Toward the beginning of my favorite documentary, “Baseball” by Ken Burns, the narrator intones the following: “Baseball follows the seasons; it begins each year with the fond expectancy of springtime; and it ends with the hard facts of autumn.”
By “the hard facts of autumn,” Burns is referring to the fact that, in the fall, the leaves are falling off the trees and the dark cold winter is approaching. The Jewish calendar has a similar dynamic.
While our “Rosh Hashana,” the new year, ostensibly begins in the fall, the cycle of pilgrimage festivals actually begins in the spring and ENDS in the fall. Pesach is considered the first holiday in the cycle; then Shavuot seven weeks later; and finally ending with Sukkot, in the fall. And, just as with regards to the baseball season, the winter is the “off-season” for biblical holidays (Chanukah, the great holiday of the winter, arose only after the biblical period, and is not considered to be a full “Yom Tov.”)
Centuries after the Torah was given to Moses, a new holiday arose: Purim. Since Purim falls one month before Pesach, and serves as a sort of lead-in to it, the Jewish springtime now began to commence even earlier. In this sense, in keeping with our baseball analogy, you might call Purim and the month following it the “spring training” period of the Jewish calendar.
But the story does not end there.
Beginning in the Middle Ages, the Jewish mystics proposed that the spring, in fact, begins yet one month earlier: on Tu b’Shevat (the 15th of Shevat). The minor holiday of Tu b’Shevat had always been the “new year for trees,” but historically this was a milestone that only held technical and legal significance relating to certain agricultural laws.
The Jewish mystics taught that Tu b’Shevat has profound spiritual significance as well. The reason that 15 Shevat is the new year for trees is because in the Land of Israel this marks the point at which the trees have stored up enough rainwater to make sap, which leads to the production of fruit.
Outside, in the month of Shevat, it’s still freezing cold and it’s still the dead of winter. But for those who are mystically inclined, who are so in touch with the deeper workings of reality, they can look at a tree in the dead of winter and perceive that the spring is not so far off.
Returning to our framework of baseball, I compare the view of such mystics to the die-hard fans who consider the baseball season to begin even before spring training; from the day that pitchers and catchers REPORT to spring training (pitchers and catchers report a couple of weeks early since they require extra preparation). The hardcore fan circles that date on their calendar and says, ah, now baseball has already begun!
I submit that Tu b’Shevat is the “pitchers and catchers report” of the Jewish calendar. The most spiritually attuned relate to this relatively minor festival as the beginning of the onset of what Ken Burns refers to as “the fond expectancy of springtime.”
In this pandemic year, I find this lesson to be of particular resonance. We’re currently in an oddly liminal state. Vaccines have been authorized and distributed; but not yet so widely. We can see the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel”; but it still seems too far off. Let’s take a page from the Jewish mystics and choose to experience that “light at the end of the tunnel more immediately” than it might actually feel; to look forward to the spring and the summer with cautious hope.
As Churchill said: “this is not the end; it is not even the beginning of the end; but perhaps it is the end of the beginning.” Happy Tu b’Shevat to all!
Rabbi Moshe Grussgott is senior rabbi at Kehilath Israel Synagogue.
