Category Archives: Actions

Actions, The Food System, The Land, The People

A Dream of Shmita in a Pandemic Year

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It is time. We have entered the “sixth year” of the seven-year Shmita cycle. Unbelievably, we are doing this from within the perspective of a global viral pandemic that, within the past nine months, has dramatically changed the world. Things that seemed impossible to change changed overnight. For better, and also for worse. This dramatic proof that change is possible has the ability to break through our internal narrative about possibilities and cause us to dream of a better world. And with the arrival of the “sixth year,” now is the time to do that within the context of Shmita.

Shmita, described as the Sabbath of the Land, is part of a relationship between the Earth and God. The human being’s role in this relationship is precisely to step back and permit it take place – to cease our exploitation of the Earth for one year out of every seven and enable it to rest.

The sudden stop that we all just experienced is in no way the golden version of the Year of Release that I have unabashedly dreamed of and that I had hoped to play some part in bringing about with care and intention. It is humbling and terrifying to witness the devastation that the virus and the accompanying economic collapse are causing as they roll across the world. To my sensibilities, this is what it feels like to have been brought into a very abrupt, unexpected, bruising experience of Shmita; Shmita the hard way. It’s something like being in a car crash along with everyone else on Earth, each person suddenly experiencing varying degrees of injury; some are dead.

In Torah we are warned what will happen if we don’t let the Earth observe its Sabbaths, and “you will be hit-by-plague” is right in there, in the early stages in a multi-phased unfolding of horrible consequences stemming from poor choices coupled with a lack of humility. Spoiler alert: it can get worse.

I’m not a religious fundamentalist. I don’t claim to “know” the meaning of Torah, and I always compare what I read against the voice of my own conscience. When I read Torah, I hear the voices of an Author from a vast and deep past with a message for the future. The text hints at how we can live together in a just society and warns about dire consequences and choices that can lead to catastrophe. The advice can be murky after traveling through many ages in the form of ambiguous stories written in an ancient language. But as I listen to this strange and often beautiful song echoing through time, I marvel that it has served as a living thread of cultural DNA for thousands of years and still has the power to shape human destiny.

I confess that I do have an irrational belief about Torah: I believe that as human experience evolves and culture develops, the actual meaning of the text unfolds. I believe that the ancient Author’s voice continues to speak, and that some of what was encoded in the Torah’s song was intended specifically for our ears, in these times, our personal lullaby and lesson even though the words were written long ago.

Ever since I read the story of Shmita six years ago, it has called to me. From the beginning, I heard it whispering that the time had come for it to be brought to life. While it feels like we are late in receiving its message, the truth is, it would have been unlikely that we would have heeded it, or even heard it, before the need began to make itself felt; we would not have recognized it as the solution to a problem if the problem had not begun to press in upon us. Hopefully there is still time, and we can learn from it, before the worst consequences take root and doom us to live the prophesy to the end.

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Whether we like them or not, we know the Ten Commandments from the Torah; they infuse our culture, whether we adhere to them or resist them. The commandment to keep the Sabbath is built into the fabric of our lives whether we observe it as part of a religious tradition, or just appreciate that our secular society has been shaped by it into a seven-day work week with a weekend attached.

But unlike the weekly Sabbath, which is practiced in some form almost everywhere in the world, the commandment to observe the Shmita year remains obscure, even to many who are familiar with other aspects of Torah. It has not been fully unpacked, unfolded, interpreted, or embodied, and it has certainly not found its way into the culture the way the weekly Sabbath has.

Like the Author of Torah, I would have preferred to introduce the story of Shmita with a promise, a golden vision of what could be, not with a threat, and certainly not with the sharp sting that we are experiencing today as I write this during the global pandemic of 2020 CE.

In Torah, Shmita is referenced more than once, and the reader is left to do the important work of discerning its many meanings. It is letting the Earth rest; it is freedom from debt. I personally first encountered Shmita when reading Parshat Behukotai, and my reaction to it at that time is expressed in the d’var Torah I gave that year.  Shortly later, I started this blog, to help bring to life a sense of how a Shmita culture might emerge in our times.

The gist of what I learned was that if we play our cards carefully, we can live with one another in peace and receive ample and abundant blessings manifest through a fruitful and generous Earth, and even experience the divine presence in our midst in this world, like in Eden. If we don’t, the consequences will bubble ominously through the web of life until the land itself, the source and medium of divine blessing, chastises us to such a degree that it becomes “a desolation, and the cities a wasteland,” (Leviticus 26:33), and only then, when the hand of the human being has been shaken off and a complete rest from human exploitation has fallen over the Earth, will its rest be restorative, and the land become capable of providing for the human family once again. The worse the damage we do, the longer the period of rest from the human hand that will be needed to restore it.

Rest

The rest of Shmita contains dormancy and healing, pregnancy and power. We are learning this from watching the more than human world answering the Shmita that has been forced upon us. There is early evidence of a spectacular recovery of species across the world. Fish, birds, mammals, and insects, all of which had been under pressure from relentless human exploitation, are resting and re-birthing.

The disruption of global supply chains has relieved pressure on the world’s fisheries. The cessation of travel has cleaned the air and quieted the oceans. The absence of people in parks and urban areas has given space back to wildlife.

