Well for a start, I’m literally writing this on the day before Tu B’Shevat, which is one of the lesser-known but very cool Jewish holidays with a rather uncreative name denoting that it falls on the 15th (Tu) of the month of Shevat. It starts at sunset tonight, and is described as a ‘New Year for trees’. This apparently makes more sense in Israel, where mid-Shevat denotes the imminent coming of spring and the budding of trees, but in the UK, which has just been snowed all over, the timing feels like a tantalising jab.
Anyways, for the first time ever, I’ve decided to do a little seder for my family to mark the holiday. The Tu B’Shevat seder was first undertaken by Rav Isaac Luria, a 16th-century Ottoman rabbi who founded the Lurianic school of Kabbalah. Within it, you’re meant to first eat fruit and nuts with an inedible outer shell; then fruits with an inedible stone; and finally fruits that can be eaten whole, with a final fourth course consisting of just smell. I like this, because smell is how HaShem and the spirits are meant to eat, marking a unification with this highest realm.
I like adding new traditions to my routine, returning to a path that my late grandparents left when they renounced Judaism during the interwar period. But I am conscious of the fact that, like an archaeologist, I approach and integrate these traditions from the outside in – it may be my heritage, but it’s also one I have to dig for.
When I first started keeping Shabbat, I used electric candles, turning them on at Friday sunset and off on Saturday night. At the time it felt like I couldn’t do much else – establishing routine during a chaotic period superseded other considerations. As life settled, I switched to real candles; began integrating an ancestor offering, with the kiddush wine and challah portion that would in times past have gone to the kohen; held my first Pesach seder. But at times I still felt cut off from the friends I made at synagogue, alienated through a broken line of observance, an abandoned lineage.
Only recently, I found my grandfather’s family shtetl, in the Kaunas district of Lithuania. Both of my dad’s parents died years before I was born, and I don’t know what they would make of me. I used to think that they renounced Judaism because they were both communist, but I’ve come to the conclusion that they were merely assimilationist, cutting the anchor of Judaism to sail free in a white-passing world. But if you cut the anchor, what happens when you want to moor somewhere?
I’ve met a couple of my ancestors now, in dreams. Invariably, they tell me off for not being Jewish enough, and I never have the quickness of wit in my dreams to point out that unlike them, I haven’t spent my whole life growing up in a shtetl, surrounded by and integrated within those traditions. There again, I wonder if they realise that their way of life has been uprooted and eradicated entirely, again, as periodically happens when you’re Jewish. The shtetl that my great-grandfather left in the early 20th century is still there; only now there’s a memorial there, on the site of a mass grave where all the remaining Jews – over 700 of them – were gunned down, like cattle, by the Nazis.
Anyways I’ve got dinner mostly sorted – fruits and nuts, shelled, stoned, eaten whole; six of the seven species of Israel you’re also supposed to eat on the day (look, there are only so many uses for pearl barley); incense for afters, instead of an etrog (do you know how hard it is to source an etrog in the UK?). And carob molasses, because of the story Honi told about the man who planted a carob tree.
Honi came upon an old man planting a carob tree, and asked him why he was planting it as he would be dead by the time it bore fruit. The old man replied that he had found the trees his grandparents had planted when he was a boy, and he was now planting this carob tree for his grandchildren. Sometimes the meaning of tradition isn’t clear to those practising it at this present time; sometimes its echoes, ripples in the past and future, cannot be felt or seen, but must be intuitively known for actions taken at the present time to have meaning.
I do what I can, though the world changes, and I change with it, and my people change too. We’ll be planting trees in our garden soon, but we may move house before they bear fruit. In our old house we also left a garden – something nice for the next tenants.
Sonya Blanck writings 