The New Year of Trees: At the Pace of the Earth
Tu BiShvat is a quiet festival.
It arrives without noise, in the middle of winter, when the branches are bare and the earth seems silent.
Yet within that stillness the Jewish tradition marks the beginning of a new cycle: the “New Year of the Trees.”
In the Old Testament, trees often appear as travelling companions.
Deuteronomy asks: “Is man a tree of the field?” (Deut 20:19).
A short question, yet enough to remind us that human and vegetal life share the same logic of patience, vulnerability, and endurance.
Among the most striking commandments is the instruction not to cut down fruit trees even during war (Deut 20:19–20): an early expression of what we might now call ecological responsibility.
Tu BiShvat was born in the agricultural world of ancient Israel, where every tree was a silent partner in survival — offering shade, fruit, wood, continuity.
Today it continues to speak with the same force, reminding us that the earth is not background, but a relationship to be protected.
Leviticus expresses it in unexpected words:
“The land is Mine, and you are but strangers and guests with Me.” (Lev 25:23).
A sentence that shifts our perspective: we do not possess the land; we are received by it.
The Seven Species — wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates — form a small geography of nourishment.
Each fruit tells a story of resilience and generosity:
wheat that becomes bread
barley that grows where others cannot
grapes that gather the light
the slow certainty of the fig
the pomegranate guarding its seeds
the olive offering oil, light, and care
the date preserving the sweetness of patience
Tu BiShvat invites us to look at a tree the way we look at an old gesture: patiently, layer by layer.
It reminds us that every fruit is the outcome of a long collaboration between earth, time, and forces we do not command.
In a century that rarely pauses, this festival teaches the value of what ripens slowly, without rush.
An almond tree blooming in the cold is not a miracle, but a message: life prepares its renewal long before we notice it.
Bibliography
Nogah Hareuveni, Nature in Our Biblical Heritage, Neot Kedumim, 1980
Ari Elon, Naomi Mara Hyman, Arthur Ocean Waskow (a cura di), Trees, Earth, and Torah: A Tu B’Shvat Anthology, Jewish Publication Society, 1999
Ellen Bernstein (a cura di), Ecology & the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature & the Sacred Meet, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998
When Food Speaks
Notes for a Hermeneutics of Nourishment
This text inaugurates the project “Food, Faith & Culture” and conveys its spirit.
It is not a popular article, but an invitation to inquiry: a journey through food, culture and spirituality, seen through the lens of ethics, art and the earth.
It is born from the desire to return voice to nourishment: to understand how, in history and in sacred texts, it becomes language, knowledge and memory of humanity.
Abstract
Food is not merely substance: it is language, memory, gesture, and symbolic power.
This essay opens an interdisciplinary path across anthropology, theology, history, ecology and art to ask how bread, oil, wine, honey and spices became words by which civilizations told themselves.
It offers no answers: it seeks listening. It is an attempt to read the world from what nourishes it.
The broken bread is a sentence. The oil that anoints is an adjective of light.
he honey, a gentle conjunction between earth and human face.
1. From Need to Meaning
Every culture writes a grammar of eating.
Who prepares, who serves, who blesses, who sits: every gesture is syntax.
Eating is an act that precedes speech, yet already contains it: the language of nourishment is born before human language.
Anthropology teaches us that edibility is not a biological fact but a cultural one; what is “food” for one, for another is taboo, sign or gift.
In the Mediterranean - crossroads of waters and memories - bread, oil and wine become a common language: the minimal lexicon of the human.
Honey and spices, instead, are the fine punctuation: the memory of travel, the breath of the beyond.
2. Ancient Tables, Economy of the Symbol
In the ancient world nourishment always carried a dual value: material and symbolic.
Bread speaks of labour and sharing, oil of care and light, wine of festivity and measure, honey of promise and gratitude, spices of meeting and distance.
Every food is more than what it feeds: it is a code.
Biblical, Greek and Roman sources show us that ritual does not create meaning, it concentrates it: every meal is already a form of narrative.
3. An Earth Ethic
Before the bread, there is the earth.
In biblical language, the earth speaks: it demands rest, measure, justice.
The command of the shemita, the sabbatical year in which the soil rests, is not a mystical act but a rule of ecological and social balance.
The practice of gleaning, which leaves for the poor and the stranger what remains in the field, is a law of equity, not pity.
Today we might say: right to access, protection of ecosystems, economy of restitution.
Food, thus, becomes a form of ethics: what we take from the earth must return as care.
4. The Table as Archive
Painted tables and still-lives are never truly dead.
Within them breathe sounds of ovens, hands that knead, herbs drying in the sun.
Art has preserved the memory of food as a silent prayer, transforming the everyday into revelation.
A loaf illuminated by a window, a bunch of grapes, an oil-jar: every detail becomes domestic theology, an anthem to matter as locus of the divine.
The image does not illustrate: it interprets. It translates gesture into form, scent into colour, hunger into thought.
5. A Methodology of Looking
To understand food means to intertwine disciplines.
One needs a philology to read the sources, an archaeobotany to know what grew and how it was preserved, an anthropology to observe who ate with whom, and an ethics to question how to nourish without destroying.
And finally, one needs art: for the eye, more than any other sense, preserves the memory of flavour.
This methodology does not explain the mystery of nourishment: it restores its depth.
It makes food a way to understand the human condition.
6. A Hospitable Language
Food is a hospitable language: it welcomes differences, reconciles memories, asks for slowness.
Eating with awareness is a political act, yet also a poetic one: a form of secular spirituality, concrete and terrestrial.
Returning to the table means remembering that the earth is not a resource, but a mother.
Every seed, every drop of oil, every crumb of honey reminds us that when humanity nourishes, it belongs to creation — it does not dominate it.
Bibliography
· Montanari, M. Il linguaggio del cibo. Una storia della cultura culinaria
· Douglas, M. Purity and Danger
· Lévi-Strauss, C. Le cru et le cuit
· Goody, J. Cooking, Cuisine and Class
· Plinio il Vecchio, Naturalis Historia
· The Bible (Lv 19; Lv 25; Dt 24; Ct; Es 16)
