In the middle of winter, in the month of Shevat, the new year of the trees is celebrated. Sometimes the almond tree is already in blossom, but most of the trees are still far from beginning to blossom. So why don’t we wait until spring? Because even when it seems, on the outside, that everything is frozen, internal renewal has already begun, and it is already possible to celebrate the approaching spring with joy.

Ancient Jewish tradition directs our attention to bare trees [by establishing the fifteenth of Shevat as the new year of the trees], while the snowy winter days are still at their height, and provides us with a sweet secret, whispering a lesson in our ears: Today, these trees are already celebrating the renewal of the coming spring. Inside the frozen, fragmented, gray, and cold external covering that enshrouds the naked trees, fresh, new life, in all its warmth, has already begun to well up. How penetrating and instructive is the moral lesson concealed in these tidings of spring that we hear from the winter trees covered in white snow. (Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, BeMa’agalei Shana 2, p. 108)