For behold, the winter is past, the rains are over and gone.
The blossoms have appeared in the land, the time of pruning has come;
The song of the turtledove is heard in our land.1
Song of Songs 2:11-12
As snow blankets the earth and frigid winds blow, we wonder: Will winter ever end? When will spring arrive?
This question may be easy to ask, but much more difficult to answer. What defines the beginning of spring? The first budding leaves? The last melting snow? The first crocus to emerge from the cold, hard ground?
In truth, while we may have dates by which we measure seasons, we don’t experience the rhythms of nature as discrete moments, but rather on a continuum. Day fades to night. Season blurs into season. The moon waxes and wanes.
Through a midrashic reading of Genesis 8:22, some mystics divide the Hebrew calendar into eight seasons: early and late halves each of winter, spring, summer and fall. By dividing each season in half, the mystics emphasize the transitional, liminal nature of our reality: there are no sharp transitions to the seasons. One experience fades into another. Life is experienced as fluid transformation.
Yet boundaries serve a purpose, which is why the Sages of the Mishnah2 recognized four New Years: the beginning of the calendar year (1 Nisan), the new year for tithing animals (1 Elul), the new year for counting sabbatical and Jubilee years (1 Tishrei, Rosh HaShanah), and the new year for tithing fruits of trees (15 Shevat). The Fifteenth of Shevat, Tu B’Shevat, is also the day that marks the beginning of “late winter,” the transition of winter fading into spring.
Why declare spring’s arrival while the world remains frozen? Why now, when most fruit trees appear dormant and quiet, do we mark the New Year of the Trees?
The Sages of the Talmud3 note this paradox. Although much of winter remains, they explain, most of the year’s rains have already fallen. HaShem has sown and nurtured and opened the seeds deep within the earth. He has caused rain to fall and nourish the ground, even if we have not perceived it. The earth, unseen, has been nourished. The Divine Plenty sustains existence, even when hidden from view.
Tu B’Shevat coincides with the first stirrings of sap within trees, mirroring shefa—the Divine Flow that nourishes all creation. The Kabbalists see this time not only as the renewal of earthly trees but also of the cosmic Tree of Life, the sefirot that undergird all of physical reality. In this season, the Divine Flow is refreshed and the Tree of Life revitalized, inviting us to become vessels of its abundance.
The Torah teaches that the exodus from Egypt occurred in “the month of Spring”. There is no Hebrew month named Aviv (“spring”), but the Sages of the midrash4 use the verse from Song of Songs quoted above to explain this ambiguity allegorically:
He [Moses] said to Him: ‘Master of the universe, You said that we would be enslaved four hundred years, but they have not yet been completed.’ He [God] said to him: ‘They have already been completed, as it is stated: “For behold, the winter is past…”’ (Song of Songs 2:11)
Midrash Shemot Rabbah 15:1
The Sages imagine Moses arguing with God, questioning the timing of the exodus. To Moses’s eyes, it doesn’t yet appear time to leave Egypt. The years of bondage are not complete. God quotes this verse from Song of Songs to show Moses that, indeed, the time has come, even if Moses doesn’t recognize it. The winter is past. The time has arrived. Moses need only open himself to the reality of this moment.
There is a Divine Plenty that nourishes us, even in our darkest, coldest moments, those moments when vitality and vibrance feel farthest from us. Beneath snow-laden branches and dormant trees, life stirs. “Winter is past.” Spring is upon us. The rains have nurtured the earth and the trees drink deeply. So too have our roots been nourished. Shefa flows. We need only awaken to its presence and let it move through us.
The following sources can be viewed at www.sefaria.org/sheets/625826