Tu Beshvat Seder
Exploring Fruit and Exploring Life
This version of a Tu Beshvat Seder was originally prepared for an event in Ramat Beit Shemesh, January 2023. To prepare, I relied heavily on Rav Dovber Pinson’s amazing book, The Month of Shevat, as well as a lecture of his, on his Iyyun website, “Tisha B’Av—Sadness and Depression.” I had a lot of fun both preparing this seder, and giving it over to a great group of women. I’m sharing it now, in the hopes that it will inspire you to take whatever aspects speak to you, to enhance your chag, or create something similar in your home. If you do, I’d love to hear about it.
If you want to recreate this Seder, this is what you will need: Red and White wine. Barley Soup. Pomegranate, or other fruit with a peel like an orange. Dates and or Olives, or other fruits with pits like plums or peaches. Figs, or other fully edible fruits like blueberries or strawberries. A lemon, or another fruit that has a strong smell. Lemon bars, or other fruit cake, like apple cake. Please enjoy substituting and being creative!
Introduction:
Let's Have
Some Soup
The minhag to have a Tu Beshvat seder dates back to the Arizal, in 16th century Sfat, and this seder retains some of the elements of the original seder, like four cups of wine, eating all of the sheva minim, and having courses using different categories of fruits. But for the purposes of this seder, I added an introductory course: mushroom barley soup.
We start today with barley and end with dessert made of wheat. In this way, we echo the path of the korbanot during the days of the omer, which begin with a barley offering and end with the shtei lechem, made of wheat. The barley offering is an offering made of grain fit for animals. Wheat is obviously for humans. During the Omer, we start our spiritual journey from a lower place, and count and grow into ourselves, becoming humans who can accept the Torah. In this spirit, we begin our Tu Beshvat journey with mushroom barley soup, and hopefully through the course of the seder we will expand and grow.
We can use the warm heartiness of the soup to ground us in our bodies. We can take a moment to take a deep breath in, and as we let it out slowly we can release whatever we don’t need, so that we can come fully into the moment. In this way, we can open up space to experience the moment we’re in. We can also think about the bigger moment, the month of Shevat. In Shevat, we are still experiencing the winter, but the sap in the trees is just beginning to rise. Spring is just around the corner, and we are starting to prepare ourselves for what we know is coming, when the whole world will open up for us to enjoy. It’s a great time to start thinking about how we will engage with the world as a whole. Since eating is the process of internalizing that which is outside of ourselves, it is a fantastic tool for examining how to engage with the world.
If we really want to think about how we engage with the world, we can go all the way back to our roots, to our experience in Gan Eden. In Mishna Rosh Hashana 1:1, Tu Beshvat is called the new year for the tree (not the trees, plural). The Arizal tells us this language hints to a deep idea, that ultimately this holiday is really all about how we related to one specific tree. Although we speak about two trees being in Gan Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Arizal tells us that there was really only ever one tree. Rav Pinson explains that this tree was a metaphor for reality. How we experience it depends on us. Our reality changes based on how we choose to relate to it. We can live in the reality of the Tree of Life, or we can live in the reality of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
When we are experiencing the Tree of Life, we are experiencing the oneness of life, the unity of Hashem as it relates to our lives. We are guests in Hashem’s world, connected to Him, taking pleasure from the world He is creating for us, minute by minute. Living in the world of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a different experience. It is what happens when we put our own ego front and center. The world becomes, Rav Pinson explains, “an object to be consumed.” From this utilitarian perspective, we look at the world, and think, how good is it? How does it benefit me, and help me get whatever I want? From this perspective, we lose consciousness of our direct connection to Hashem.
The project of Tu Beshvat is the project of exploring how we are perceiving our world, in the hopes of expanding our consciousness, and moving closer to eating the fruits of the Tree of Life. In that spirit, each course of our Tu Beshvat seder is a world of its own. Each course introduces its own way of perceiving the world we live in, and the challenges we face within it. At the same time, the path through these worlds echoes the way we ate on our national journey to redemption, from Mitzrayim to Eretz Yisrael. At the end, hopefully, we can come to a greater understanding of the worlds we create and the way we enjoy the fruits of those creations.