Within the human family, the rest is terrifyingly uneven. There are those who have secure homes and income who are finding new delight in simple pleasures: taking walks in quiet nature, dining in and cooking from scratch, gardening, and jigsaw puzzles. And there are those whose rent and groceries will not be paid if they do not go into work, often at jobs that involve lots of interaction with the public, and exposure to the virus. Some people have no paid sick leave and have to choose between staying home when sick and paying the rent; others are finding themselves without health insurance as the economy sheds jobs. Our current forced Shmita has exposed lethal flaws in the way our society has chosen to allocate resources, with the rich suddenly aware of the poor now that the virus can be passed across social class.

Agriculture

In Torah, the Shmita year is deeply about agriculture, requiring as it does that the fields be left fallow. The promise is that a Shmita observing world can be so productive in six years that the lack of a harvest in the seventh will be amply compensated.

In the Shmita year, fences are removed from farmed fields. The produce that grows there is freely available for all to all to take from. Everyone, regardless of their status in society, is welcome to what grows there with just a single condition: that they take only what they need. They may not hoard; they may not convert food into money by selling it. The animals, wild and domestic, are also welcomed into the fields during the Shmita year.

Our industrialized, global agricultural system is highly unsuitable for observing a Shmita year. Farmers who are finding their supply chains disrupted are euthanizing livestock (1), pouring millions of gallons of fresh milk down the drain (2), and plowing under ripe produce (3), all while starving people line up at empty food banks (4).

But seeds of adaptation are also sprouting. Some farmers in the Great Plains have begun to plant fruits and vegetables as cover crops to feed starving neighbors on fields that have typically been sown with only commodity crops. They explain that they will let people come to the fields in person and harvest the produce when it is ripe (5). The same is true of the famers who brought hundreds of thousands of pounds of potatoes to give away in Tacoma (6), and the farmer in Pennsylvania who sold out overnight after deciding to bottle his own milk and sell it from his farm, which shortened his supply chain and brought people out into farm country to find the source of the abundance they enjoy (7). There has been a huge surge in interest in planting food gardens closer to home. These are all examples of dormant seeds of Shmita germinating in the culture in a time of need.

Economics

Shmita has even another element of release: the cancellation of debt. Imagine a world in which every person emerges from the Shmita year debt free.

What is a debt besides a gamble that we will have more in the future than we have today? And what is a lender besides someone who purchases a piece of someone else’s future? Shmita would periodically erase the debt-fueled pressure to produce more, and then even more, next year than this year. After all, what is interest but the belief that next year there will be “more.” But more of what? If in the Shmita year we discover that is already more than enough, then the promise of “more” is empty. How might this dawn of awareness transform the way we think about economics?

The Yoval, or Jubilee, known as the Shmita of Shmitas, takes this idea even farther. The Yoval takes place every 50 years – once in a generation. It follows the seventh Shmita year and involves a complete leveling of society, the elimination of debt, and even more dramatically, the restoration of each person to an equal productive endowment. In Torah, that entails a return to the land one’s ancestors were given; but a modern interpretation would be a radical redistribution of wealth, so that each person had the means to fully realize themselves according to their ability and inclination, not owing someone else before they rise in the morning to begin working, not scraping by, but fully endowed with the means to earn a productive livelihood: to feed, shelter, and educate themselves. The decision to implement a worldwide Jubilee as a response to this virus will be the subject of its own essay.

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It is impossible not to be struck by the congruence of the requirements of Shmita and the situation we are facing today. Have we ever really let the Earth rest? Have we ever perceived a value or a requirement, or a hint or suggestion that we should do so? Have we ever experienced the promise of what a Shmita-aware social order could look like?

Farmers have long understood the value of letting a field lie fallow as a way to allow it to regenerate and restore its productivity. And some universities offer researchers a Sabbatical year, which is intended as a time to break old ways of thinking, rest, refresh, and learn new skills and perspectives. There is something of this restorative, but also transformational fallowness about the Shmita year.

But in our world, every year, exploitation of the land increases; we use our ingenuity to invent new methods by which to extract its abundance to the last drop. We whip what we need from the Earth with increasing ferocity, exploiting it with industrial agriculture that poisons the land, industrial overfishing that kills the birthing grounds of the life of the seas, fracturing its bedrock and contaminating the pristine aquifers deep underground; we recklessly plunder the treasure chests of time without replacing a dime.

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Today, many destructive processes have fallen silent. A quiet ocean is hearing whale song that has long been drowned out by vessel noise. Quiet cities are being reclaimed by curious wild animals. Clear skies are giving an urban generation that had never even known its own wealth a glimpse of its gorgeous birthright of a horizon studded with stars by night and snowcapped mountains by day, a glimpse that a generation of children and young people have never had before. It seems that we hold in this strange, still moment a glimpse of a world that is possible, if we can grasp it.

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A Solution Without a Problem

When I began to study Shmita six years ago, I remember seeing it referred to as “an answer without a question,” or a “solution without a problem.” (7) People looked at it and asked, “what for”? Why would we do this thing that seems so difficult? Perhaps it was not possible to know, or to feel, the answer to this question until today. Perhaps it was for us that the Author of Torah encoded this mysterious lesson from the past.

