Fulfilling Mitzvos with Sweetness and Delight - Tu B'Shvat in Light of Chassidus

00:00 What did trees do to merit a special holiday? Creation is full of good things that Hakadosh Boruch Hu made. There are inanimate things, plants, animals, and human beings, yet of all the creations Hakadosh Boruch Hu made in His world, it is trees that we celebrate. What is special about trees? That is what we will discuss today: the deeper meaning of the New Year for Trees. If it simply means that we should thank Hakadosh Boruch Hu for the sweet fruit He has given us, then we should equally have a special New Year for livestock, for animals, for the earth, and for all the other wonderful, beautiful things Hashem created in His world that we enjoy. There is something special about trees in particular. And the question is even stronger: Within the plant kingdom, there are many things besides trees. There are field crops too—wheat and barley. We do not specially celebrate a New Year for crops. The Mishnah that is the source for the New Year for Trees—the first Mishnah in tractate Rosh Hashanah—does mention a New Year for livestock, and also mentions a New Year for crops and vegetables. Yet we do not find a Jewish custom of holding a special celebration, a New Year, for vegetables, livestock, or the produce of the land. Trees, specifically, have merited their own New Year. And the Jewish custom is that on this day, 15 Shvat, we do not say Tachanun in davening, and there are various customs to eat fruit. Some also recite verses, teachings of our Sages, passages from the holy Zohar, and other things according to Jewish custom. So the question, as we said, is what is special about trees that we celebrate them? There is a well-known verse that people generally use to explain this. It appears at the end of Parshas Shoftim: “For man is a tree of the field.” This verse tells us something that connects a person with a tree of the field.

02:27 Although, when we look at the verse, it is actually talking about something quite different. It is talking about war. When conducting a war, the Torah says—there, at the end of Parshas Shoftim, where it discusses various kinds of war—that among the laws of war, one must be careful not to cut down fruit trees. That is where it says, “For man is a tree of the field.” There are several interpretations of this. In general, it means that we must preserve the tree of the field because a person lives from it. Its fruit sustains a person, so we should not rush to cut it down. This is where the whole subject of bal tashchis comes in: we may not destroy things fit for food. We learn that from these verses. Nevertheless, according to the Midrash, the verse also contains an allusion. The Gemara in tractate Taanis derives from “For man is a tree of the field” an allusion to a Torah scholar: someone who studies Torah should have students—this is the idea of a tree of the field—and should have students and good, proper character traits. We learn this from the verse. But it still does not explain what is unique about fruit trees that we have a special New Year for trees. As we said, among plants there are trees, which generally bear the fruit we are speaking about. And when we speak about fruit, we mean especially the seven species for which the Land of Israel is praised; these are central to the subject of fruit. So we celebrate, and the Jewish custom is to try to find fruit from the seven species—specifically, the five of those species that are fruits. The first two species, wheat and barley, are crops; they are bread. They are not what we celebrate on 15 Shvat. On Tu

04:49 BiShvat, we celebrate the other five species: grapevines, figs, pomegranates, “a land of olive oil and honey”—olives and dates. Those are the main focus of the celebration. So today we will learn and explain in depth how the teachings of Chassidus illuminate this for us, as they do everything else, giving us a deeper, inner perspective: how every holiday is also—and really, above all—a message for a Jew, a message for a person, a message for our lives that is relevant right now. We will learn what the message of the New Year for Trees is for our daily lives. One of the main things we see specifically with trees becomes clear when we look at how they grow. There is a seed that we put in the ground, a hard, dry seed with neither taste nor fragrance. We put that seed into the earth, where it remains for a while. After plowing and all the work we do, we leave it in the ground for a time. Then, believe it or not, the seed goes through a process of decay: it rots beneath the earth, and only then does the process of growth begin. Now, this process occurs in every kind of plant. But what is special about the fruit of a tree is this: with tree fruit, unlike vegetables or other crops—wheat, barley, and other grains—we do not simply put seeds in the ground and get seeds. With those crops, what grows is essentially of the same quality as what was sown. We sowed seeds, and seeds grew. Of course, they grow in greater quantity than the one small seed we planted: wheat grows with many grains. But the difference is only in quantity, not in quality. It is not a fundamental difference. That is also why it takes less time. We put wheat grains in the ground, and after a few weeks—not such a long time—growth appears. And this

