News

Dear JCOGS family,

We’ve got a little known holiday coming up called Tu BiShvat, a celebration of trees.  I am delighted to share with you a piece about the holiday written by one of our members, Bobbi Rood.  Bobbi lives in the Mad River Valley and sits on both our Stowe Jewish Film Festival committee and on our April 2023 Interfaith Israel trip committee, while she actively works on her Yiddish and Hebrew in preparation for her adult Bat Mitzvah.

I hope you enjoy her writing and that it inspires you to join us a week from tomorrow, Saturday, January 22 from 3:30-5:30 p.m. as our community celebrates “Shoe BiShvat”.  We’ll be outdoors at JCOGS roasting potatoes grown from the Mitzvah garden (plus marshmallows), making sugar-on-snow, sipping hot cider (and for the grown-ups, mulled wine!), and heading out on a short snowshoeing trek to honour the trees.  A special Storystroll about the “Wise Trees” of Tu BiShvat will be available for all to enjoy.
  
Tihiyu bri’im, stay safe, be well.  Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi David

PS a reminder: tonight and tomorrow morning, we celebrate Shabbat with a look at the prayer book Siddur Lev Shalem. 
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By Bobbi Rood:

This year Tu BiShvat, meaning the 15th of the month of Shevat, begins at sundown on Sunday, January 16 and ends at sundown on Monday, January 17. Also called Rosh Hashanah La’Ilanot, literally the New Year for the Tree, this minor holiday dates back to an agricultural festival celebrating spring in Israel. With the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, at which time many Jews were exiled, the agricultural festival stopped. In the 16th century the Kabbalists of Tzfat created a new ritual to celebrate it called the Feast of Fruits. Modeled on the Passover seder, people read from the Hebrew Bible and Mishnah and ate fruit and the seven species of Israel or shivat haminim. These are foods mentioned many times in the Bible and grown in abundance in Israel. The foods are typically wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives or dates, various nuts with shells, fruits with peels and edible seeds or fruits with inedible pits and wine or grape juice. Some families would have a 15-course meal, each course associated with one of the foods associated with the Holy Land. Today it is a broader environmental holiday, a day to remind us to take care of the natural world and symbolically remind us of our ties to Israel. It teaches appreciation of our natural world and abundance of food and is also an opportunity to be charitable to others less fortunate than ourselves. 
 
I first celebrated the holiday in 2018 as "Shoe BiShvat," sharing it with members of JCOGS and Beth Jacob Synagogue. We donned snow shoes and went out on a blustery cold night walking along the edge of the North Branch of the Winooski River, enjoying stories about trees and sharing our own history with trees and standing on “icebergs” (or so they seemed to me), the big chunks of ice and snow that had heaved up on or near the shore). Later we went inside the North Branch Nature Center (outside of Montpelier) to learn about trees and enjoy a fruit and nut seder. And plenty of hot cider!
  
For me it is a reminder of survival in winter and the miracle of rebirth that we witness every spring. It helped me reflect on the tenderness of young trees and their ability to withstand hardship.  As farmers and fields rest during this year of Shmita, it is an important reminder of what we are given and the need to steward our delicate balance of the natural environment.  I cherish the tradition and this metaphor for life. 
 
JCOGS will be celebrating "Shoe BiShvat" outdoors on Saturday January 22 from 3:30-5:30 with hot drinks, warm treats, fun activities and a snowshoeing trek to honor the trees.
 
Enjoy Tu BiShvat your own way. Look for celebrations wherever you are. Your seder plate can contain all sorts of yummy foods! Think olives, dates, figs, almonds, pecans… and maybe delicious hot cider. 
 
Let’s Celebrate the Birthday of the Trees!  

Resource: A Person is Like a Tree: A Sourcebook for Tu BeShvat by Yitzhak Buxbaum (Jason Aronson Inc) available from www.bn.com.