The New Year for Trees
When Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867, he described the land of Israel as “rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary. … There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”[1] Although the land had become barren, Zionists returning home in the early 1900s started planting conifers and pine trees to beautify and restore their ancient homeland. Various trees are still being planted in Israel to reforest, refresh, and beautify the land of the Bible.
In Leviticus 19:23–25, the Lord declared,
“When you enter the land and plant all kinds of trees for food, then you shall count their fruit as forbidden. Three years it shall be forbidden to you; it shall not be eaten. But in the fourth year all its fruit shall be holy, an offering of praise to the LORD. In the fifth year you are to eat of its fruit, that its yield may increase for you; I am the LORD your God.”
Therefore, to help farmers keep track of the age of their trees, the rabbis declared the fifteenth day of Shevat on the Jewish calendar as the annual birthday of all trees. This year that date falls on February 13. Called the New Year of Trees, or Tu B’Shevat in Hebrew, this date was chosen because it follows the rainy season when the soil is moist and ready for young trees to thrive. As a way of connecting with the heritage of their forefathers, Jewish farmers started replanting fruit trees, including fig, pomegranate, olive, and date palm trees (Deuteronomy 8:8). To date, the Jewish National Fund–Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael (KKL-JNF) has planted over 240 million trees to help transform a desolate land into a beautiful agricultural homeland of forests and open spaces.
The New Year for Trees is a holiday that recognizes the goodness of God our Creator who provides for His people. The Lord declared, “If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments so as to carry them out, then I shall give you rains in their season, so that the land will yield its produce and the trees of the field will bear their fruit” (Leviticus 26:3–4).[2] So the Jews see these trees as God’s orchard and rely on Him for the rain.
During WWII over 140,000 Jews were imprisoned in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Czechoslovakia before being sent to forced labor or extermination camps. In 1943, a teacher named Irma Lauscher smuggled a silver maple sapling into this prison, so her students could learn the lessons of the tree celebration. The children carefully saved some of their water rations to help the tree survive. Although fewer than two hundred of the original fifteen thousand children in the camp survived the war, the tree remained standing. When Theresienstadt was liberated in 1945, the children who survived the Holocaust placed a sign on the tree declaring, “As the branches of this tree, so the branches of our people.”[3] Survivors called it “The Tree of Life.” In 1985, their teacher who survived the Holocaust was buried next to this memorial tree.
Today branch saplings from this original tree have since been planted in Jerusalem, various cities in the United States, and elsewhere around the world to educate and inform the next generations about the Holocaust and the resilience of the Jewish people.
Hargrave Ministries actually has a section of forest in the lower Galilee along the Gospel Trail called the Hargrave Ministries Forest. In May of 2023, Gary and Bruce took part in a dedication ceremony inaugurating this section of the Lavi Forest on the Gospel Trail. Following the ceremony, they planted a carob tree. There the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael–Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) unveiled a plague that reads:
The Hargrave Ministries Forest
Dedicated with love to the Land of Israel and its People,
in the Foothills of Nazareth and along the Gospel Trail,
By the Hargrave Ministries Community
“Then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice before the LORD.”
Psalms 96:12
[1] Jewish National Fund, “The Story of Israel’s Tree Planting,” https://www.jnf.org/menu-3/news-media/jnf-wire/jnf-wire-stories/just-as-my-ancestors-planted-for-me.
[2] All Scripture references are from the New American Standard Bible 1995 (NASB1995).
[3] Julia Gergely, “Tree that survived the Holocaust gains new life in New York City,” The Times of Israel, December 4, 2021.