07:18 is connected, because the transition from seed to growth in the produce of the land, in grains and vegetables, is not such a great or fundamental change. That is also why they grow faster, and why we always have to start over. We plant the seeds; once we have harvested, we need to plant seeds again for another crop, and so on. With fruit trees, by contrast, the process we see is much longer and more sustained. It takes a great deal of time and much more effort, but the growth is incomparably greater. Once I put a fruit seed in the ground—let us take a grape seed, a fig seed, or a pomegranate seed—a process begins that will take years. Apart from the halachos we know, that there are at least three years of orlah, followed by the fourth and fifth years that the Torah discusses before the fruit is fully available to eat, the natural process itself also takes a great deal of time and effort. We have to work at it, take care, check on it, and pay attention to the water and the soil, protecting it from all sorts of potential harm along the way, until at last a wonderful tree grows: “a fruit tree bearing fruit according to its kind.” But once the tree has grown, it is not merely that I planted a seed and seeds grew, or that I planted a fruit and a few fruits grew. The growth of the fruit is tremendous. A tree grows that can last for many years. That same tree will go on bearing fruit according to its kind; we only need to care for it, and it will produce fruit and further fruit for many good, long years. That is the wonderful thing we see in fruit trees. And one more thing before we learn the lesson, the instruction for us, is the matter of the purpose

09:40 What fruits have is different from everything else. Fruit from a tree is not something a person eats because they have to eat. It is not food eaten to feel full. Essentially, it is eaten for pleasure. In general, grain is filling food: bread, baked goods, and all kinds of foods, including cakes, that a person eats to feel full. That is why the blessings over them differ as well, as we know from the laws of blessings over food. Fruit from trees—most of it, if not all of it—is not something a person generally eats because they are hungry. People eat it for its sweet taste. It has sweet-and-sour flavors and other distinctive tastes, and people eat it for enjoyment and pleasure. That is what is distinctive about fruit from trees, more than all the other things we spoke about earlier. So if we take all of this and try to understand its message, what it represents in our daily lives, we can begin with a teaching of the holy Baal Shem Tov. The Baal Shem Tov speaks about the verse, “For you shall be a treasured land, says Hashem of Hosts.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu says through the prophet, “For you shall be a treasured land.” The Jewish people are like the earth, a treasured land. The Baal Shem Tov says that to Hakadosh Boruch Hu, every Jew is like the earth. What does that mean? As we said earlier, the earth seems to be the lowest, plainest, most material and coarse thing, the very bottom, seemingly without any special vitality. Yet Hakadosh Boruch Hu placed within the earth this wondrous power—the power to grow. You put a seed in the earth, and it grows. The most precious things are found specifically in the earth; Hakadosh Boruch Hu placed them there. We know that treasures and minerals are hidden in the earth—the greatest, most important treasures.

12:03 And no matter how much we search, we still will not reach the depths of what is found and hidden within the earth. The Baal Shem Tov says that this is the meaning of “For you shall be a treasured land.” The Jewish people are, so to speak, like Hakadosh Boruch Hu’s treasured land, His earth, with the power of growth inside it. Now, what do we see in the earth’s power to grow? As we said earlier, you take a seed and put it in the earth. There, the process begins: first it decays, and then, slowly, wonderfully sweet fruits grow. What does this represent in our lives? It represents a Jew’s purpose—why he is here in this physical world. Our soul, the soul of every Jew, is hewn from beneath the Throne of Glory. Our soul is “literally a part of G-d above,” as the Alter Rebbe explains in Tanya. The soul’s source is in the very highest place, hewn from beneath the Throne of Glory. Before descending here into this physical world, the soul was in Gan Eden. It was connected to the radiance of the Shechinah and took pleasure in it, as the Gemara says. That is the soul’s reality as it exists in the higher worlds. Then this soul descends here, into this world. We say this every day in the morning blessings: “The soul You have given me is pure,” my G-d. Every Jew says this blessing at the beginning of the day: “My G-d, the soul You have given me is pure.” My soul is pure. Not that it was pure—it is pure now. The essence of our soul, which is literally a part of G-d above, is pure even now. But “You created it, You formed it, You breathed it into me, and You preserve it within me.” Hakadosh Boruch Hu brought the soul down from world to world, from level to level, until He breathed it into us, into our physical, material body

