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Hi friends,

Befriend your local Lorax this February and speak for the trees. The Jewish holiday of ecological celebration, Tu B’shvat, is fast approaching and in this era of climate denial it is of utmost importance to keep talking about the trees. About environmental protections, about net-negative action. In honor of this arboreal event, stand tall in your own beliefs and keep the conversation going.

Our community enmeshment and discussions act in tandem alongside a network of hard working sub-terraneum mycelium, seeds, and roots. Mirrored, delicate connections maintaining life amidst an uncertain future. In many Indigenous languages, nature is spoken of in active tense–acknowleding the life and lives of our surroundings. Let us speak for the trees and speak as trees in a shift away from colloquial passive tense–we’re partners in this natural world.

With forests front of mind, I’m appreciate the locality of winter produce–apples, walnuts, hearty greens and prepping for my next pop-up event here in Portland and enjoying cold weather treats like glazed apple scones. I hope you’re finding ways to usher in Tu B’shvat, and excited to share more on the holiday below.

Scroll on for eats, inspiration, and as always–

Stay hungry,
Hawnuh Lee | Founder, Closed Loop Cooking

Cinnamon glazed apple scones.

The dish >>

• Making the most of winter produce and cold weather treats with these cinnamon glazed apple scones.

• Using up my bruised fruit and snacking on peanut butter + dark chocolate banana chip bites just about all day.

• Rereading “Guests on this land”–a modern take on Tu B’shvat.

• DC folks–show up to support the EPA!

• This 4 ft disco croissant is making me happy.

• Please listen to AOC’s latest 90 min live explainer right now. Seriously. Remember that we outnumber the 1% drastically–create friction. Resist. Move your money out of their control. The slower they can operate, the less they can break. There is NO action too small.

• Portland locals > come hang at my next Tzimmy mini menu pop-up!

• This green girl’s guide to planet considerate tech is great.

• On composting the news–encouragement to self regulate.

Tu B’shvat is for everyone this year

by Maia Welbel

Tu B’Shvat, the 15th day of the Jewish month of Shvat, has been celebrated since ancient times as the New Year of the Trees. The Torah states that fruit from a tree must not be harvested until three years after a tree is planted, which raises the question for Jewish farmers of how to keep track. Tu B’Shvat falls after the winter solstice, marking the end of the rainy season and peak soil conditions for tree planting (where the rabbis of the Talmud were writing textual interpretations still widely observed today between the 3rd and 5th centuries CE), thus Tu B’Shvat, which begins at sundown on February 12 this year, was established as the official arboreal birthday. Each year, as the sap begins to rise in the reawakening trees, we are reminded of the essential presence trees hold in our lives, and our sacred responsibility of environmental stewardship. 

Many Jewish traditions can similarly be traced to agrarian roots. The three major festivals mentioned in the Torah  — Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot — respectively honor the beginning of the new planting season, the late spring harvest, and the last bountiful harvest of summer. Shmita, the imperative to leave cultivated land fallow every seventh year to replenish its vitality, mirrors the practice of resting and replenishing ourselves every seventh day on Shabbat. Each ritual is an invitation to lean into ecological time, and remember ourselves as beings inextricably entwined with the cycles of the Earth.

Whether or not you observe Tu B’shvat, this period of waning winter can be a time for renewed commitment to your environmental values. Spend time revelling in the miracle of trees that have known your neighborhood longer than you’ve been alive. Seeds gathering nutrients in cool soil beneath your feet, months before they’ll ever see the sun. Ecosystems displaying unfathomable resilience despite so much human destruction. How might you attune more closely to the rhythms of the natural world? How might you waste less, harm less, observe more, nourish more? 

Celebrating with seder

One way we particularly love to honor Tu B’Shvat is by feasting on fruit and nuts. In the 16th century, Kabbalists (Jewish mystics) originated the ritual of the Tu B’Shvat seder — a meal that engages all of the senses in a journey through the Four Worlds of creation. Like the Passover seder, it involves imbibing four cups of wine and a sequence of symbolic foods. The fruits of the Tu B’Shvat seder represent the different offerings trees bless us with, and with each comes an opportunity to reflect on our own spiritual growth.

The Four Worlds of Kabbalah can be interpreted as:

• Levels of spiritual ascent or intimacy with God

• Seasons: winter, spring, summer, fall

• Elements: earth, water, air, fire

• Ways we experience the world: practical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual

• Parts of a tree: root, trunk, branch, bounty (as Juliette Hirt uses in her beautifully illustrated Haggadah)

Many talented Jewish scholars, artists, rabbis, and teachers have published Haggadot that are free to download or offered by donation, so we won’t include a full guide here. Check them out!