People who have never experienced a day of rest, a Sabbath, or a Saturday if you are not religious, might wonder: what it would be good for? Wouldn’t life always be better with a little bit more money? Can’t I just take a few minutes of rest this afternoon, get a good night’s sleep, and maybe another couple of hours on Wednesday late afternoon, and it all adds up to the same in the end? And yet the idea of a day of rest has spread. First the Jews were called lazy by the Romans for adamantly refusing to work on the Sabbath; then the Roman people began to clamor for it. Now it is universal. Can this happen with the Year of Rest, once every seven years?

I ask you to dream with me, to plan. What would it be like if we agreed to meet back here in seven years for another, better Year of Release, hopefully not under the cloud of a global pandemic virus, and in a world where we have made real progress in mending the rifts between the secure and comfortable and the perilously economically fragile?

Could preparing for a world that takes a deep breath together bring about a transformation in our relationships, to our friends and family, to our fellow human beings in general, with places where we live, and with the Earth itself?

Let’s answer that question together. Let’s share our essays and dreams and visions, our art and our music and our literature, our data and statistics and research, and most importantly, our expression of Shmita in our intentional formation of social bonds and modes of human connection and interconnection.

Let’s begin to dream a dream of Shmita, and then wake up and bring the dream to life, together.

(This piece was originally published by Hazon. A few edits have been made to reflect the passage of time since it was published.)

References

  1. Farmers euthanizing livestock. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-13/hog-cattle-futures-fall-by-daily-limit-on-slaughter-disruptions
  2. Farmers pouring milk down the drain. https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-dairy-farmers-dump-43-million-gallons-of-excess-milk-1476284353
  3. Farmers plowing under ripe produce. https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2020/04/06/Farmers-destroy-crops-grown-for-restaurants-hotels/2211585843469/
  4. Demand at nation’s food banks rises. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/covid-19-crisis-heaps-pressure-nation-s-food-banks-n1178731
  5. Great Plains farmers growing fruit and vegetables during pandemic. https://civileats.com/2020/05/12/most-farmers-in-the-great-plains-dont-grow-fruits-and-vegetables-the-pandemic-is-changing-that/
  6. Potato giveaway in Tacoma. http://www.chronline.com/community/farmers-to-give-away-200-000-pounds-of-potatoes-at-tacoma-dome-on-thursday/article_afae25e0-93e9-11ea-9d2a-234cd8f5d015.html
  7. Stop the Machine. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/stop-the-machine-the-sabbatical-year-principle/
Actions

Pesach, Marie Kondo, and Plastic Rain

Believe me, I had no intention to sit and write anything this morning, Tuesday, with the hours counting inexorably down until the first Seder this Friday night. I am busy purging my home of leavened products, which involves plenty of deep cleaning, particularly in my kitchen.

During the preparation for Passover, great attention is given to each item relating to the kitchen: the dishes, the cooking utensils, counter tops, stoves and ovens, it all gets a severe once over. According to tradition, everything that has come in contact with wheat or grain during the year must be cleaned in a way consistent with how it was used. It’s a labor of love and I’m grateful for it.

This morning, I was sitting enjoying my coffee and reading from my Facebook feed when I saw it – the last straw, as it were. An article in National Geographic about how microplastics are literally raining from the sky, and can now be found in measurable concentrations even in the remote reaches of the Pyrenees Mountains in Southern France. We are increasingly aware that plastic is in fact toxic at every stage of its “lifecycle,” and is building up in the oceans and in the food chain. New plans to turn America’s Rust Belt into a Plastics Belt fed by fracked natural gas mean that the pieces are being set in place to dramatically increase plastics production world wide, without any plan for managing the resulting waste stream.

Given that I am already holding each item in my kitchen up to scrutiny, it struck me that now is exactly the time to make a quantum leap towards dramatically reducing my use of plastic in the kitchen, especially single use plastics.

What if you don’t celebrate Passover? Maybe Spring Cleaning is a more  familiar tradition in your home; or maybe you find you are becoming an acolyte of Marie Kondo? Any of these practices can serve as a motivating impetus to make a big change.

But how does this relate to the central message of Passover – which is “freedom?” For me, that’s  easy. I do not feel “free” to act out my ethical values of leaving my children the beautiful and life-sustaining world of abundance that I want for them, and that I believe their Creator wants for them, as long as I am behaving like a slave to the petrochemical industry and a culture of waste for the sake of convenience.

This year, starting right now at Passover, I will focus on my freedom to honor the Divine gift of life in all of its myriad, beautiful, and interrelated forms by reducing my contribution to the world’s growing plastics nightmare. I trust that in doing so, I will join with millions and millions of other people the world over, a mixed multitude if you will, who are also seeking this sort of freedom. Please join me, and keep me posted on how it’s going!

Actions, The Food System, The People

The Gift of the Fruit Tree

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Apple TreeIf you follow My laws and faithfully execute My commandments, I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit. – Leviticus 26: 3 – 4.

You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.” The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.   – Khalil Gibran

Seattle is a city of indescribable abundance when it comes to fruiting trees. During late summer, the modest trees that you may not have even noticed standing along roadway medians and in city parks reveal their true nature, branches extended and fairly aching with the gift of heavy ripe fruit, the mercy of their abundance bestowed freely and without prejudice. Individuals fortunate enough to have a private fruit tree or two may wind up with hundreds of pounds of ripe pears, plums, quince, or figs in a season.

What to do with that abundance? How much of it can be harvested and enjoyed, and how much is destined to go unpicked and fall to the ground? How much is insect damaged? How many trees do not reach their full productivity for one reason or another?

The trees themselves are the spoken words of the Divine, and their meaning is clear. “Let all who are hungry come and eat,” they whisper. If only there were some way to care for these trees, to harvest this magnificent crop, and to enjoy what we can and distribute the rest freely to people who are hungry…

It turns out there is a way, and it is called City Fruit. City Fruit is a Seattle area nonprofit that cares for these trees, harvests their crop, and distributes it to food banks. If you’ve ever driven past an apple tree growing in the median of a road, or along a trail, or in a park, that has been draped in a fine white net, that’s the work of City Fruit, protecting the fruit from insect damage. At the end of the season, the undamaged fruit will be harvested.

City Fruit is truly Shmita in action, honoring the gift of the abundant fruit, and ensuring that it is put to its best and highest use. As importantly as all of that, City Fruit engages homeowners, volunteer harvesters, and a multitude of businesses and nonprofits across the city to build community around this gift. It engages each participant in the Divine project of nourishing human bodies; the project itself nourishes the soul of the individual, and of the community as a whole.

Here are some of the ways that City Fruit enriches our community:

  1. Netting public trees to protect the quality of the fruit produced
  2. Harvesting fruit in the fall
  3. Distributing fruit to food pantries
  4. Enabling homeowners to register their fruit trees and give permission to City Fruit to harvest and donate all or a portion of their crop
  5. Sponsoring classes to teach home owners to care for their trees
  6. Forming partnerships with different communities such as immigrants, refugees, and youth in growing, caring for, and harvesting fruit

Last year, City Fruit achieved the following remarkable statistics:

home-harvest-results-2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a world in which some seem to have so much and others have seem to have barely enough to survive, we are taught a lesson by each fruit tree. Each tree reminds us that we are all loved no matter who we are; that we are all worthy to be fed; and there can, indeed, be enough for all, if we will just take that lesson to heart.

Thanks to the groundwork laid by City Fruit, we can all take part immediately in fulfilling the Divine intention, which begins with the gift of the fruit tree.

Actions, The Food System, The Land, The People

Shmita: A Workplan for the 21st Century Economy

Imagine my surprise and joy when I opened my email inbox this morning and found a link to this incredibly inspiring Eli Talk about Shmita! Through  my long dormant connections to the wider Shmita world, Aharon Ariel Lavi was able to reach me, and his words give me comfort because now I know I am not alone in beginning to ponder the question of how to respond as the next Shmita cycle begins to awaken in our consciousness.

As it happens, I have never really stopped thinking about Shmita, and like Lavi, I too dream of a day when, as he puts it, “Shmita can become a self-evident part of our society and economy.”

If you are inspired after listening to this talk and would like to take part in this ongoing exploration of possibilities about bringing Shmita to our lives in Seattle, in ways both large and social and small and individual, please reach out.

I will be teaching about Judaism-based environmental advocacy at Limmud Seattle in January, and Shmita will definitely be one of the topics to be explored. The Limmud presentation is intended to be a catalyst for a great deal more exploration and unfurling of Shmita over the coming years, in various contexts and communities.

Like Lavi, I consider the re-emergence of Shmita in the world to be part of an open conversation, and the more voices and the more ideas that are involved, the more it will grow and the richer and more meaningful it will become.

I am also looking forward to reading Aharon Ariel Lavi’s book, About Economy and Sustenance, which takes on the challenge of placing economic thought within a Jewish spiritual context.

Actions, Texts, The Land, The People

Love at the Crossroads

These are (approximately) the words I shared as a member of the opening interfaith opening panel for the Love at the Crossroads conference produced by FACT (the Faith Action Climate Team) on October 28, 2017.

Love at the Crossroads

Good morning and thank you for inviting me to speak here today about Love at the Crossroads. I look forward to a day of learning with you about the connections between social justice, climate change, and love.

For a number of years, I have been studying the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish texts, looking within them for lessons about how human beings should relate to the Earth, and I have been writing and speaking and teaching about my reflections.

I do this in part because, as I’ve grown older I have seen that reason has not been very good at inducing so-called rational human beings to think differently, or make changes that are uncomfortable. I’ve seen that we live by the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, about what is real and important, and about what is expected of us. We can be motivated to change our behavior, but not, I believe, primarily by means of data. It is discomfort that does it. Spiritual discomfort changes us.

This discomfort can come from our own life experiences, or, from stories that work on us and change us from the inside. The Hebrew Bible is a rich source of stories; stories which play across not only our individual minds, but which are reflected across much of Western culture, and connect us to generations past and future. These stories, these “myths,” if you will, shape how we view ourselves, our roles and responsibilities in the world; and what values we are willing to sacrifice for. So, by taking hold of the coloration and meaning of these stories, and sharing them, we can change ourselves and the future – at least that is my hope.

 

The world the Hebrew Bible envisions for us is one in which we love one another. This is the central teaching of our faith.  Love your neighbor as yourself, and also, love “the stranger who lives within your gates.”  (Both commandments are found in Chapter 19 of the book of Leviticus.) But lest we think that love is just an abstract feeling, we are guided with very specific instructions about how to do this; about what our relationships are supposed to look like, with one another, with God, and with the land.

