Tu Bishevat and Shabbat Shira

This Shabbat is a particularly joyous one for us, the Jewish people, as we celebrate both Tu Bishevat and Shabbat Shira. Tu Bishevat is certainly the more familiar celebration, the holiday sometimes called “The New Year of the Trees” and also explained as the birthday of the trees. Shabbat Shira is the Shabbat when the Torah portion Beshalach is read which contains Shirat Ha-yam “The Song of the Sea.” This is the song of rejoicing sang by the Israelites after they have crossed the Sea of Reeds safely escaping Pharoah and the Egyptian forces. The Song of the Sea may be known to you as the prayer Mi Chamocha which opens with a direct quote from it. In recent years Shabbat Shira has become a time to celebrate Jewish music and there will indeed be a music service the Saturday (January 30) at SAJ. This confluence of events affords us the opportunity to think about the connection that exists between them.

Tu Bishevat helps us to think about and celebrate our relationship to trees. There are indeed many things that we “need” from them but need nothing so directly and essentially as our breath. We are in a continuous relationship with trees – they “breathe” the oxygen that we need to live, just as we give them the carbon dioxide that they need. Trees quite literally give us our breath and in this way they are partners with God in giving us our neshamah our breath, our soul. Shabbat Shira is a time to focus on raising our voice in song; it is a time we recognize that song is a pure expression of spirit. If we reflect on how this is, we can see that we create song through infusing our voice, our very breath with soul. I think that this is no accident, for Judaism is about the integration of the physical and the spiritual. Look no farther than Hebrew which recognizes the relationship between the physical and the spiritual. The Hebrew word for breath neshamah is also the word for soul. In fact, the Hebrew word for wind, ruach (for what is breath but wind coming into and out of our bodies) is also the word for spirit.

It is no accident that both of these celebrations use our breath as the entry point into a more meaningful world. They both help us to see that the physical and spiritual worlds are inextricably linked and it is through this linkage that there is the possibility for harmony - within ourselves and with the world around us.