Category Archives: The People

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/
Texts, The Land, The People

Tisha B’Av and Transformation

Summer is here and the burning time is upon us, as our air here in Seattle becomes thickened with smoke from the incineration of the Northwest’s forests.

Liturgically speaking, we are in the “three weeks” leading up to the Ninth of Av or Tisha B’Av. This period is a time of psychological preparation for the dramatic mourning  associated with the memory of the trauma of losing the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. In its day, the Holy Temple was experienced as the physical locus of connection to the divine. Practically, it was the site of virtually all (but not all) of the important ritual behaviors involved with maintaining our relationship with G-d.

I believe that we are standing on the brink of a rupture every bit as profound for the world as the loss of the Holy Temple was for the Jews, and that is the climate crisis. The Earth is manifestly a source of connection, a locus of relationship, with the divine forces which give us life and sustain us; and by us, I mean every person, and also every living being. The course that forced atmospheric warming would take has been foretold by scientists for decades. Now we are watching the details of the prophesy unfold; changes which began slowly, almost imperceptibly, now roll downhill with gathering speed and momentum. People born after 1985 have never experienced a year with lower than average global temperatures.

In the Talmud, the loss of the second Temple was not attributed to the aggression of the Romans, but to “senseless hatred” among the Jews themselves. The Romans are given no agency; the problem was understood to be in ourselves. I think that we can argue about where the fault for the climate crisis lies; likely the truth is complicated. I am unwilling to let the fossil fuel giants off the hook for the stumbling blocks they that they placed, and continue to place, before the blind. Also, I drive a minivan that gets about 16 miles per gallon, and will be flying across the country in an airplane this summer with my family.

I feel the need to sit with my feelings about the possibility of losing Earth in the form that all my human ancestors experienced it in my generation. I sense that these feelings are deeply connected to the experience of losing the Holy Temple. Future generations may well mourn by candlelight in the dark the events taking place today.

But something new was created out of the Judaism of yore. The religion was re-imagined, and miraculously has survived; the Temple itself survives in the liturgy and rituals; the connection to the Holy One, Blessed be the Name, was rebuilt.

Knowing what is coming for us, how can we, in our generation, turn the rupture and dislocation of today into a seed for those who will come after us, who will want and need to learn from our experiences to create something new? How can we draw on our sacred practices, our wisdom, and indeed the very lessons we are learning right now about the aching complexity of being human, of living together in society, to offer our gift to the future? What would you say to the people who will inherit the Earth of 100 years from today, 1000 yrs from today, 5000? How would you say it?

I would welcome your response in the comments.

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.

Texts, The Land, The People

Shabbat Hazon – Shabbat of Vision

As we approach the weekend of July 21, 2018, Shabbat Hazon, Tisha B’Av, I am overwhelmed by many meanings and significances that seem to be converging onto this time. It is my deepest conviction that we need to build this world with love, Olam Chesed Yibaneh, and that to do that we require the courage that springs from simple awareness of the beauty, connection and love that surrounds and cares for us at all times.

However our Jewish calendar also brings us through the depth of sorrow. At Tisha B’Av, it is our tradition to allow ourselves to truly feel the impact of our ruptured connection with the Divine, symbolized as the destruction of the Holy Temple that once (twice, actually) stood in glory in the Holy City, Jerusalem. At Tisha B’Av, we enter our sanctuary without greeting one another. We light a small candle and find a place alone in darkness, and absorb the harrowing words of Eicha sung to us through darkness in a trope that weeps like a mother grieving for her lost children, and we fast.

This image cannot help but remind us of the present day mothers who weep in detention centers for children who were taken from them at the border of our country.

Equally as significant are the unfamiliar and uncomfortably high temperatures many of us are experiencing, which cannot help but remind us that Earth’s climate is warming quickly, and with no end in sight.

In response to this crisis, our children are rising up in Zero Hour Climate Marches in DC and across the country this weekend, and are taking our government to court to force it to ensure them a livable planet.

In doing this, these children are wading in the deep waters of our tradition on Shabbat Hazon – our Shabbat of Vision. Shabbat Hazon holds before us an image of our errors and their undeniably tragic consequences, while simultaneously pointing the way through them to a different, better future in which connections are restored. Today, these children are our prophets, crying out on behalf of the future, calling on us to restore our connection with the Divine Source of Life before it is too late. This connection can only be forged through love, and must pose a direct challenge to the sinat chinam, or senseless hatred, which is believed to have been the root of our problems.