Here are some highlights:

  • Our system of justice should not favor the rich or the poor
  • We must take up the case of the vulnerable, the widow and the orphan, who have no one to advocate for them
  • We don’t take advantage of people’s ignorance – we don’t “place a stumbling block before the blind”
  • We don’t stand idly by our neighbor’s blood, we take responsibility for the welfare of others
  • The list could go on and on

Regarding the land:

  • It is through the medium of the land that God attends to all of our needs
  • We don’t own it. It belongs in perpetuity to God and must be used first to serve God: A portion of its produce must always be set aside for the needy.
  • Every seven years, the land must enjoy a complete rest, during which all of its produce is ownerless and may be used at subsistence levels by everyone, from the richest to the most vulnerable, including animals both wild and domestic.
  • Debts must be periodically forgiven.
  • The distribution of land, which is the ultimate source of all wealth, must be rebalanced in each generation so that it is not amassed by a few and used to exploit the many

In the words of Dr. Cornell West: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” And I would say as a corollary: “Exploitation is what happens when love is forgotten.”

 

We are told that if we follow these laws (and more) then we will be rewarded with rains that fall in their season, and the land will be productive and feed us; but if we do not, that God will “break our fierce pride! The heavens will be like iron, the earth like bronze; your land will not give forth its yield, its trees will not give forth fruit; our cities will become a wasteland.”

Will this come about as a result of “miracles” or “natural consequences?”

It would be interesting to write a long essay on this subject that probes all the possible connections between social justice and environmental sustainability, but let me raise just one.

 

What if we took seriously the lesson that the land is God’s, and that we are meant to benefit from the natural abundance that springs from it. The gifts that spring up from the land we are to experience as a gift, part of a relationship, that links us with God and with generations past and future. We may make use of them, but only with reverence. The buzzword is “sustainability,” but it’s even more precious than that if we treat it as a gift.

Well, attached to this “land,” along with its potential for agricultural, there is wind, there is sunlight. These can be converted to energy. The dignity to using them in this way comes from the fact that they connect the individual not to the marketplace, but to God and the land.

 

My interpretation of the text leads me to believe that there is something powerful about people being connected as directly as possible to this source of natural abundance. Because it is there that we “feel” the love of our Creator for us, and “see” it as part of what connects us to our children and parents, and feel motivated by our own love for all of this, to care for it and tend it lovingly for the future. In this sacred and loving connection lies our hope that we can save the planet and one another. So let’s do everything we can do deepen and enrich our sense of our dependence on, and our ability to enter into sacred relationship with the land.

 

When I read stories about how vigorously fossil fuel interests and private utility companies are trying to delay or prevent the deployment of liberating renewable energy technologies, I am reminded of the story of Pharaoh. If you recall this story, Pharaoh took ownership of the produce of Egypt during seven years of plenty, and then when seven years of famine came, he sold the life-saving grain back to his people. At first this was very helpful. But as the famine wore on, this market for grain became exploitative. People were forced to pay for it by selling first their draft animals, then their land, and finally they sold themselves into slavery to Pharaoh.

It seems to me that there is a similarity here with the fossil fuel giants taking control of the millions of years of “plenty,” during which carbon was stored in the ground and became oil and gas, then selling them back to us. At first it was very helpful (and saved a lot of whales), but we have turned the corner and understand now that the environmental costs are too high.

 

We can and must throw off this Carbon Pharaoh, even though, just like with the first Pharaoh, despite warnings of disaster, he seems to be only hardening his heart against us. In the Bible, deliverance began with prayer, and was accomplished with a lot of help from God. Today our prophets are climate scientists, and the increasingly unmistakable drumroll of catastrophes, from widespread and devastating wild fires, droughts, and famines, to inundation of coastal cities along with more and more powerful hurricanes and storms, are feeling like modern day “plagues.”

 

In the Jewish tradition, we look at time as something like an ascending spiral, that advances, hopefully, even as it revisits the same stories year in and year out. Our texts give us keys and clues to living honorably on the land. Can we take these images and ideals and use them to build a new model of relationship between human beings and the sustaining and loving landscape we have been given, before it is too late?

 

When we do this, then the struggle will be over, and we will truly be able to say that our soul has returned from a very profound exile and found rest. Because isn’t this what we long for: the repose of the soul, in peace, in justice and with love, upon the good land that we have been given, in a world in which each person is able to rest in the shade of their own fig tree and vine, knowing that each other person rests securely under their own?

 

Shabbat Shalom

Actions, Texts

Beliefs and Practices of Judaism that Help Me Respond to Climate Change

These are the notes for my remarks at the Faith & Climate Action Conference held on October 8 in Seattle WA:

I am here to talk to you about the beliefs and practices of my faith that help me prepare to respond to climate change. And also, to learn from each of you, make new friends here, and bring your wisdom back into my community.

First, my tradition categorically accepts, and explicitly teaches, that our actions can set in motion a chain of events that will ultimately disrupt the climate to the point of the land becoming inhospitable to human life, and that if we let this process run its course we will “perish quickly from the good land that the Lord has given us.” We recite these words as part of the Sh’ma, our foundational affirmation of faith, morning and evening; we bind them to our bodies when we pray, and we write them on our doorposts and our gates – that’s what’s written inside the mezuzot that Jews affix to their doorposts. And yet still we can forget them, or not fully engage with their meaning.