14:15 which is, so to speak, like inanimate matter, dust from the earth. That is the reality of the body. “And Hashem formed man from dust of the earth.” Man was formed from that dust, and that is our body. Here begins the remarkable process we call a Jew’s growth in this physical world. As we said, this process includes a stage of decay. When the soul descends here, it joins with the body, with the physical world, with physical reality. That takes time. Each of us sees it in our own life. There are moments, days, periods in life when we are searching and do not quite know what we are doing here in the world or what our purpose in life is. Then a person begins the work of asking: How am I going to do this? What am I here in this world for? Eventually, he comes to understand that his purpose is growth: Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave me this great and holy soul, hewn from beneath the Throne of Glory. But it is, so to speak, like a seed. My task is to bring that seed together with my physical body in this physical world. The soul’s self-nullification within the body is the stage of decay. Decay represents a kind of self-nullification. I have to go through a process of setting aside my sense of self—of becoming nullified, of “decaying” in the sense meant here. It means knowing the supernal will and putting myself aside. As long as I am concerned only with myself, with my own ego, with what I like and what I want, I remain, so to speak, a whole, intact entity that does not allow itself to grow. Part of our process of growth requires us to reach a certain self-nullification, to submit to the supernal will—what the Torah calls accepting the yoke of Heaven. A person has to put himself aside

16:29 and put his own desires aside, and ask: What does Hakadosh Boruch Hu want from me at this moment? Once we have that self-nullification, that decay, that setting aside of the ego, growth can begin. Sometimes it is not a coarse ego that says, “I specifically want material things.” There is an ego in spiritual matters too. I like certain things in Yiddishkeit, in Torah and mitzvos, that I connect with. But I seek to fulfill the mitzvos that are pleasant to me, that feel sweet to me. I like them because they suit my nature. If you ask me to fulfill mitzvos or do things that do not suit my nature so well, that is where I struggle. Some people naturally love to sit and learn. Ask them to sit and learn, and they can do it all day. But ask them to go and do a favor for another Jew, and that is hard for them. To go out, take action, and speak to people—“I’m shy. It isn’t easy for me; I’m uncomfortable”—so that part is difficult. And there are people who are the opposite. They love helping others endlessly. Ask them to help, to give, to do someone a favor, and they are there. But ask them to sit and learn: “I don’t have the strength; I don’t feel like it. That just doesn’t suit my nature.” So here we come to this decay: setting aside the “I,” not only the material “I” but the spiritual “I” as well. I put myself aside and seek to know the supernal will. From this decay, the fruit begins to grow, and as we said, there are different kinds. There is grain, which, as we said, represents food a person eats to feel full, food a person eats to sustain himself. What does that mean in daily life? It means the things a Jew does in Torah and mitzvos because he is obligated to do them. There are things we have a duty to do, things

18:34 Obligations, necessary things. The everyday mitzvos that the Shulchan Aruch says a Jew must do each day. A Jew must put on tefillin every day. A Jew must give tzedakah every day. A Jew must wash his hands in the morning. There are the necessary mitzvos that I have to do every day. To study one chapter in the morning and one chapter in the evening, as it says. But then there is serving Hashem in the category of fruit from a tree—things that bring pleasure, things that have sweetness. This is no longer about necessity; it is about doing things with delight. When I serve Hashem only because I have the yoke of Heaven upon me, only because I am obligated as a Jew, then I do the minimum. I look in halachah to see what I am required to do, and that is what I do. So I will do only what is necessary, the bare minimum. The moment a person feels pleasure, joy, and happiness in keeping Torah and mitzvos, when serving Hashem comes from a place of delight, he does not stop at what is required. He acts without calculating. He goes beyond all the limits. He wants to go beyond the letter of the law, to perform a mitzvah in a more beautiful way. I do not want to do it specifically in the most minimal way. If we talk, for example, about observing mitzvos, let’s take putting on tefillin. I can put on tefillin quickly—one, two, done. I have fulfilled the mitzvah. But if I feel delight, joy, pleasure, and sweetness in carrying out Hashem’s command, then I will do it from an entirely different place. There will be joy in putting on tefillin. I will not rush to take the tefillin off my head. I will want to put on not only Rashi tefillin, but Rabbeinu Tam tefillin as well—to perform the mitzvah with greater care, greater delight, and greater joy. And the same is true of studying Torah. The moment

