When Zann Jacobrown began planning the Jewish Learning Center’s cycle of study on Israel, she opted to expand students’ horizons.

“One of the huge, hot topics for Jews is the Israeli-Palestinian ongoing conflict in the Middle East. I realized that so many of these kids on the island and in North Kitsap had never met an Arab kid. It’s so hard. It makes it so unreal if you’ve never even met somebody,” she said.

Tu B’Shvat, a Jewish holiday marking the the New Year of the trees, seemed a fitting celebration through which to connect members of her congregation with local Arab families. So last weekend, in partnership with the Seattle-based Middle East Peace Camp, Chavurat Shir Hayam held a peace seder.

A seder, meaning “order,” is a ritual meal at which specific food and drink is shared along with words and song. Unlike a Passover seder, the Tu B’Shvat seder involves nuts, fruits, juices and wine, all the products of trees.

In the kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, the Tree of Life is a symbol of moving from the everyday into the realm of sublime spiritual consciousness. This seder takes participants through four worlds, first through eating fruits with hard shells, symbolizing the hardness we start from; the second through soft fruits with pits, symbolizing the softening of the exterior to reveal the heart; next with fruits that can be eaten all the way through, representing a softness throughout; and finally, only drink, symbolizing the complete movement of body to heart.

That’s this seder “in a nutshell,” Jacobrown said.

At each part of Saturday’s peace seder, a participant presented a poem, story or song. Two teenage friends, one of Palestinian-Jordanian descent and one Jewish, read a poem about peace in both Arabic and English. A Jewish member of Shir Hayam sang a song in Yiddish. Another read an autobiographical piece about anti-Semitism. And a Turkish participant read a poem and played a tune on his saz, a lute-like instrument.

At the meal that followed, Jacobrown said, politics did come up. Turkish participants talked with those of Armenian descent; Arabs talked to Jews; the topic of Gaza was not avoided.

“People said…that they felt like this was really healing, from both sides,” Jacobrown said. “They exchanged recipes for food, and wished that they could see each other more. So I hope that we will.”

On Sunday, after a presentation by the Middle East Peace Camp about its cross-cultural summer programs, members and friends of Shir Hayam planted a peace tree on a Sunrise Drive property. The celebration was symbolic, joyful, and heartening, in the name of sublime peace.

“Watering the tree of life, watering the tree of peace, is pretty much the same thing,” Jacobrown said.