AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The Jewish festival of Tu BiShvat begins tonight. It's a holiday that's been celebrated in different ways over the centuries. And as Deena Prichep reports, for Jews in Minnesota, this year is taking on new meaning.
DEENA PRICHEP, BYLINE: Marcia Zimmerman is the rabbi of Temple Israel in Minneapolis. It's a large congregation, just a few blocks from where Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents a little over a week ago.
MARCIA ZIMMERMAN: There are cars running in the middle of the street or in the middle of the highway, and people have been taken. So you sort of feel it everywhere, everywhere.
PRICHEP: For someone with Holocaust survivors in the family, these last few weeks have hit especially hard.
ZIMMERMAN: I never believed that I would be, in my lifetime, having to say these kinds of things again. But love your neighbor as yourself. (Speaking non-English language).
PRICHEP: Rabbi Zimmerman and her congregation have been blowing whistles out on the streets, delivering supplies and paying rent for people who don't feel safe to leave their homes. And in the midst of all that, there's a holiday.
ZIMMERMAN: So this is the new year of the trees, which is Tu BiShvat.
PRICHEP: Tu BiShvat is first mentioned in the second century. It's basically a way to count the harvest for tax purposes. But in the 16th century, Tu BiShvat took a turn.
SAM SHONKOFF: There emerges this mystical ritual.
PRICHEP: Sam Shonkoff teaches Jewish studies at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union. He says these mystics, the kabbalists, created the Tu BiShvat seder. It's sort of a mindful eating ritual, where different fruits and nuts and different mixtures of red and white wine represent different aspects of life, or if you're a mystic, realms of existence.
SHONKOFF: By the very appearance and feel of the fruits and the way you eat them, they're associated with different worlds.
PRICHEP: The Tu BiShvat seder breaks down these categories. You've got fruits like pomegranates and walnuts with a hard inedible shell, fruits like dates and olives with a hard pit inside, and soft fruits you eat whole. Eating them is an act of both imminence and transcendence.
SHONKOFF: In connecting with the tastes and the sensations and the plant life of these fruits, we are actually directly impacting the brokenness of the cosmos, that this is an act of repair.
PRICHEP: Over time, other Tu BiShvat traditions emerged - a nationalist tree-planting holiday for early Zionists, a sort of Jewish Earth Day for environmentalists. But in recent years, the mystical Tu BiShvat seder practices have been revived. Modern Jews may not believe that this ritual can literally heal the world, but it's still meaningful and brings people together, which congregations, like Minneapolis' Temple Israel, need right now.
ZIMMERMAN: We're going to taste. We're going to smell. We're going to listen to music. We're going to hear the beauty of what it means to be in community.
PRICHEP: This weekend, Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman says they'll lay out plates of different fruits and nuts and invite people to think about how they can soften up some of those hard shells they've built up, what pits are still hiding deep down, and what trees might be able to teach them about connection and putting down deep roots and being in it for the long game.
ZIMMERMAN: What the kabbalists did to help us have those conversations about the world as it is, the world that we're working towards and the world that we hope to be.
PRICHEP: In the midst of shattered windows and frozen streets, it can be hard to imagine a better world. The Jewish mystics who developed the Tu BiShvat seder knew of hard times as well. They were themselves refugees, their lives shattered by the Spanish Inquisition. But they created a ritual that, generations later, is helping people find reflection and connection and a taste of what they hope the world can become.
For NPR News, I'm Deena Prichep. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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