To avoid this fate, we are told to adhere to the laws we have been given in Torah: to build a society upon justice with compassion, supporting the vulnerable as a community, welcoming the stranger, and deeply cognizant that the Earth does not belong to us, but that we are sojourners upon it, that it belongs to God. Indeed we are invited in Psalm 145 to imagine it as the very hand of God, extended, and supporting the needs of all life, including future generations.

These are the beliefs that provide the color and form of my response to climate change.

There are many practices that my faith tradition offers, that I am actively studying. Let me name a few of the highlights:

First we have Shabbat, the day of rest. To fully observe Shabbat according to Jewish custom, there is no driving; no money exchanged; no electricity used. Imagine: the whole community living within walking distance of friends and places of worship; imagine a world that uses 1/7 or about 15% less electricity, that spends a day free of the habit of consumer culture. Imagine what our communities would look like if they were designed for a Shabbat culture.

Next we have Kashrut, a detailed system of dietary laws that fundamentally restrict what creatures we may consume and require their ethical treatment. Products are labeled with a Heksher if they adhere to our community’s ethical norms. The Heksher may be the first system of food product labeling for this purpose in history. Imagine a system of product labeling that fully encompasses our social justice and environmental concerns, and people rigidly adhering to a system of food consumption that met the highest standards for worker and animal and environmental sustainability.

Next, there is Shmita – a seven year cycle which gives a year of complete rest to the land itself. No agriculture is permitted; people may eat only what grows without human intervention, grown locally, and only while it is in season (I guarantee you all of those requirements are there in Torah law!). During Shmita, all the fields opened to everyone, animals wild and domestic, and all people from rich to poor. Hording of food beyond one’s true need is not permitted! Imagine an agricultural system designed around a Shmita-aware permaculture, interwoven throughout our communities, with food accessible to all.

Finally, since I know I am running out of time, I want to say just a few words about self-reflection and Tikkun Olam. Today is Shabbat Shuvah. Jews around the world are in the liturgical period known as the Days of Awe, the Yamim Nora’im, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, during which we reflect on and seek to repair relationships in our lives, with one another and with God. In our tradition, true repentance comes from realizing and understanding what we have done wrong, expressing a sincere regret and asking forgiveness, and working to heal the damage we have caused, and to never return to the actions that caused the harm.

We can use this period to look at our relationship with God – with God’s outstretched and generous hand – as in need of repair, and form a strategy for restoring what has been damaged and changing the habits and behaviors that ruptured this relationship in the first place.

My tradition teaches that human beings are, in fact, partners in the work of repairing Creation.  We call this work Tikkun Olam – Repairing the World. We are taught that each person has their own part of Creation to repair, and we are taught by Rabbi Tarfon, a sage who lived during the time of the destruction of the second temple, who put it this way: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it either” (2:16).

 

Together, our faith traditions are like trees in a forest that draw from roots that are very deep. It is so meaningful that we have assembled here together to strengthen our resolve, and to join our wisdom sources together. May we go from strength to strength as we work together to heal and repair the world.

Actions, The People

Debt, Seattle, and the Hebrew Free Loan Association

At the end of seven years, you are to make a Release [shmita].

Now this is the matter of the Release: he shall release, every possessor of a loan of his hand, what he has lent to his neighbor. He is not to oppress his neighbor or his brother, for the Release of the Lord has been proclaimed!” … – Deuteronomy (15:1-2)

Debt release is as intrinsic to the concept of Shmita as is the fallowing of the land.  And like the fallowing of the land, it is extremely difficult to imagine doing in practice. Indeed, the difficulties were foreseen by the Author of the Torah, as it were, as the verses that follow the commandment to release debt acknowledge that the tendency might be to reduce lending to one who is in need if the lender fears he may not be repaid.  The text goes on to exhort those in a position to lend to “open, yes, open your hand to your brother, to your afflicted-one, and to the needy-one in your land!”

In our community we held a discussion a few weeks ago about Shmita and debt, student debt in particular. The young woman who led the discussion was a law school graduate burdened by a significant amount of student debt. She spoke movingly about the effect the debt was having on her life, on her ability to own property, and on other major life choices and options. And yet, in the end it was impossible for her to conclude that student debt should be “erased” if doing so would reduce lending for education or lead to irresponsible behavior on the part of borrowers.

As I reflected on this conundrum, I came across a (perhaps) little known (at least little known to me) institution of Jewish life, the Hebrew Free Loan Association. This institution allows Jews to borrow money at zero interest for a variety of purposes, including getting an education, starting a business, and consolidating debt.

Hebrew Free Loan Associations operate in many cities in the United States including Seattle. According to an article by Michael Feldberg in My Jewish Learning, Seattle was actually the birthplace of the Hebrew Free Loan Association in America! According to Feldberg:

In 1909, a group of Seattle Jewish women formed a whist and sewing club with dues of 25 cents per month. When they had accumulated $64, they offered to purchase a gift for their local synagogue. Because the rabbi knew that the women raised the money by playing cards, he refused the gift. Undaunted, the women started the Hebrew Ladies’ Free Loan Society of Seattle. Their thoughtfulness helped some of Seattle’s first Jewish entrepreneurs get started in business.

