TBT Blog

This might be hard to believe given the current weather, but today is the first day of the Hebrew month of Shevat. Shevat is supposed to be a month of abundance and rebirth. We will celebrate Tu B’Shevat, our holiday honoring trees and their hypothetical reemergence from dormancy, at the full moon. On Tu B’Shevat, we enjoy all the delicious fruits and nuts that come from trees, and we often plant parsley seeds to get ready for Passover. 

…but it can sometimes feel hard to embrace the spirit of Shevat in January. We are celebrating nature, and yet the nakedness of the trees feels like a lifetime distance from the vibrant colors of the leaves at Sukkot, our fall harvest holiday. Sure, it’s not the darkest time of the year anymore, but the sun is certainly not back in full force. It is still quite cold and nothing is flowering…yet!

We enter a month of abundance and rebirth, and yet...there is an important nuance. If we dig a little deeper, we learn that Shevat is not actually a month to celebrate the fullness of Spring. It’s more like a month of anticipation for the revivification that will eventually come. During the month of Shevat, we celebrate Shabbat Shirah by reciting the Song of the Sea, recalling the moment the Israelites crossed the threshold from slavery to freedom. But that moment of crossing the Red Sea was just the beginning of the Israelites' long journey to becoming; their launching point.

Spring has not arrived yet, but the days are getting longer, little by little. Shevat reminds us not to give up hope and that the future will be beautiful and bountiful, so long as we plant the seeds now for what we want to grow.

And planting seeds is exactly what we are doing right now at TBT! In addition to our congregational meeting and SECC kickoff event this month, Shevat is the perfect time to expand our commitment to environmental justice with new learning and advocacy opportunities.

During our “Green Shabbat” (January 19-20), we will kick off our Tu B’Shevat celebrations with a soulful Kabbalat Shabbat Service on Friday night, where we will present Reverend AC Churchill, Executive Director of Earth Ministry/WAIPL, our “Heroes of Faith'' award. On Saturday, January 20, we will host a screening of the film, “The Plastic Problem,” followed by a panel discussion. And as a bonus to the weekend, I invite you to join me at the Dayenu Advocacy Workshop on climate grief and active hope at Hillel UW on Sunday, January 21. 

In addition to all of our Tu B’Shevat celebrations, on January 23, we’ll have the first of five salon-style conversations about Jewish environmental ethics using essays from the book, The Sacred Earth: Jewish Perspectives on Our Planet (learn more and register here).

For those of you who love to connect directly with nature, we have a TBT Teva Shabbat Hike on February 17 and our first ever TBT Teva Passover Camping Trip in the desert in April!

Weather aside, there are plenty of other harsh “storms” we are making our way through right now. We are three months into the war in Gaza and it certainly doesn’t feel like there’s an end in sight. In these moments of despair and disorientation, I hope that the turning of a new Hebrew month offers you a renewed sense of hope and optimism. It might not feel like it right now, but things will get better and Spring will come again. And in the meantime, we can take action in our own lives and community to lay the seeds for a strong future together.

Hodesh Tov,

Rabbi Molly