First Course
Fruits With Peels
White Wine
Let’s center ourselves in the world of nature. We could connect this loosely with the kabbalistic world of Asiyah, the world of action. This is the world as we experience it with our five senses. It appears to be running on its own, distanced from its Creator. Events happen naturally, according to set rules, without emotion. Compared to the warmth of Gan Eden, this is the cold world of winter. We can represent it with a cup of white wine, which is reminiscent of our cold, pale skin in the days of winter, and the white snowy landscape. In this world, lifeforce is often in hibernation, hidden within.
There is, however, a hidden benefit to the distance from Hashem in this world. In that place of distance, there is room for us to express ourselves. There is space for us to have free choice. We have the choice to co-create in this world, and we can make things better or worse. We can appreciate the beauty of nature, and make wonderful things happen in this world. And, of course, we can make bad things happen in our world. We can feel bad things when they happen in our world. Evil is real, because the possiblity for evil is the possibility of free will.
In this world of nature, we can also be slaves. Our eating in this world parallels the time we spent as a nation in Mitzrayim, where we ate as slaves. We so often look at the world of food in the most utilitarian way. And we describe our foods as good and bad. For how many of us is chocolate good and blue cheese bad? We eat as indulgence, and sometimes we eat as addiction. Too many of us are enslaved to our morning coffee (myself included!).
At this point, we can pick up our cup of white wine, say a bracha and a toast to the reality of our world. Take a moment to taste and savor our world.
We can explore our reality further through the rimon, pomegranate (or we could use an orange or a nut with a shell). Take a moment to hold the rimon, or a piece of it. Feel the hard shell surrounding it. This is what the kabbalists call the klipah. It’s all the hard parts and challenges in the world. The evil in the world. But when we peel it back, there is beauty, meaning and softness in the world. Stop for a moment and appreciate how beautiful this fruit is. Think of all the natural processes of planting and irrigating, sunshining and growing that went into the formation of this fruit. Take a moment to notice how much work of your own you had to put in to be able to taste and appreciate the delicious fruit.
When we recite a blessing thanking the Creator for this truly miraculous creation, and we take a bite and relish the taste, we are truly having an embodied spiritual experience. We put in the work, made the choice to peel back the hard shells and inedible parts of this fruit. And now, in this little bite of fruit, we can taste the joy and the beauty of the world of free will.
Second Course
Fruits With Pits
Light Pink Wine
Now let’s move into a new perspective, which we can connect loosely to the kabbalistic world of Yetzirah, the world of formation. This is when we expand our consciousness to consider that this world was formed by Hashem, and when Hashem creates, He creates for a purpose. As Rav Moshe Shapiro teaches in his shiurim on Bereishit, the first creation mentioned is time. The word time, zman, is related to the word hazmana, invitation. Time invites us to move forward. Being in time is an invitation to advance toward a goal. The structure of our world, as laid out for us in the first pasuk of the Torah, is shamayim and aretz, heaven and earth. Aretz, from the root word ratz, to run, and ratzon, desire, is the place where we run after everything we want. But we do not run endlessly. The earth was formed in time, moving toward a place of meaning. From the moment of its formation the aretz was connected to the shamayim. Shamayim is the place of “sham,” there—the place where we will attain for eternity what we desired here.
In this world there are challenging and difficult things for sure, but we recognize that there is more to what is happening than meets the eye. “Everything Hashem does is for the good” (Brachot 60b). We may not understand it in the moment, but if we had a view that included past and present, our whole life history and our whole soul history, we would see the meaning and the good in whatever we are experiencing. This is the perspective of teshuva, where the wrong paths and the mistakes that we make ultimately spur us to grow and to become better people. They are not intrinsically pleasant, but our life experiences all have meaning and are moving us forward.
Eating in this world parallels the way we ate matza on our national journey out of Mitzrayim. On this level, we are no longer enslaved to our food. We are eating for a greater purpose. Of course, we can still appreciate that some foods taste better than others. But we eat our food with an appreciation that we are eating to live, that we want our food to bring us spiritual and physical health. We can combine meaning and higher values with the foods we eat.
