins in darkness, in cold, in the deep places where roots learn how to hold.

And so we bless the fruit. We bless the tree. We bless the earth that sustains them and the hands that tend them. We bless the hidden work of becoming. Tu B’Shvat teaches us to trust that beneath the surface, something holy is on the move.