20:43 that I am concerned only with what is necessary to fulfill the obligation to study Torah, I will say: Fine, I fulfill my obligation with one halachah in the morning and one in the evening. I will study the minimum. I have done it. I am okay with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. But that is still not what Tu BiShvat is about. Fruit from a tree comes to teach us that when a person reaches the point of serving Hashem after the whole process, as we said, he reaches a place of delight and great joy in serving Hashem. You will study not only what you are required to. A person will want to learn another page of Gemara, another few words of Torah, another verse, another Mishnah, another halachah, another word of Chassidus—and take delight in it. When something fills me with delight and joy, I do not ask what I am required to do. I will do much more than I have to. A person will study “and you shall meditate on it day and night,” or, as people sometimes say, he will even steal time from the hours when he needs to do other things. Wherever I can stay a few more minutes and learn a few more words of Torah, I will. And the same is true of the mitzvah of tzedakah. There is a halachic obligation for a Jew to give a tenth of his earnings—ten percent. But when Torah and mitzvos, serving Hashem, come from a place of delight for a Jew, then he serves Hashem in an entirely different way. The tzedakah he gives will not be only ten percent; he will try to reach twenty percent, as our Sages say that the more beautiful way to fulfill the mitzvah of tzedakah is to give up to twenty percent, and even more. Sometimes he will not even consider that limit, as the Alter Rebbe says in Tanya: when it comes to physical health, G-d forbid, if a person needs something for his health, he does not calculate the cost. He will do everything

22:40 he needs to do to regain his physical health. All the more so when it comes to the health of the soul: there, a person certainly will not make calculations, and sometimes he will give even more than twenty percent to restore his soul, to heal his soul, and so on. So here is the wonderful message of this holiday, the New Year for Trees. What is special about trees in particular? As we said, first of all, they represent growth, something very, very essential in the life of a Jew. It is essential to the life of a Jew because we are a “desirable land”; we have the power to grow. We see in verses throughout Tanach that the Jewish people are compared to every kind of fruit. It is a wonderful thing. If we look at the verses of Tanach, we find that sometimes the Jewish people are called a grapevine: “You brought a vine out of Egypt,” in Tehillim, chapter 80, comparing the Jewish people to a vine. The Jewish people are called a fig: “Like the first ripe fig, I saw your fathers.” The Jewish people are compared to an olive tree: “A flourishing olive tree, beautiful with fine fruit.” That refers to an olive tree. Pomegranates: “Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates,” in Shir Hashirim. “She is likened to a date palm.” We find the Jewish people compared to all these fruits, and of course the Jewish people are also compared to grain, to produce, to wheat and barley. “Israel is holy to Hashem, the first of His produce”—“His produce” refers to grain. But here we are talking about precisely this point. When we are talking about grain, that is not yet a reason to celebrate. When we are talking about the growth of grain, of things that are necessary, they are obligations; and if something is an obligation, you will not celebrate it yet. That is what a Jew is supposed to do. That is why our soul descended into this world: to do what is necessary, represented by grain—the observance of the obligatory mitzvos. This is, in fact,

