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January 2010
1. Per the advice of Hillel, the festival of Tu B’shevat was fixed as the day of the full moon of Shevat, the fifteenth day of the month. It was celebrated in the time of Hillel, almost two thousand years ago, but then ignored for many centuries. The holiday was revived in Israel in the early 1900s when Jews began repopulating the land. Deuteronomy 8:7-8 emphasizes the connection with the land when Moses speaks of “a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey…”. These are the seven species, all were found in Israel more than three thousand years ago. Corn, lemon trees, apples, and tomatoes may grow there today but do not have the distinction of being mentioned in the “seven species” passage of Deuteronomy. There is a growing tradition of a Tu B’shevat seder, where the table is set with these diverse agricultural products of Israel. Incidentally, both corn (maize) and tomatoes are New World plants, although the term “corn” was commonly applied to the principal grain of a country in the centuries before the discovery of the Americas. Thus Biblical references to corn actually refer to barley.
2. Jews had lived for centuries in eastern and central Europe, frequently in the service of Polish nobility who controlled vast estates that stretched across the central plains through to the Ukraine. In the late 1700’s, they may have been as much as ten percent of the population in this region. Then, with Austrian and Prussian connivance, Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, planned and executed the three successive partitions of Poland. From 1772 to 1795, they carved up the center of Europe and Poland disappeared off the map of Europe until after the First World War. Each of the annexing nations thus became a host country to large number of Jews. And Russia, the most anti-Semitic of the group, became master of the largest segment of former Polish territory – and a huge number of Jews became unwitting Russian subjects. They were progressively circumscribed in where they could live (in “The Pale”) and what they could do. Some scholars have noted that this deliberate institutional discrimination ultimately corrupted the Tsarist bureaucracy. There is a parallel in our own country; the systematic discrimination against blacks ultimately corrupted the legal and civil authorities trying to suppress them.
3. Today’s extremists may wish to ignore the long common history of Judaism and Islam. There have been periods of great tension as today, but also there have been times of great mutual prosperity and tolerance, as in the flourishing Muslim-dominated societies of medieval Spain or the hundreds of years when the Ottoman Empire was ascendant. However the history is interpreted, the common Semitic origin of the Qu’ran’s Arabic and the Bible’s Hebrew is indisputable. Mary LaHaj, an American Muslim woman who spoke at the brotherhood breakfast some time ago, pointed out two very striking examples of this common linguistic heritage. The consonant group ShLM (Shin, Lamed, Mem) appears as the greeting “Shalom”, or peace in Hebrew and also forms the core of the word Islam, the religion of peace or surrender to God’s will, and of the word Muslim, one who surrenders. You can also recognize the same root in the Arabic name for God, Allah, and our own “Elohim”. El is the generic Semitic name for God. Even before the periods of Abraham and Moses, back in the Akkadian language of the very early second millennium BCE, there are references to Ilu. |