Tu BiShvat 2041

The dates

Tu BiShvat is the New Year for trees, the date from which a new year is counted for fruit trees. It falls on the fifteenth of Shevat, in the middle of winter, in the very weeks when the almond is the first thing in Israel to come into blossom.

It is not a public holiday and not a biblical festival but a date fixed in the Mishnah for an entirely bookkeeping reason. It has nonetheless become one of the best-loved days in the calendar: a day of dried fruit, of school children planting saplings, and of a table that looks like the end of summer in the middle of winter.

From a technical date to a festival

The Mishnah opens the tractate on the New Year by announcing that the year has four different new years, each for a different purpose. One of them belongs to trees: "On the first of Shevat is the New Year for the tree, in accordance with the statement of Beit Shammai. But Beit Hillel say: The New Year for trees is on the fifteenth of Shevat" ¹. As almost always, the law follows Beit Hillel; hence Tu BiShvat.

The disagreement sounds minor, but it turns on something practical: from which moment a fruit belongs to the new year. The answer had real consequences for tithing, so a sharp cut-off date was needed. The point chosen was the one at which most of the winter rain has fallen and the sap begins to rise, the moment a tree, agriculturally speaking, starts a new year.

Fifteen centuries later the date was transformed twice. The kabbalists of sixteenth-century Safed turned it into an evening ordered around fruit and symbolism; and the Jewish revival movement in the Land of Israel, at the end of the nineteenth century, turned it into a day of planting. A school, a sack of saplings and a procession: that is still what Tu BiShvat looks like in Israel today.

Why a tree needs a year at all

The question sounds odd until you read the verse everything grows from: "When you enter the land and plant any tree for food, you shall regard its fruit as forbidden. Three years it shall be forbidden for you, not to be eaten" ². For the first three years after planting, the fruit is not eaten. And to count three years, you have to agree on when a year begins.

That is the whole story behind the date: not a festival but a cut-off point. Yet out of that cut-off grew a day given over entirely to fruit, above all the fruits of the seven species, which the Torah lists in describing the land: "a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey" ³. The honey there is understood by tradition to be date honey. Five of the seven are tree fruits, and they are the core of the Tu BiShvat plate.

Fruit, saplings and a seder

Eating fruit. The oldest and simplest custom. People eat generously of the fruits of the land, and especially the seven species. For centuries these were mostly dried: figs, dates, raisins and carob, because in midwinter there was nothing else.

A new fruit. It is customary to taste a fruit not yet eaten that season and say the “shehecheyanu” blessing over it. This is why a great many children meet an unfamiliar fruit for the first time on Tu BiShvat.

The Tu BiShvat seder. In sixteenth-century Safed the kabbalists composed an ordered evening around fruit: four cups of wine whose colour shifts from white to red, and groups of fruit sorted by the kind of skin they have. It has come back into wide use in recent generations, in many versions: religious, kibbutz and environmental.

Planting. In Israel Tu BiShvat is the planting day: whole classes go out with saplings, and it is one of the most widely shared childhood memories in the country.

A small festivity. There is no restriction on work and no special prayer service, but the penitential “tachanun” is omitted and fasting is not permitted, a quiet marker in the prayer book that this is a good day.

The man planting a carob tree

The story most associated with this day is in the Talmud, and it is very short. Choni HaMe'agel was walking along the road and saw a man planting a carob tree.

"He said to him: how many years will it take to bear fruit? He said to him: seventy years." Seventy. Choni asked the obvious question: are you sure you will be alive in seventy years? And the man answered in one sentence: "I found carob trees in the world; just as my ancestors planted for me, so I too plant for my children" ⁴.

The story then goes somewhere much stranger (Choni falls asleep there and wakes seventy years later) but that one line stands on its own. It is why the carob became the emblematic tree of Tu BiShvat, and why the saplings handed out in schools are, in the end, a quotation from it.

A New Year with no reckoning

There is something pleasing in the fact that the Hebrew calendar has four new years and only one of them asks anything of a person. On the New Year of Tishrei you stand before judgment. On Tu BiShvat you eat figs.

It is also the only day in the calendar fixed by something happening underground. On Tu BiShvat there is almost nothing to see (winter is still in full swing, the trees are bare) and yet this is the moment defined as the start of something. The almond, first to flower in Israel and often in exactly these weeks, is the only visible evidence.

And perhaps that is the point of it. In a world inclined to celebrate only what has already grown, Tu BiShvat marks the moment when there is nothing yet to show. The man planting the carob understood that. He was not planting in order to see it. He was planting so that it would be there.

Common questions about Tu BiShvat

When is Tu BiShvat?

On the fifteenth of Shevat. On the civil calendar it falls between late January and early February, depending on the year. This year it falls on 17/1/41.

When is the eve of Tu BiShvat?

On 14 Shevat, the day before. The Tu BiShvat seder, where it is kept, is held that evening, as the day comes in.

How long does Tu BiShvat last?

One day. It is not a festival day and not a public holiday: work and school run as normal, and in schools it is usually a day of activities and planting.

What does "Tu" mean?

It is a number. The Hebrew letters “tet” and “vav” are nine and six, which together make fifteen. Tu BiShvat is simply the fifteenth day of the month of Shevat.

Why is it called the New Year for trees?

Because a new year for fruit trees is counted from it: used to work out the age of a young tree, and to decide which year a given fruit belongs to. That is where the date comes from; the fruit and the customs came later.

The Tu BiShvat date, Hebrew and civil side by side

The table at the top of this page shows Tu BiShvat as it actually falls: the Hebrew date, the matching civil date and the weekday, for the selected year and the years after it. You can see at a glance which evening the seder falls on, and whether the day lands on a weekend.

Every date is computed from the Hebrew calendar as the page loads, so it holds for any year.

• Every festival of the year in one view: the annual holidays calendar
• The full printable calendar: home page
• The Hebrew month it falls in: Shevat

Related pages

• Printable calendar for January 2041
• The Hebrew month of Shevat 5801
• All the Jewish holidays of 2041
• Printable 2026 Jewish calendar with holidays