Happy Birthday to the Trees!

On January 17th, 2014 we celebrated a delicious Tu BiShevat seder.  

We arrived to see beautifully arranged plates set by Laura with some of the fruits and nuts of trees that typically grow in Israel.  
The tables were arranged in a welcoming "U"  formation so we could all gather around. 

Here is a plate that has pomegranate, olives, dates, figs, almonds, coconuts, raisins, apples and oranges. 

We noticed that one of our members hadn't eaten real figs in a couple of years and began to hum the "big fig newton" song from 20 years ago and several others began humming along until they realized that this aged them and quickly quieted down.  

There was also red grape juice and white grape juice and as the service progressed we went from all white to all red, while going through "tinging" which means mostly white with a touch of red or vice versa.  Now this, as with all things Jewish sparked a fierce debate about whether this is mixing or tinging, however anything under 50% was decided to be tinging and so another raucous debate was settled with 49.9% being tinging and 50 % being mixing. So should this come up next year, mark this, we will be ready.

A good time was had by all, as this is a really fun event and the service was lovely. It has become an ecological holiday and what can be bad with eating?

We also learned more about one another, we learned for example one of our families has a small orchard of hazelnut trees!

 We also learned about the origin of the holiday, TuBishevat. The fruit of the trees was taxed in Israel, but only after it's fourth year.  To be able to calculate how old a tree was they decided on one specific birthday for all trees.  For the first three years the fruit of a tree should not be picked or eaten. In the fourth year of fruit was to be given to G-d and on the fifth year the fruit could be picked and eaten and therefore taxed.

 Laura did a wonderful job of setting up the seder plates and making sure there was a representative fruit for each category.