Tu B'Shvat Reflections

Just before we left Israel, we hiked through Bet Guvrin and saw a number of blossoming almond trees, a sign that Tu B'Shvat -- and springtime -- was just around the corner. Since we've returned to the cold, snowy weather here in St. Petersburg, it has been nice to remember those tiny white blossoms and think that sometime soon, spring will return to St. Petersburg. It's a little reminiscent of the Jewish community here and how it went into hibernation for over seven decades of communism and has now re-emerged only to grow and blossom. I can't help but to mention the YESOD logo today, as I reflect on Tu B'Shvat. It's an image of a small plant breaking through an abstract shape. It represents the renewal and growth of Jewish life in St. Petersburg.

Over the last couple of days, we have celebrated Tu B'Shvat, the new year for the trees, with a new appreciation for the natural world around us. On Shabbat, we trudged through the freshly fallen snow (about 3" fell over night) to attend a new Chabad minyan that has just started to meet regularly at the newest Jewish building in St. Petersburg, a Chabad school called Maor. It was beautiful to see the untouched white snow. At Shabbat lunch, as we chatted in a smattering of Russian, Hebrew and English, we enjoyed dried fruits and customary Tu B'Shvat songs.

Today, I taught my youngest students all of the parts of the tree in English and we learned about all of the gifts that trees provide for us. Tonight, we attended a Tu B'Shvat event at YESOD that really brought the building to life and honored us in an unexpected way. One of our colleagues asked us to participate in the ceremonial planting of a palm sapling -- we were really touched by the honor and proud to be building, physically and spiritually, the landscape of the Jewish community here. Tonight's event focused around an opening of a large art exhibit by a wide variety of Jewish artists, both amateur and professional. It was beautiful to see the walls come to life with the colors and textures of Jewish culture. The evening was capped off with a performance by young adults from EVA who depicted the story of Noah and the Ark from the animals' perspectives in the form of a musical. Tonight's event was about as homegrown as they come -- Russian Jewish life revolves around the arts and culture, nearly to the exclusion of all other expressions of Judaism.

After personally struggling for so long with the culturally-based expressions of Jewish life in this community, I am slowly beginning to appreciate the value and beauty of this commitment. The Russian Jewish community makes countless contributions to the world Jewish community -- by treasuring, protecting and nurturing certain elements of Jewish arts and culture that we take for granted in the West. Take klezmer and Yiddish culture, for example.

Tonight, over a late-night bowl of soup, I read an article written by Nessa Rapoport in the October issue of Sh'ma which really resonated with me. Eloquently, she writes that "culture arises from a paradox -- the sense of being replete, rich with a past we know, merged with longing for something intangible and beautiful that can never be had in precisely its old form but must be distilled and made new." With this simple and beautiful sentence, I immediately understood why Jews in Russia are so deeply attached to their cultural expressions of Judaism. They know that they cannot recreate the rich Jewish life that once existed in the shtetl; yet they are acutely aware of the lifestyle that their great-grandparents enjoyed from the paintings of Chagall, from S. Ansky's The Dybbuk and from countless other legacies of Jews from this region. Today, three generations later, they long for something spiritual -- a way to access what the generations before them so dearly cherished.

May the Jewish community of St. Petersburg continue to "flourish like the palm tree and grow like the cedar in Lebanon."