This is a world of development, of moving forward. We are metaphorically stepping into spring in this world. We pour a bit of red wine into our white, symbolizing the life force that begins to become apparent as the world wakes up. In the spring, the whole world has the energy of moving toward something wonderful. We can embrace and enjoy this state as we sip our cup of blushing wine. And we can think about how our lives are unfolding toward their purpose.
The fruit of this world is soft on the outside, because we are looking at our world with eyes that see the good, and we experience it. There is, however, still hard parts in this world. We can not bite unthinkingly into a date or olive or we will break our teeth on the pit. But in these fruits, the hard part is not a shell that is meant to be simply thrown away. The hard part of these fruits is the pit. And a pit is really a whole plant in potential—something hard from which something new and wonderful can grow. In this world, and also within ourselves, we can see and accept the challenges, the areas that are not quite soft, and accept them, because they are all serving us, helping us grow.
If we are using dates, we can think about Bamidbar Raba 3:1, which tells us that the date is an amazing plant because every part of it, trunk, branches, fruit, fibers, leaves, all have a useful purpose. We can think about how this is true, as the midrash says, about every member of our nation, but also about every part of ourselves and our world. If we are using olives, we can think about how even when they are crushed, they produce the most wonderful oil. In this world, everything brings us forward, towards goodness and meaning.
Pick up a date or an olive. Enjoy the deliciousness of the outside, how it is all prepared for us, ready to eat. And appreciate the hardness of the pit, from which new fruit grows. There is an invitation here to think about eating and experiencing all the different moments of our life, both sweet and hard, with an appreciation that they are all part of something bigger.
Third Course
Entirely Edible Fruits
Red Wine
Let’s move into a vision of creation which strongly feels its connection to its source. We can loosely connect this world to the kabbalistic world of Beriah, creation. In this world, closeness to Hashem is everywhere, and this is where we put our focus. We stop judging our experiences as good or bad, and instead think about in what way we can feel Hashem’s presence through all the circumstances of our lives.
To understand this perspective better, we can think about the concept of hishtavus. Histavus is a way of being explained eloquently by Rav Moshe Gersht in his short and powerful book, It’s All The Same To Me. He writes, “I ask you to suspend your thoughts about the question of good and evil and instead come with me on a journey to discover whether there is another way of looking at things. . . Hishtavus is a state of non-judgemental awareness. You are able to totally accept reality as it is without labeling things as essentially better or worse. It is the beginning of what it means to live in the presence of G-d.”
Rav Dovber Pinson explains this idea in connection to the story of Adam and Chava in Gan Eden. Quoting the Ma’or VaShemesh, he says that when Hashem told us to eat from the fruit of every tree, it was an instruction to eat equally of everything that life brings us. When we experience life without labeling things as good or bad we move ourselves out of the world of duality, and back into the world of unity, the perspective of the Tree of Life.
In the month of Shevat, we strengthen our sense of taste. And the way that we are aiming to strengthen it is, “ta’amu u’ri’u ki tov Hashem” (Tehillim 34:9). How beautiful if we can taste in all the moments of our life, the goodness of Hashem.
This type of eating is eating with equanimity, and a sort of transcendence. We put aside our desire and attachment. We see all food as equally good. This eating parallels the way we, as a nation, ate manna in the desert. The manna, like breast milk, could contain the flavor of any food. It was direct nourishment, eaten while we were being held in Hashem’s embrace, in the annanei hakavod.
In this world, we can pick up a cup of red wine, and make a toast to the season of summer. In the lazy days of summer, time sometimes seems to stop, and we exist in the enjoyment of the moment. Life is in bloom in summer. Life force is everywhere. And we can appreciate the feeling of just being in the moment.
Pick up the fig. Every part of it, the outside, the inside, the seeds—can all be eaten and experienced as one. Take a moment, as you eat, to think about what it would be like to experience life without being afraid, without making judgements. We are invited to think about just experiencing life, moment by moment, as a gift from Hashem.
