Why should we care about Tu BiShvat?

On Rosh Hashanah - the one for people - the whole world stands in judgment. The shofar sounds. Every person’s deeds are weighed. Fate for the coming year hangs in the balance: life and death, prosperity and poverty, health and illness. Each individual faces their own accounting, responsible for the year they lived and the person they became.

Then comes Tu BiShvat: the tree’s new year. No judgment. No teshuvah. No moral reckoning. It marks a botanical fact - enough rainfall has accumulated, sap is rising, fruit will begin forming from this year’s sustenance rather than last year’s - which determines halakhic categories for some agricultural mitzvot. The tree doesn’t know it’s happening. It simply continues its metabolic processes according to rhythms encoded at creation.

What could be less significant? Our Rosh Hashanah determines our fate. The tree’s Rosh Hashanah determines which produce can tithe for which other produce. We mark it slightly - we don’t say tachanun. Some eat extra fruits. Compared to the drama of judgment day, why does it matter? Why mark it at all?

Man and Tree: A Conflicting Interpretation

The question becomes sharper when we consider another element. Around Tu BiShvat, we are often told that the Torah compares man to trees. The mystical traditions develop elaborate parallels - roots (ancestors), branches (descendants), fruit (deeds).

In its plain sense, though, the verse says the exact opposite. *“Ki ha’adam etz hasadeh”* - “For is the tree of the field a man, that it should be besieged by you?” (Deuteronomy 20:19). The Torah is prohibiting the destruction of fruit trees in wartime. The logic is clear: The tree isn’t a man. It’s not your enemy. It hasn’t taken up arms. It’s fundamentally different. Leave it alone.

Some rabbinic sources, however (see for example Ta’anit 7a), do read the words as an affirmation: “For man is the tree of the field” - comparing human beings to trees. Both readings appear in our tradition. Man is not like a tree. Man is like a tree.

This tension points to something real. We’re neither identical to trees nor completely separate from them. And this ambiguous relationship manifests in the strange halakhic reality that we mark two different “New Years,” one for us and one for them.

When Timelines Intersect: The Steipler’s Analysis

The Steipler Gaon explores a question about Tu BiShvat and shemittah that cuts to the heart of this ambiguity (Kehillot Yaakov, Rosh Hashanah, Siman 1 and Siman 14 in the later additions).

For most agricultural mitzvot - orlah, ma’aser, neta revai - the tree follows its own timeline. Tu BiShvat determines which year fruit belongs to. Fruit that forms before Tu BiShvat belongs to the previous year; fruit forming after belongs to the new year. The tree operates on its own schedule.

Shemittah may differ. The sabbatical year isn’t fundamentally about the tree - it’s about the kedushah, the holiness, of the Land of Israel itself. The land rests in the seventh year. The land’s produce becomes ownerless and sacred. The sanctity attaches to the land, and anything growing from that land during the seventh year absorbs its special status.

So which timeline governs for shemittah? Does the tree follow its own new year - Tu BiShvat - as it does for other agricultural laws? Or does it follow the land’s timeline - Rosh Hashanah, when the seventh year of the land begins - since shemittah is fundamentally about the land’s kedushah rather than the tree’s biological cycle?

The Chazon Ish was the Steipler’s brother-in-law - a relationship that parallels this duality. Brothers-in-law are not born into connection. Each develops independently, forms his own identity, lives his own life. Only later, through marriage, do their lives intersect and interact. They remain distinct individuals even as they become family, each maintaining his own approach while engaging with the other’s perspective.

The Chazon Ish took the position that for shemittah specifically, because it’s rooted in the sanctity of the land rather than in the tree’s own cycle, fruit should follow the land’s timeline, not the tree’s. Rosh Hashanah, not Tu BiShvat, determines when fruit enters the shemittah year.

The Steipler analyzes this question carefully. On one hand, the tree has its own established new year - Tu BiShvat. The Mishnah explicitly designates it as such. Why should shemittah be different? On the other hand, shemittah is unique among agricultural mitzvot precisely because it’s not primarily about the tree. It’s about the land’s rest, the land’s sanctity. When the land enters its sabbatical, shouldn’t everything growing from it follow the land’s schedule rather than maintaining its own?

