The Upside Down Tree

I always loved Tu B’Shvat. It’s Rosh Hashana La’ilanos, the birthday of the trees, which already feels adorable. It was the day we ate dried fruit and pretended we were very sophisticated. I loved dates and pomegranates, and I was always slightly afraid of carob. It looked like chocolate, but it absolutely was not. A very deep childhood betrayal. But then one year, I stopped and thought…why are we celebrating trees? I’m not a farmer.


I don’’t own a field. I do, however, love Trader Joe’s. So how exactly do trees and I connect?

In Sefer Devarim, we are taught, “Ki ha’adam etz hasadeh.” A person is compared to a tree. But here’s the funny part. A tree gets its life from below. Its roots are in the dirt, in the darkness, deep in the ground. But a Yid? A Yid’s neshama comes from above. Our roots are in Shamayim. Our soul descends downward into this world. So if we’re trees… we’re very strange ones. Almost like upside-down trees.

In the month of Shevat, we were taught the famous first Ma’amer of Baasi L’’Gani from the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He taught that, Hashem says, “I have come into My garden.” This world is not a dark jungle that we’re stuck in. It’s a garden that Hashem chose. He could have stayed in the world of angels, in perfect light, but He didn’t. He wanted a dirah b’tachtonim, a home down here, in the physical, in the messy, in the human.

And how do we help Him feel at home? By connecting to our roots down here.

We always think everything is from above to below. But Tu B’Shvat whispers a secret: there is something even higher than coming down from above. And that is growing from below upward. In Shevat, the trees still look dead. But underground, the seeds are cracking open. Sap is beginning to move. Life is quietly preparing itself. That’s emunah. Emunah is believing that something holy is happening even when nothing looks holy yet.

 So maybe we really are upside-down trees.

Our neshama comes from above, but our greatest power is how we grow from below.

The secret of a Yid is not that we never face darkness. The secret is that the deepest part of Nishmas Yisroel can live there. Thrive there. Not because we love darkness, but because we are rooted in Hashem. So the real root is from the bottom. From mitzvos that use the body. From patience. From brachos. From choosing light when it’s not obvious.

Tu B’Shvat isn’t just the birthday of trees. I’s the celebration of this strange, beautiful truth:

We are Heavenly souls learning how to grow on Earth.

And honestly? That makes being an upside-down tree feel kind of magical.