24:53 every Jew’s obligation, and we do not yet celebrate that. The fifteenth of Shvat, Tu BiShvat, this holiday of the New Year for Trees—“for man is a tree of the field”—represents this wonderful thing: a Jew has the ability to serve Hashem from a place of delight, from a place of joy, where he does things not only because he is required to, but because he takes special pleasure in doing them. And as we said, reaching this point is a longer process. Serving Hashem in the most basic, obligatory way does not require such a long process. But serving Hashem in a way that a person truly feels joy, happiness, and delight, and serves Hashem from that place—that demands more work from us. For that, we need to think more, contemplate more, delve more deeply, and understand what we are doing here in the world. To understand the... the wonderful thing we have received, this great gift that Hakadosh Boruch Hu gave us, the “actual part of G-d above” within us, and the Torah and mitzvos, which are the wisdom and will of Hakadosh Boruch Hu. For that, we need to study what the inner dimension of Torah teaches us. It teaches us about the inner dimension of the soul and the inner dimension of Torah. It explains the garden, the orchard, the... the... the... wonderful delight there is in serving Hashem and in Torah and mitzvos. And then, specifically, serving Hashem becomes much more joyful and delightful. That is what the New Year for Trees celebrates. So as we find ourselves now on this holiday of the New Year for Trees, we see something wonderful. And why do we celebrate it specifically on the fifteenth of the month? It is interesting. When we look at the Mishnah, there are four New Years, and all four listed in the Mishnah fall on Rosh Chodesh. There is Rosh Chodesh Nissan, the New Year for kings and festivals; Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first

26:56 For animals, there is Rosh Chodesh Tishrei. We all know that the Mishnah lists Rosh Hashanah for many things—five or six things for which 1 Tishrei is Rosh Hashanah. Then we come to Shvat. Beis Shammai says here, too, that it is Rosh Chodesh, while Beis Hillel says it is the fifteenth, and that is how the halachah was established. We celebrate specifically on the fifteenth, and that is surprising. Why is the New Year for trees on the fifteenth of the month, unlike all the other new years, which fall on Rosh Chodesh? Logically, Rosh Chodesh would seem more fitting for a new year. It is the head of the month, the beginning, the starting point. The moon is born anew; it is the beginning of the whole month. So the new year for certain things is set at the beginning of the month. Rosh Chodesh Nissan is the new year for kings and festivals. Rosh Chodesh Tishrei is the new year for years and for people, and so on—all the things we know about Rosh Hashanah. Why, then, was the halachah for trees established specifically on the fifteenth of the month, rather than on Rosh Chodesh? This is connected to everything we discussed earlier. On this Rosh Hashanah of Tu B’Shvat, we are not celebrating what is necessary. We are celebrating delight. We are celebrating the joy and wonderful pleasure a Jew experiences in serving Hashem. That is why he does it in a radiant, expansive, delightful way: you can see the light, the joy, the smile on his face, the pleasure he takes in every word of Torah he learns and every mitzvah he performs. That is precisely the theme of the fifteenth of the month, when the moon is full. At the beginning of the month, the moon is just a point. It has only now been born; everything is dark, and you cannot yet see all its light. It is just a point. On the fifteenth, the moon is complete. You look at the moon on the fifteenth of Shvat and see

29:02 a full moon, a shining moon that sends light into the world amid the great darkness. We know that the Jewish people are symbolized by the moon, for they are destined to be renewed like it. The Jewish people, the holy Shechinah, are the moon. When the moon is full on the fifteenth of the month, it symbolizes Knesses Yisroel filled with light. And that is what we celebrate on the fifteenth of Shvat. A Jew serves Hashem with pleasure and joy, full of light, love, eagerness, and delight, and he brings that into the world. He brings that light into life. May we each, with Hashem’s help, connect to this festival, the New Year for trees. For “man is a tree of the field.” May we be people of trees, people of gardens, people who find delight and joy in serving Hashem, and may we spread that light to illuminate the world. This will bring us happier lives. And may the words of the verses about the revelations foretold for the Geulah soon be fulfilled in our days: “The tree of the field will yield its fruit,” as it says in Parshas Bechukosai, and, in another verse, “The plowman shall overtake the reaper.” May we merit to see the great flowering of the true and complete Geulah through Moshiach Tzidkeinu: “A shoot shall emerge from the trunk of Yishai”—the great tree—and “May You speedily cause the scion of David Your servant to flourish, and raise his glory through Your salvation, for we have hoped for Your salvation all day long.”