Even within this system, we must sometimes choose which timeline is determinative. The tree has its own rhythm - Tu BiShvat marks when its year turns over. The land has its own rhythm - Rosh Hashanah marks when its sanctity shifts into shemittah. When these two timelines intersect, when fruit grows from holy land, which governs?

There’s no simple answer. The very question illuminates the complexity of living in multiple timelines simultaneously. The tree isn’t independent - it grows from the land. It isn’t simply subsumed into the land’s timeline either - it has its own new year for most purposes. Coordinating these overlapping but distinct rhythms requires careful analysis and, ultimately, a choice about which reality takes precedence in which context.

(For further analysis of the implications of Tu BiShvat, see Rabbi Shlomo Fischer, Beit Yishai, Siman 31.)

Autonomy and Embeddedness

On Rosh Hashanah, each person stands individually before God, judged on their own merits, responsible for who they’ve become. This is radical autonomy - our timeline is genuinely ours. We create ourselves through our choices.

We’re simultaneously embedded in timelines we didn’t create and can’t control. Children grow according to their own development, not when we decide they’re ready. Society shifts through forces larger than any individual. Trees respond to rainfall and temperature, not to our spiritual state.

These timelines aren’t synchronized with ours. A child’s moment of readiness arrives on their schedule. Economic shifts, political upheavals, cultural changes - all moving according to their own rhythms, affecting us whether we acknowledge them or not. And the tree’s year turns over in Shevat, regardless of where we are in our own cycle. Its fruit sustains us. Its growth obligates us. What happens in its timeline impacts ours.

The tree itself faces this tension. It has its own timeline - Tu BiShvat, when its fruit cycle renews. It grows from land that has its own timeline - Rosh Hashanah, when the land’s sabbatical year begins. The tree is both independent (with its own new year) and embedded (in land whose sanctity operates on a different schedule). For most purposes, the tree follows its own rhythm. For shemittah, the question becomes: does the land’s sanctity, the reality the tree is embedded in, take precedence?

Why Mark Their New Year?

This is what Tu BiShvat marks: the recognition that we live among timelines not our own. The tree isn’t judged, doesn’t repent, has no moral timeline. Halakha demands we acknowledge its new year, know when it occurs, adjust our behavior accordingly.

The Steipler’s analysis of shemittah reflects the genuine complexity of this coordination. Which timeline governs when realities intersect? The tree’s biological rhythm or the land’s sanctified cycle? There’s no simple answer because both are real, both matter, and they don’t perfectly align.

If we only attend to our own timeline, we’ll think we’re purely autonomous, that our choices are made in a vacuum. We’ll fail to notice all the other “new years” happening around us - moments when others’ timelines demand our attention, create obligations, shape possibilities.

The tree isn’t a man - it has no moral agency, no judgment day. Man is like a tree - embedded in natural rhythms, dependent on processes beyond control, growing from ground whose sanctity operates on its own schedule.

The Practice of Recognition

 

Tu BiShvat doesn’t have the drama of our Rosh Hashanah. Just a quiet marking: the tree’s year is turning over now.

That marking is spiritual practice. It acknowledges that our radical autonomy - our individual judgment, our personal responsibility - coexists with embeddedness in countless other timelines, all turning over on their own schedules, all affecting us.

On Rosh Hashanah, we focus inward: Who have we been? What must change?

On Tu BiShvat, we look outward: What other timelines are we embedded in? Whose “new year” needs our recognition?

The tree’s new year arrives in Shevat. We mark it because we share this world with it, eat its fruit, have obligations shaped by its cycle. In that marking, we practice living with complexity - autonomous yet embedded, responsible for our choices while responsive to rhythms we didn’t create.

Tu BiShvat reminds us: other new years are happening all around us. Notice them. Mark them. Let them enrich how we live. The wisdom lies not in choosing between independence and connection, but in learning to honor both - creating ourselves while remaining open to the timelines we share with others, with society, with the natural world. The tree’s year turns over. We pause to acknowledge it. And in that pause, we affirm our place in a world far larger and richer than any single timeline could contain.