A Love Poem to the Soil

The Jordan Valley. Photo by David Shulman

Dear friends,

The South Indian spiritual sensation Sadhguru drove his motorcycle across the border from Jordan this week and made his way to Tel Aviv. He’s on tour to Save the Soil of the Earth, most of which has been degraded in dangerous ways, in a kind of offshoot of the climate crisis. He probably didn’t know that he arrived in Israel during the week when Jews are reading Parashat Behar, the Torah’s great love poem to the land, the soil, the earth itself. 

It begins with Shmita, the seventh year, where (as we learned so beautifully from Liz Aeschlimann at our Shabbat a couple weeks ago), the land itself gets a rest: 

“When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a sabbath of יהוה.  

Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of יהוה: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard.  

You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land.  

But you may eat whatever the land during its sabbath will produce—you, your male and female slaves, the hired and bound laborers who live with you, and your cattle and the beasts in your land may eat all its yield.” 

For farmers, following the laws of Shmita without the legal tricks the rabbis came up with to keep them from bankruptcy is not easy. But not following them is even more dangerous: 

“Exile comes to the world for idolatry, for sexual sins and for bloodshed, and for [transgressing the commandment of] the [year of the] release of the land.” (Pirkei Avot 2) 

It’s simple mathematics. Let the land rest and you can live off of it. Don’t, and you’ll be pushed off of it. 

Next week’s Parashah we includes this: 

“And you I will scatter among the nations, and I will unsheath the sword against you. Your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin.  

Then shall the land make up for its sabbath years throughout the time that it is desolate and you are in the land of your enemies; then shall the land rest and make up for its sabbath years.  

Throughout the time that it is desolate, it shall observe the rest that it did not observe in your sabbath years while you were dwelling upon it.” 

The math couldn’t be clearer. The next part of the Parashah holds a more complex mathematical formula that is even more radical: 

“You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years.  

Then you shall sound the horn loud; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land - and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.” 

Every fifty years we are commanded not only to let the land rest in a stricter way than the seventh year, but also to relinquish whichever land purchases were made during that time. Real estate should not be tied to place, but to time: 

“In buying from your neighbor, you shall deduct only for the number of years since the jubilee; and in selling to you, that person shall charge you only for the remaining crop years:  

the more such years, the higher the price you pay; the fewer such years, the lower the price; for what is being sold to you is a number of harvests.” 

There should be no such thing as ownership of land. A private beach, a private forest, a private waterfall – these are fantasies that should not hold standing in our reality. Even the notion of borders that keep certain people out of a piece of land denotes a type of collective ownership, which is, simply put, false. Our participation is such falsehood is a sin. “Those that preserve hollow lies,” said Jonah, “forsake their own mercy.”  

The underlying principle of our relationship with land comes in the final climax of this redemptive poem of radical, impossible love: 

כִּי־לִ֖י הָאָ֑רֶץ כִּֽי־גֵרִ֧ים וְתוֹשָׁבִ֛ים אַתֶּ֖ם עִמָּדִֽי 

“For the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.” 

The land does not belong to us. What is ours is temporary. The notion that we actually own anything is an expression of false pride. The Medieval Jewish commentator Rabbenu Bahya explains our stranger-resident-ness like this: “Don’t consider yourselves the main point.”  

Observing these laws strictly is impractical. Letting them guide our way, however, is a gift that will help us be truly free, along with everyone else living on this soiled earth. As the Zohar says: “This is Torah, which is called Freedom. And that means the freedom of everyone and everything.”  

Shabbat shalom, 

P.S.
One way to actualize these ideas is to support our fundraiser for Black Women's Blueprint.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha