Tu BiShvat Countdown

Tu BiShvat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees, falls on the 15th of the Hebrew month of Shevat — late January or early February — and is celebrated with fruit-laden seders, tree planting and a growing spirit of care for the natural world.

History

Tu BiShvat first appears in the Mishnah, the foundational compilation of Jewish law edited around 200 CE, where the tractate Rosh Hashanah lists four new years in the Jewish calendar. One of them is the new year for trees: the school of Shammai placed it on the first of Shevat, while the school of Hillel favoured the fifteenth — Tu BiShvat, since the Hebrew letters tet and vav spell the number fifteen. Hillel's date prevailed. The day was originally a practical boundary in the agricultural calendar of the ancient Land of Israel: fruit that budded before it belonged to one tithing year, fruit that budded after it to the next, and it likewise counted the age of young trees whose fruit could not yet be eaten. For many centuries the date remained a quiet calendrical marker, noted chiefly by the omission of penitential prayers and a custom of eating fruit. Its transformation into a celebration came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among the kabbalists of Safed in the Galilee, who fashioned a Tu BiShvat seder modelled loosely on the Passover meal. Codified in the anthology Pri Etz Hadar, the ritual moved through four cups of wine shading from white to red — echoing the turning seasons — and courses of fruits accompanied by readings and blessings. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the day took on new life as a festival of planting, with schoolchildren setting saplings in the soil each Shevat, a custom that spread widely. More recently, Jewish communities around the world have embraced Tu BiShvat as a natural occasion for environmental reflection — sometimes called a Jewish Earth Day — reviving the kabbalistic seder and pairing ancient blessings over fruit with modern care for forests, food and climate.

Meaning

Tu BiShvat honours the bond between people and trees. Falling in Shevat, when the almond tree is the first to blossom in the Land of Israel and the rains of winter begin to stir new sap, the day marks the hidden turning point of the agricultural year — a new year not for people but for orchards. Eating fruit with blessings, especially the seven species of the biblical land, turns a simple meal into an act of gratitude for the earth's generosity. The kabbalists deepened the day into a meditation on renewal, seeing in the fruit-bearing tree an image of the flow of blessing into the world. Modern celebrants have added a further layer: planting saplings, learning about conservation and treating the day as an annual prompt to steward the environment. Across all these layers runs one idea — that gratitude for creation carries a responsibility to tend it.