My personal Tu Bishvat – the New Year of Trees – resolution this year is to stop being mopey. When asked how I am, I’m no longer answering with a qualification: “Fine, considering the situation.” Answering “Okay” is good enough. To me, this is the message of Tu Bishvat, the mysterious holiday that we celebrated on February 12-13.  

When I was a child in Colchester, Connecticut, we marked Tu Bishvat by trying to eat the unmalleable carobs that our rabbi passed out like diamonds in Hebrew school. Our family had apples growing in our back yard, and we picked buckets of blueberries from the bushes. Hence, I was puzzled about this treasured jaw-breaker from the sunny land of Israel. The complex calculation of the birth dates of fruit making them permissible to eat was another enigma.  

Lately, however, I’ve come to appreciate the message of Tu Bishvat: that the delicate, beautiful flowers we joyously greet are the promise of the fruit to come in the Promised Land. It’s a message of optimism. And I am determined to counter the national blues with resilience-boosters. I am more aware than ever that we, the civilian population of Israel, are the target of psychological warfare.  

s she was mostly held in homes with Palestinian families 

The humiliating manner in which our hostages are being released, together with the reports of a supposed 10,000 Gazan recruits and half a million Yemenite men signing up for Houthi rations, are aimed at making us forget that we’ve withstood enemies on seven fronts.  

I would like to hear Churchill-like encouragement on the radio, not yet another tortuous interview with the families of hostages, asking them how they feel now that their beloved child or brother isn’t included in the hostage deal. How does anyone think they feel? 

I don’t want to hear one more politician and supposed wartime genius outlining our mistakes for the enemy and for us.  

WE HAVE to stop cooperating with the enemy’s psychological warfare, full of deception and cruelty. Let’s remember, our suffering and deaths are their joy. 

Last Thursday night, as common in many Israeli households, I was cooking, with all the bounty of the land spread before me, about to turn it all into family foods for the sake of Shabbat. (Not a single granite-like carob in sight in the real Israel of 5785!) 

Thursday night cooking is a happy time for me, and I usually have the radio on. I started cooking later than usual because I’d returned from cheering Jerusalem’s women basketball team Hapoel Lev Yerushalayim to victory over arch-rival Elitzur Ramle. It felt good to celebrate these talented young women, a number of whom are soldiers. 

Instead of news commentary, I listened to a mood-elevator lecture by Naomi Cohn Zentner, an assistant professor in the music department at Bar-Ilan University. Still with Tu Bishvat in mind, I thought of that line made famous by singer-songwriter Naomi Shemer: “Every blade of grass has a unique melody,” so listening to Cohn Zentner was an organic choice.  

Although Cohn Zentner spoke via Zoom from her home in Jerusalem, the lecture was broadcast through University of California (!) in Los Angeles (UCLA). The event was sponsored by the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies and the Lowell Milken Center for Music of the American Jewish Experience. Most of the listeners were likely Americans.  

I downloaded it to compensate for the time difference. 

She didn’t speak about Disney tunes. Cohn Zentner’s subject was music after Oct. 7. Not the lightest topic.  

Her theme was the plethora of healing musical creativity that has come forth in the last 17 months. At first there was silence, Cohn Zentner reminded us. Not only were all public concerts canceled for security reasons, but listening to music was too painful to bear.  

That was my experience, too. Music and movies seemed irrelevant and jarring. 

But then came the songs. Hundreds of songs.  

“Israeli musicians have always felt a responsibility to relate to current events and to give us a place to express our feelings, which is often easier through music,” she explained. 

For example, before the war, the popular “Stalbet b’ Kibbutz” (“Chillin’ on the kibbutz”) by singers Full Trunk and Jimbo J was the army radio Galgalatz number one song of 5782.  

Among the early wartime songs was one about the kibbutz tragedies by folk trio Jane Bordeaux “Not Alone”: 

“And who will sing at the memorial ceremony in the kibbutz… We’ll all lend a hand, we’re not alone, partners in a painful destiny and love as one people, we’ll cry and we’ll overcome.” 

LAST YEAR, the Israeli entry in the Eurovision Song Contest, “Hurricane,” was originally called “October Rain,” referring to the Oct. 7 massacre.  

In this year’s Rising Star Israeli TV competition to choose our country’s Eurovision representative, current events also dominated. A competitor from the year before was mourned, having fallen in battle in Gaza.  

Additionally, contestant Daniel Wais, who made fifth place, is a Kibbutz Be’eri survivor whose parents were murdered. The winner and this year’s Israeli representative is Yuval Raphael, a survivor of the Supernova music festival during which 364 persons were murdered. 

Suddenly, songs were being sung at military funerals and memorial tents of fallen IDF soldiers, often by Israel’s most popular singers. Poems, letters, and melodies of fallen soldiers were turned into new songs. “The letters that IDF soldiers write before going into battle become their ethical will and testament,” Cohn Zentner said. 

The music of Aner Shapiro, who tossed back seven grenades thrown at the shelter near Re’im, to be murdered by the eighth, was turned into an album. Popular singer Yonaton Razel performed with Col. Golan Vach a new melody of the 23rd Psalm that Vach had learned from musician and school principal Yossi Herskowitz before Hershkowitz was killed fighting in Gaza. 

“Musicians have stepped into the role of giving context, perspective, hope, comfort, and even guidance,” Cohn Zentner explained. “Their music always ends with hope, sometimes moving from minor to major chords as in the song “Not Alone,” to comfort us as we look toward the future.” 

And so, my friends, let us tune into their message of hope and build our resilience. Tu Bishvat is a holiday of winter – no getting around that. In theory, most of the rain for the year has fallen. This year may be an exception for rain’s blessing. Let’s tune out the propaganda and join in to that rare combination of soulful and hopeful that can sustain us. Fruit is on its way as we stay resilient. How are we?  

We’re okay.