Other HFLAs followed, and they were generally used to assist new Jewish immigrants at a time when they had a hard time gaining access to commercial credit. To be eligible for a loan from the Seattle Hebrew Free Loan Association a borrower must:

  • Be a member of the Jewish community residing in the State of Washington or a local Jewish student attending any accredited college or university.
  • Have two co-signers.
  • Have a source of income so that he or she will be able to repay the loan.

While the HFLA is dedicated to Jewish self-help, (according to Maimonides, “A loan is better than charity, for it enables one to help oneself”) there is nothing barring the wider community from forming “free loan” associations along similar lines.

Potential donors may wish to consider gifts to free loan associations as part of their overall charitable giving portfolio. Donations are tax deductible, and membership dues cover the administrative costs of the program. (The Seattle Hebrew Free Loan Association will hold its annual brunch on February 8. This might be a good way to learn about the program, meet people, and make a contribution.)

And debtors may wish to consider converting some of their commercial “debt with interest” to the type of debt without interest offered by the HFLA.

All of this is perfectly legal, and while it does not directly speak to the subject of total debt forgiveness envisioned in Shmita, it does perhaps point a way to some significant amount of debt relief through the elimination of interest payments, relief that is available today, operating within all of our our existing institutions and laws.

Actions

Shmita and the ‘Buy Nothing’ community

For six years you are to sow your land and to gather in its produce, but in the seventh, you are to let it go and let it be, that the needy of your people may eat, and what they (allow to) remain, the wildlife of the field may eat. Do thus with your vineyard, with your olive-grove.

– Exodus 23: 10-11

Anyone who locks his vineyard of fences off his agricultural field in the Sabbatical year has nullified a positive commandment.

– Rambam, Mishne Torah, Hilchot Shmita v’Yovel 4.24

In the seventh year, there is a sense in which a sharing economy replaces the traditional economy. For those looking to become part of a share-based community close to home, the “Buy Nothing” communities on Facebook are a good place to start.

I was first alerted to the existence of the community during (what else?) a discussion of Shmita that took place last summer. Since joining my neighborhood’s Buy Nothing community, I have seen so much. The mother who has a bag of outgrown clothes for a 2 year old boy that she would like to “gift;” the person who has bought a new appliance or cookware and wants to “gift” the things she has replaced, etc.  Thus one person’s super-abundance fills another person’s need.

In addition to these simple acts of generosity, I have also seen acts of pure compassion that have brought tears to my eyes. Occasionally someone will post a request for someone they know who is in a more dire form of need. The NE Seattle group is gathering boxes to move a family out of a domestics violence situation, filling the holiday wish lists of children whose grown-ups are in the hospital, and putting together equipment for a cooking class for developmentally disabled adults.

The Queen Anne/Magnolia group has organized members to cook a dinner for Tent City, an encampment of about 100 homeless men and women, which is temporarily hosted by a small university in our neighborhood.

According to one friend who is also a member, “Buy Nothing has brought back meaning to the term ‘neighborhood community.'”

In the Seattle area, there are (at least) six Buy Nothing communities – in Northeast Seattle, UW/ Ravenna/Laurelhurst, Queen Anne/Magnolia, Southeast Seattle, and Shoreline. These are closed groups. To join you must submit your name, and then answer a few questions about who you are, where you live, and why you want to be a part of the community.

Perhaps, in addition to just the “mere” equitable and needs-based distribution of food that the seventh year seems explicitly designed to cultivate, the less tangible benefit would be exactly this simple awareness of the needs that exist in our communities, of the places where one person’s suffering can so easily and lovingly be relieved by someone else, if only they knew and could be brought in contact with one another.

Such a simple thing – these Buy Nothing groups. Yet they truly blur the line between “online community” and real community.

 

Actions

Chanukkah, Shmita and Shammai

As we head into winter, the light changes and creates changes inside of us. Dusk descends upon the Earth earlier and dawn arrives later.
An evening walk takes us through luminous pockets of blue, white, red and green. For some, winter light brings a melancholy and longing for bright summer sunlight. For others, the candles and iridescent colored bulbs bring excitement and nostalgia.

It is with this consciousness of light and its effects on the human condition that the Jewish people observe Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.

During Hanukkah, we commemorate the triumph of the Maccabees over the Greeks in the 2nd century BCE.  When they rededicated the desecrated Temple, the Maccabees found only one cruse of oil left to light the ceremonial lamp.  That cruse of oil was only expected to last for one night; however, it lasted for eight days.

What meanings can we glean from the miracle of the oil? Perhaps it is that no matter how abused or degraded an individual or a group may be, there is the capacity in it for more fire and light than one could ever imagine. Or maybe it is that triumph over oppression illuminates what is good.  We have what we need even if it doesn’t seem as though we have enough.  We can enter darkness in our world and in our souls knowing that we will endure, and that the world has what it needs to illuminate truth, beauty and goodness.

Congregation Har Shalom is getting ready to construct its outdoor hanukkiah, which we light each night in front of the synagogue.  What will be different about this year’s Hanukkah Festivities at Har Shalom?

