Tu B’Shevat
In the dead of winter, I walk in a valley
of trees, under boughs bare and brittle,
amid deer-browsed bark, and caw of crows.
In the middle of Shevat, in the middle
of snow, in the midst of twilight, at the end
and in the beginning of a new year for trees,
the moon rises pregnant and orange in faint
cobalt light. In the land of Israel, it is taught
that in the middle of Shevat, the sap of trees
begins to rise, adds another ring into ancient
record of wood. Soon, the almond will flower.
We celebrate the cedar and the oak,
the olive and citron, the fig and tart wine
of pomegranate, the milk and the honey.
But here, in the middle of Shevat,
in the month my father died, the trees
hold frost on their shoulders. I say a prayer
that the sap here will also rise in memory
of all that I’ve loved. May it rise through
veins of maple so I may tap its sweetness.
So that I, too, will be lifted through roots,
through sturdy trunk, through the branches,
toward buds that clutch spring in their fists
and reach upward toward the light.
Sara O’Donnell Adler
Rabbi Adler is a Staff Chaplain at the University of Michigan Hospitals and a Certified Michigan Naturalist