A Moment for a
Breath
and a Scent
Take a moment to stop and breathe. If your nose is in good health, your moment to breathe is also a moment to smell. The substance we need most immediately to live in this world is air. And the way that Hashem created this world is that within that air are particles that we can not see or feel, but we can smell. With each breath, Hashem breathes life into us. And with each breathe we are simultaneously getting a message about the world we live in: there is so much more to this world than what we can see and feel. The air that is our life force is what allows us to perceive qualities in our food that we cannot fully quantify. And the smell of the food greatly enhances its taste. The Ma’or Einayim teaches that it is in the taste and fragrance of the food that the chayus, the Divine life force, rests.
Take a moment to think about the smells of the fruits we’ve been eating. For this presentation, I was fortunate enough to have a shmitta lemon growing by our home. Lemons are filled with the most incredible fragrance. Smelling a lemon (or any fruit) is an opportunity to open up our eyes to how much is layered and present in our food and in our lives that we are not paying attention to.
There is a special blessing on the smell of a fruit: hanoten reiach tov ba peirot. We can take the opportunity of saying this bracha to use our breath and our thoughts to add depth to the experience. I would like to share with you a practice we could apply at any time, to any bracha.
We are invited, before we begin to speak, to take a deep breath in, recognizing that our breath carries with it our life force. We can think of ourselves as being breathed by Hashem. And then, as we hold that breath within us, we can think about what we are going to say. Baruch Ata Hashem, Hashem You are the Source of all blessing in my life. We can then let our breath go, using it to speak the words of the bracha. We breathe in our life force from Hashem, and then return it to Hashem by using it to say the words of the bracha.
We can continue with the bracha. Breathe in. Think again. I’m about to say, Elokeinu Melech HaOlam. Hashem is bigger than the entire world. Open your mind to pan out for a moment: this country, this continent, this hemisphere, this entire globe, our whole solar system, the entire cosmos. The G-d that made all that is my God. Breathe out the words, returning our life force to Hashem with the words, “Elokeinu Melech HaOlam.”
Breathe in again. Think again. “Hanoten Reich Tov BaPeirot.” Hashem gave us this world for us to enjoy, for us to take pleasure in. He didn’t just give us sustenance. He gave us delicacies. Every form of fruit, in every color and every shape, and every texture. And then he let them fill our room with delicious scents. And in that scent, which enhances our pleasure and our taste so much, he gave us a hint to the G-dly life force and Divine energy that are also waiting for us in the fruit. Breathe out those words to Hashem. And enjoy, really enjoy, the smell of the lemon.
Fourth Course
Fruit Cake
Light Red Wine
Through breathing and smelling we made space for the idea that we can experience realities that we cannot fully quantify or understand. This idea can be loosely connected to the kabbalistic world of Atzilut, emanation, a world that is beyond the faculties of creation. This is a world beyond our understanding. It is a world of paradox, where we can experience many things at once. In this world, all other worlds exist and are true.
To understand what this might mean to us practically, let’s explore two results of Adam and Chava eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. First, that our world is a world of pirud, separation, and second that our world is a world of distance from Hashem.
To explore this idea of the world of separation in connection to this seder, I’d like to first share with you a little tidbit about Tu Beshvat. We know from Mishna Rosh Hashana 1:1 that Tu Beshvat is the new year of the tree, but Rosh Hashana 16a tells us that it is actually Shavout that is connected to the fruit. So why are we eating fruit on Tu Beshvat? Why aren’t we just carving wood? The idea is that part of the tikkun of Tu Beshvat is connecting the fruit and the tree.
Originally, when Hashem commanded the earth to bring forth trees, He asked the trees to be “eitz pri oseh pri, trees of fruit bearing fruit.” Both the tree and the fruit were ideally edible. This is not the reality of our world. Generally, trees are not edible. They are instead a representation of the process we take in this world to get results. The fruits represent the end result. In a world of unity, process and result are joined. In our world, process is separated from result and they often don’t even feel like a similar experiences. Even when the results are amazing, the process can be less enjoyable.
When Chava ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and specifically when she focused on the value of the fruit above all else, she magnified the distance between process and completion. When we join our celebration of the fruit to our celebration of the tree, we are moving ourselves back toward a place of unity. It’s a tikkun.