Generally the custom on Hanukkah is to light one candle for the first night, and one additional light each night until the eighth night when the hanukkiah is aglow with all eight branches burning brightly. A lesser known form of the ritual is to light eight lights on the first night and one fewer each night until one candle remains lit.  This year, since it is a shmita or sabbatical year in which we allow fields to lie fallow as instructed by the Torah, our community has decided that we will light our public hanukkiah according to the lesser known tradition. This mirrors the shift away from production and cultivation of land which in our times can be construed as increasing consumption of energy and natural resources.  The lights of the universe and beyond will be felt most profoundly on the culminating 8th night instead of eight lights that are humanly constructed and lit.

The sabbatical year occurs every seven years and provides the opportunity for a shift in perspective towards humility in which we
can explore the non-dominant approach.   Our usual way of doing things is interrupted and we take some time to retreat into stillness.  From there, new approaches to address old problems arise, a welcome opportunity in this challenging year.  We hope you will join us in staring into the night sky and that you will be blessed with discernment, and the lights of awareness and new hope.

This guest post was written by Jennifer Geraci and Rabbi Shoshana Leis. Rabbi Leis is co- rabbi of Har Shalom Center for Jewish Living in Fort Collins, CO.

Actions, The Food System, The Land

Shmita and Perennial Agriculture

“Now the Sabbath-yield of the land (is) for you, for eating for you, for your servant and for your handmaid, for your hired-hand and for your resident-settler who sojourn with you; and for your domestic-animal and the wild-beast that (are) in your land shall be all its produce, to eat.”

Leviticus 25: 6-7

If the land yields food in a Shmita year that has grown without the sowing of seeds or the tilling of soil, then according to Scriptural Law, that food is considered Sabbath-yield and is permitted.*  Clearly an agricultural system that emphasizes food obtained from plants which either re-grow from their roots each year, or which are permanent fixtures of the landscape such as trees, shubs and vines, will produce more useable food during a Shmita year than one that is primarily based on crops which require the soil to be tilled and re-seeded every year.

Intriguingly, whatever our motivation may be for aspiring to a Shmita-friendly agricultural system, with doing so would come layer upon layer of tangible, ecological benefits.

According to Eric Toensmeier, author of Perennial Vegetables: From Artichoke to ‘Zuiki’ Taro, a Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious, Easy-to-Grow Edibles, perennials can be low maintenance: they do not need to be re-sown each year, and with their larger root systems, can draw nutrients and water from deep in the soil. They are soil builders: they “improve the soil’s organic matter, structure and porosity, and water-holding capacity through the slow and steady decomposition of their roots and leaves.” They provide ecosystem benefits: their root systems hold water, and they provide habitat to beneficial garden plants and animals. And they sequester carbon dioxide in their deep root systems.

Jerry Glover is another advocate for perennial crops, particularly, in his case, wheat. Glover is part of a movement of plant breeders and agricultural scientists working to develop new breeds of perennial grain crops that could replace some or all of the annual species currently in use around the world. The focus on grain crops is important because about 70% of all of the world’s cropland is in grain production, according to National Geographic.

Such research is moving forward in the part of the Pacific Northwest known as the Palouse, which is one of the world’s most productive wheat-growing regions. The hope there is that by reducing tillage, wind and soil erosion can be avoided. In Perennial Wheat: the development of a sustainable cropping system  for the U.S., Pacific Northwest, published in the American Journal of Alternative Agriculture, the authors look at some new wheat varieties that are being tested for productivity, with the hope that they could be used in certain soil conditions in combination with traditional varieties of wheat to reduce soil erosion, enhance wildlife habitat, and provide other benefits such as water retention and carbon sequestration.

One of the practices I am incorporating into my personal Shmita awareness is learning about perennial food producing plants that I can one day incorporate into my landscape (starting in 5776, since another of my practices is to lay off planting new things in my garden in 5775!) This year, I plan to learn more about plants that I might want to  grow and explore the possibility of growing them in our shul’s garden. Maybe at some point I will have the opportunity to teach about those plants, encouraging others to try some perennial vegetables in their own gardens – so that they will be ready with harvests to enjoy by 5782, the next Shmita year.

I will also look for ways to support the development of perennial grain harvests. Every day we read about the rigor with which the Earth is worked to produce annual commodity crops, such as wheat, corn, canola, and soy. The soil is tilled, leading to erosion and destruction of native microbe communities, then it is sprayed with chemicals to prevent weeds and pests. The cycle seems to be a vicious one, as more chemicals are needed as the pests adapt, and more fertilizer is needed as the natural productivity of the soil is not allowed to regrow. Chemicals then flow off the land, where they  pollute water bodies and kill fish. Farms are no longer wholesome places to raise children, and clearly they are not welcoming places for wildlife.

In contrast, Shmita offers a vision of agriculture in which people and wildlife are welcome and nourished; a vision of an Earth which belongs to God and is entrusted to us as a perpetually renewable gift. May there come a day when we learn to treat it as such!

*Rabbinic law does not allow the use of plants which may regrow from seeds dropped the previous year, or which otherwise look exactly like plants which are prohibited, in the belief that people may cheat. See Rambam, Mishne Torah, Hilchot Shmita v’Yovel 4.1-3 (source: Shmita Sourcebook)