Happy Tu B’Shvat! Today we are celebrating the new year for the trees — but they don’t seem to be changing. And outwardly, they’re not. As you may have learned in school, what we’re really celebrating is the sap’s rising, which will eventually nurture the trees into all their spring glory. But we’ve a while yet…
For the human celebrants of Tu B’Shvat, this is a metaphor (after all, “ki ha’adam eitz hasadeh…”). Many, many times in our lives, we feel stuck in winter darkness, afraid that nothing will change. And change happens so slowly most of the time that it’s barely detectable beneath the surface. But it happens. At the darkest point of winter, the sap starts rising.
At one point in my shidduch journey, I realized that I needed to develop parts of myself in order to be the kind of person and eventually wife that I deeply wanted to be. It was scary to acknowledge that because it meant I had to go through the process. And a process takes time. And time takes you through months and years. And if you’re in shidduchim, that can be a unsettling prospect, to say the least.
But if you want to eat the fruit, you have to plant the seed. You have to let it grow. And you have to trust that it will be worth it.
Tu B’Shvat is about playing the long game. When you hold a fruit in your hand, you are holding a process that could not be rushed. But it ended with something beautiful. Wherever you are in your own process of growth, remember that sap rises in darkness. You might not see change on the outside for a long time, but it is happening. And the fruits of your labor will burst forth at the right time.
“Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”
–Joyce Kilmer
(The image above is Bringing in the Maple Sugar, by Grandma Moses (1939).)