Cue up this soothing Tu B’shvat nigun, by Batya Levine, gather the people who make you feel grounded, and enjoy a celebration our ever generous plant communities. Below is our brief outline, ripe for your personal interpretation and expansion.

Asiyah

White wine: winter, stillness, tranquility, gathering strength

Fruits with an inedible shell (almond, coconut, pomegranate): self protection, what we present to the world, what separates us from our higher selves

Yetzirah

Pale pink wine: spring, new blossoms, tenderness, hope

Fruits with pits (olives, cherries, dates, avocado): seeds of new life and potential growth beneath the surface, places within us that are hardened to connection 

Beriah

Deep pink wine: summer, sweetness, pleasure

Completely edible fruits (figs, grapes, berries, apples): vulnerability, openness, ways we feel most available for connection

Atzilut

Red wine: fall, wholeness, abundance, gratitude

Fragrance (spices, herbs, oils): dreams, curiosity, what might be possible beyond what we can touch or taste

In the book For Times Such as These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year, authors Ariana Katz and Jessica Rosenberg write:

“Tu B'Shvat is a time to look at our relationship to the earth, and a time to deepen our spiritual and political relationships to movements for environmental, climate, and food justice. This is not a contemporary innovation; this is, in many ways, what Tu B'Shvat has always been about. Tu B'Shvat is, was, and always will be an opportunity to look at relationships to the natural world, find out what teshuvah is needed, and spiritually prepare to take it on.”

Whether you host a Tu B’Shvat seder or just hug the nearest oak, I encourage you to spend some extra time appreciating the majesty of trees and all they do for us this week.   

Expanding on ways to get involved for Tu B’shvat is an excerpt from Thursday Bram’s holiday zine-

Resources for planting trees

• “Examining the Viability of Planting Trees to Help Mitigate Climate Change” (article) — Wondering why planting native trees matters? NASA wrote up the science behind planting trees to reduce climate change.

• “Planting the Promised Landscape: Zionism, Nature, and Resistance in Israel/Palestine” (article, PDF) — This academic article is long at 50 pages, but author Irus Braverman provides important insights into the ways that Jewish campaigns to plant pine trees in Israel have been used to remove Palestinian presences from the land and are iconic to the Zionist experience. Pine trees are not native to Israel and act as a method to make the land more comfortable to Ashkenzai settlers.

• “Why I no longer donate to the Jewish National Fund” (article) — This short article touches on some of the topics covered in more depth in the source above. Writer Matthew Gindin looks at the militarism and greenwashing associated with the JNF, the leading organization planting pine trees in Israel.

• “Jerusalem Wildfires in Summer 2021, When Climate Change-Related Wildfires Expose the JNF’s Colonial Afforestation Project” (article) — This article focuses on the cultural and climate impacts, including wildfires, of the JNF’s campaigns to plant European tree species in Israel.

• “Cultivating Resilience: Growing Olives in Palestine” (article) — Emily Baron Cadloff’s article on how Palestinian olive farmers have been forced to watch their trees systematically destroyed (along with their livelihoods) is a difficult but necessary read for American Jews.

• “Palestine’s Budding Fair Trade Olive Oil Industry” (article) — Adrian Fadil wrote this article, along with several others, as a Reporting Fellow with the Pulitzer Center. It covers the development of the Palestine Fair Trade Association.

• “Fostering Palestine’s Connection to the Earth: Non-Violent Activism at the Tent of Nations” (article) — Another of Fadil’s articles, this piece looked at a summer camp connecting Palestinian children to the land, as well as the legal battles connected to the land the camp takes place on.

• “Trees for Life 2021 Report” (report, PDF) — The Palestine Fair Trade Association’s annual report on its Trees for Life program describes the organization’s work distributing more than 37,800 seedlings of native trees to more than 350 Palestinian farmers. The organization also educates farmers on regenerative farming and the use of native seeds.

• Rooting Resistance (donation page) — For U.S. donors interested in contributing to the PFTA’s Trees for Life program, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights offers a donation process that doesn’t require you to figure out international payment processors. Every $25 donated equals one tree sapling planted. Guidestar has reviewed the organization.

And remember, you speak for the trees.

I just wanna hug this baked potato stuffie.

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