Thursday, January 16, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
At Osher Ad, a chain of large supermarkets that caters in the main to Haredi consumers, store managers at the Giv'at Shaul branch have created an elaborate spread of such delicacies in anticipation of buyers snatching them up ahead of Tu BiShvat, the fifteenth of the month of Sh'vat - a day that in Jewish tradition and law marks a new year for various agriculturally-related commandments such as tithing fruit. Tu BiShvat will occur this year in about four weeks. Whether shoppers intend to buy anything for it, however, remains a tenuous assumption.
"It's gonna be huge," predicted Polly Anna, an assistant manger. "Lots of ads mention it. Companies give their workers fruits and stuff for it. Preschools make a big deal of it. Must be a tremendous time for sales. I remember bringing home Tu BiShvat stuff from school such as dried figs and dates, and my mom would get so excited! We never ate any of it, though. Just kind of put it out with dessert over the next several weeks until acknowledging no one wanted."
The origins of the day's observance comes from ancient texts that identify the fifteenth of Sh'vat as the day by which most of the winter's rain has fallen, and thus it became a harbinger of spring and the next season's harvest - an intuitive line to draw for defining fruit-tithing seasons and for uniform determination of what year of a tree's productive life yielded fruit (the first three are forbidden, while the fourth must be eaten in Jerusalem). Later centuries saw the harbinger-of-spring aspect of Tu BiShvat evolve into both a time of hope amid cold, dark exile and persecution, and a celebration of the bounty of land to which the Jews longed to return; it sits at the annual pole opposite Tu B'Av, a day of hope and potential for love even after catastrophe.
Since the only way to obtain fruits at all, and certainly the more exotic fruits associated with the land of Israel, in climes such as Eastern Europe, involved dried figs, dates, or raisins, those items became associated with Tu BiShvat even though no one actually likes them.
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