This weekend, each of us in our own way, through contemplation, prayer, fasting, or marching, can respond to the call of Tisha B’Av: to open ourselves to grief for the destruction of our beautiful home and the values we cherish, which we believe came about because of our failure to live together in peace and justice. It is not and never was some foreign adversary, but our own shortcomings that lead ultimately to the destruction of our tranquility, our home, and the moral voice that once went forth from our holy place.

So while it may seem like there is enough to be sorrowful in our own time, it is striking that so many events of enduring significance converge on this one sorrowful midsummer weekend.

May we deeply absorb the weeping voices that we hear, including our own. And may the grief of the world open our hearts to a period of deep reflection and inner transformation that will bring healing and repair of the breaches that divide us from one another, from the future, and from the ineffable Divine. And may this healing come soon.

 

 

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

The People

Zeman Simchatenu

As Sukkot 5778 draws to a close I want to take a few minutes to reflect on the varied meanings of the holiday for me this year. As in previous years, I have experienced Sukkot as a time of joy and connection. The very fact that we do something so different – eating our evening meals outdoors in the sukkah – is a source of excitement and real joy for the children, and for the parents as well. In the evenings, the sukkah is twinkle lights amid hanging, scented, branches, with the radiance of the setting sun traced on the burlap scrim that we have for walls. It’s no wonder the kids wanted us to leave it up and keep the holiday going a little longer.

I’ve had the added joy of being home and sharing meals and gatherings in the sukkah with friends during the day. On sunny mornings, I when I am alone out there, I am not really alone. I am surrounded by the chittering of chickadees and visited by curious squirrels. Stellars jays occasionally barnstorm through the roof. When I can bring my friends together for simple companionship, that itself is a joy to me which feels also very holy. I am truly honored by every person who has come to sit in our sukkah. I hope that over the years, it will be remembered as the birthplace of many new friendships and meaningful connections.

As part of an intentional process of bringing that about, for the second year in a row I have hosted an event which I grandiosely  will call  “The Second Annual Faith Based Environmental Leadership Summit in the Sukkah.” This event consists of me inviting the people I know who are taking an active leadership role in protecting and caring for our environment, particularly those representing the faith community, to come sit in the sukkah together. There is no agenda. It’s just a time to get together in person, eat bagels, meet one another, and learn about what everyone is up to. While there is no agenda going in, I often feel like I leave with an agenda, inspired by the projects and enthusiasm of those around me. During our meeting this year, a canvasser for a Seattle mayoral candidate stopped by and we invited him to join us for a while. It turned out he didn’t know much about the environmental agenda of the candidate he was supporting, but some of my guests did, and he left with some great new talking points!

Finally, this year our “Zeman Simchatenu,” our time of rejoicing, was darkened by the very sad cloud of the death of a young father within our community. Interestingly, in Jewish law, Sukkot is such a time of joy that it is literally not permitted to mourn during the holiday. The traditional week-long period of mourning, called shiva, must be postponed until after Sukkot ends. My heart aches for this family, which I have known for almost 13 years –  we met as regulars at Tot Shabbat with our tiny baby boys who are now nearing Bar Mitzvah age.  It is at times like this that I am most glad to be part of a loving and supportive community that I know will be there for them over the years as we have been there for other families and individuals who have suffered loss. For all of us, these sudden profound changes that time brings only renew the message of Sukkot:  that we are always vulnerable, always fragile, and that our only security, our only true source of a joy that transcends the uncertainties of life, is our need for one another, and our commitment to one another.

Perhaps there is a message that we should take away from the prohibition to mourn during Sukkot, and a prayer for ourselves. May it be that during Sukkot, we all feel so interconnected, while yet so open to the experience of vulnerability, so, in a sense, raw, protected only by our community, that even the sadness of loss and mourning is met with such a depth of warmth that for this special week the chill does not reach us. And may the connections that we have strengthened in this way during Sukkot continue to sustain and support us all throughout the year.

 

 

 

 

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.

The People

Sukkot, Shmita and Vulnerability

In his d’var Torah for Parashat Nitzavim-VaYelekh, Rabbi Shai Held gets to the heart of a concept that unites Sukkot and Shmita – vulnerability.  During Sukkot, we dwell in fragile huts in which we are conscious of every breath of wind, of every drop of rain, of the warmth of the sun filtered by the shade of vegetation. Even starlight, which connects us far beyond the world of our daily experience and out into the vast universe, is intended to be part of the experience of dwelling in a sukkah.  The fragility of the sukkah is an aspect of its very permeability and connection to the world outside of itself. The entire community is enjoined to share this experience of dwelling in a fragile structure, a partially open structure, and we are called upon to offer our friendship, our hospitality, our gifts, to friends. From our place of vulnerability we build community, offering, and accepting, gifts of food and friendship.