Adam and Chava’s eating from the tree also created more distance in our world. As we mentioned, a world of distance is a world where there is a lot of space to express ourselves. We began to rectify this distance by moving into a world of hishtavus, the world where we ate fruits that were completely edible. It was a beautiful place of experiencing Hashem’s world, as He gives it to us. But when we take out all our judgements and all our desires, there is very little of ourselves left in the picture. In the world of hishtavus, we are not very connected to our own ratzon, our own will and desire. This is not great, because our desire is a fundamental part of who we are.
There is a way of eating where we value the beauty of the end result, but also every single beautiful step we take to get there. There is a way of eating where we taste all the bitter and all the sweet; where we feel our desires, and also our closeness to Hashem. We can feel hardship and at the same time feel Hashem’s presence. We can feel pain and also good. We can laugh with tears. Rav Dovber Pinson calls this the eating of Holy Re-engagement. When we eat this way, and live this way, we are bringing ourselves—our yearning, our experiences, our wants and desires, the parts we love, the parts we love less—all into our relationship with Hashem.
In our path of national redemption, this type of eating is paralleled by our entering Eretz Yisroel, and settling and planting the land. Eretz Yisroel is both a place of nature, and the land that Hashem personally looks after (see Devarim 11:12). It is nature and miracle together.
Bereishit Rabbah, 15:7, tells us that when Adam was diminished after eating from the Tree, the tree was diminished as well. Originally, man ate wheat from a tree. The wheat in Gan Eden never had to be replanted or harvested the way it does now. Our “work” was in the eating and the enjoying. After we ate from the Tree of Knowledge, eating wheat became the process it is now. And fruit remained our symbol of eating for enjoyment and pleasure. We can choose, on Tu Beshvat, to eat the two together mindfully.
For the purposes of this seder, I chose to create lemon bars from shmita lemons. They are a mixture of wheat and fruit, and they are sour and sweet at the same time.
Eating on this level means eating and tasting the physical aspect of our food, but at the same time, also the Divine energy of our food. Our joy in tasting the unique delicious aspects of each unique food is, in itself, the way in which we connect to the nitzotzot kedusha, the Divine sparks, that are within the food.
We can connect this experience to the season of autumn. You never know what you’ll get in autumn. Summer is in the air some days, and winter is in the air some others. We live in the reality that our experiences are constantly changing. Our experience of being close to Hashem is constantly changing. Autumn is the season of remaining connected, even as life changes around us, and appreciating all the imperfections that bring us where we need to go.
We can pour ourselves a toast to this state of being by filling our cups mostly with the red wine that symbolizes our connection to our Source, our life force. And then we can add in a bit of white, a bit of hardship, and watch how it swirls and combines and becomes part of the red. Take a sip and appreciate the paradoxical beauty of our imperfect lives and selves.
Fruits are foods we usually eat not just for sustenance, but as something to enjoy. They were originally what Hashem gave us to eat in Gan Eden. As the Ramchal tells us right in the beginning of Mesillat Yesharim, “Man was created for the sole purpose of rejoicing in Hashem and deriving pleasure from the splendor of His presence.” We eat to live, and we live to experience the pleasure of being in Hashem’s Presence.
Rav Pinson writes, “This is the deepest way of living — seeing and experiencing the full deliciousness of Hashem’s light sparkling within every moment and within every-thing. This is the path that the holy Baal Shem Tov revealed to the world. A wise Chassidic Rebbe, Reb Simcha Bunim of Pshischah, once scoffed at those who sang the praises of their spiritual master, claiming that he was so spiritual that he did not even taste the food that he ate. ‘A real Rebbe,’ replied Reb Simcha, ‘is one who truly and deeply tastes his food. As it is through such enjoyment that one is able to taste the Divinity within everything that he eats and experiences.’ “
Pick up the lemon bar. Appreciate the color and shape of the dessert. Take a deep breath, and enjoy the smell. If you haven’t said mezonot yet, then say the bracha, using it to express your anticipation for tasting this treat. And when you take a bite, enjoy the experience in every part of your being, all the way down to your toes.