In the end, Sukkot causes us to feel within our bones that our protection, in the end, is not in being cut off, from nature, from risk, from one another, but precisely in our immersion within the wholeness of the world – of nature, of the universe, and most importantly, of the wholeness that comes from being in relationship with one another.

The Shmita year likewise opens us up to experience vulnerability and connection. But unlike Sukkot, which lasts a single week, Shmita lasts an entire year; and whereas Sukkot provides, for most of us, only a simulation of vulnerability, the Shmita year asks for much more. Literally, the Shmita year asks us to release our tight hold, and to accept God’s gifts as gifts. We are required to deeply take in our reliance on natural processes that are outside of our control. We are asked to release our sense of ownership of productive, food producing land and to see it as, in the end, a gift from God, intended to nourish all life. We are asked to shift our focus from accumulation, to use, and then to sharing. We are asked to release our economic control over one another, or subservience to one another, that comes about as a result of indebtedness. We are asked to trust that there will be enough for all, and to make it so.

This heightened vulnerability would, of necessity, lead to a heightened experience of connectedness, with the productive landscape, with the processes that govern its bringing forth food, and with our companions, human and non-human, who share the land with us.

It is striking how often we hear about disaster bringing a community together. Think of the Oso landslide in our area – or Hurricaine Katrina. Out of a tragedy that blindly strikes a community, each person is brought to the raw experience best captured in that old expression, which I intensely dislike but find irreplaceable sometimes, “there but for the grace of God go I.”  From the authenticity of that realization emerges the response: the ones who run in with aid, with comfort, with food, with a blanket, a room for a stranger, the tools and the skills to rebuild. From the depth of awful circumstance arises a  community with a renewed sense of a purpose beyond their individual selves, and faith founded in direct experience in the goodness, the dependability, of fellow human beings. It seems to me that these holidays, Sukkot and Shmita, ask us to build these conditions, to respond, and to form this awareness, through the regular, voluntary acceptance and experience of vulnerability.

This very repetition is surely intended to develop and strengthen  our response, our willingness to stand in a gift relationship with one another and the wider world. In much of our daily life, we are asked to put our faith in the “market economy,” which enables (some of) us to purchase what we need free of any encumbrance by entangling relationships. However as Michael Sandel sets out to prove in his book, What Money Can’t Buy, “Altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise.” Our tradition requires that we stand in a particular relationship to one another, and, I would assert, to the Earth. Sukkot and Shmita in particular provide us with regular opportunities to bring our conscious awareness to those relationships.

Rabbi Held concludes his d’var with the observation that “genuine community requires compassion, and compassion, in turn, depends on admitting our own vulnerability. … Community becomes possible … when we realize and accept that we are all susceptible to being hurt and are, crucially for the Torah, all equally dependent on God.”

This, then, is what Sukkot and Shmita have in common – the intention of building a world up from an authentic experience of vulnerability, community, and our shared dependence on God.

 

Actions, The Food System, The Land, The People

The Puget Sound: Deepening Our Connection to Local Abundance

There is simply no way to get around the fact that shmita is deeply concerned with food, as a source of life, of health, of well being, and ultimately, of peace. The shmita year compels us to express and embody our latent awareness that the true source of food is not with us. Food comes as a gift from the Creator by way of the land. And significantly, through shmita laws, the Creator infuses the distribution of food with a concern for justice and compassion for each and every being.

Shmita imagines a food system so well integrated with natural processes that it can be left to run on its own one year out of seven and still ensure enough for all, including wild nature. Furthermore the sources of these foods will be so woven into the physical environment where we live that we will be able to harvest them ourselves as needed, without the need for commercial harvesters. Surely this is a powerful vision of a return to life in a garden!

A shmita food system is local – so that we can personally access and pick from the farms where our food is grown. It is chemical free – if the food is to be shared with wild creatures, it cannot be laced with poisons. And everyone has direct access to sufficient amount to eat to contentment, “sova”. There is no waste and no stockpiling. According to Dr. Jeremy Benstein, director of the Sova Project, “the fact that our globalized agricultural system is highly unsuited to local decentralized community based solutions says a lot more about the ills of the system than about shmita and its relevance.”

To my great surprise and delight, there is a body in the Seattle area that is expressing great sensitivity to the way that a strong local agricultural system is a foundational element of community and individual health and well being. graphicThe Regional Food Policy Council is looking holistically at the interaction between local government, education, health, equity, environment, agriculture and economic development. It is made up of a broad range of local stakeholders including farmers, policymakers, academics, native tribes, people concerned with availability of food within vulnerable populations, restauranteurs, and food processors. They meet downtown monthly and the public is welcome to attend. Register at their site to receive agendas and meeting materials.