They Hid, And We Must Not

By Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin

Despite the apparent unparalleled nature of today’s struggle with climate change, one could reasonably argue that this is not the first but rather the second time that humanity has suffered radical, global environmental destabilization by its own hand.

Think of expulsion from the Garden of Eden. There we were, just the two of us (instead of the cozy 7 billion we have grown to be today), happily tilling and tending the garden, basking in the gentle climate and eating to our heart’s content.

Then, whether seduced by greed, appetite, curiosity, the nudge of boredom, the itch of discontent or the promise of progress, we bit off more of the world’s resources than we could chew.

Teaching Shmita

By Laura Bellows

This summer, I challenged my students to let Teva’s Red Wiggler composting worms be their teachers for an afternoon. In Perkei Avot (4:1), Ben Zoma teaches: “Who is wise? The one who learns from all of creation.” Let the learning begin. My kindergarteners danced and wiggled like worms, second graders cradled their new friends in beds of damp newspaper and fed them food scraps once bound for the landfill. Our b’nai mitzvah students wrote their hopes for teshuva – for personal transformation and renewal, on scraps of paper and let the worms turn their writing into the physical teshuva of new soil. Though Ben Zoma may have intended our wisdom to come from human teachers, is it not even more illuminating to learn from those parts of creation so different from ourselves? What wisdom might we gain from letting the land be our teacher for even an hour, let alone a year? Shmita gives us this opportunity. In the shmita cycle, we spend six years directing the resources, property, and people around us — preparing, acquiring, growing, getting ahead — and in the seventh year (shmita) we return to the life of students with the land as our teacher: we break down our fences, let go of that which is “ours,” take only what we need, release debts (and are released), and listen to the pulsing of a more interdependent society and a land at rest.

On a microcosmic level, I often wish my classroom was the ideal shmita society: radically cooperative, economically (and socially) equitable, environmentally sustainable and embracing of life beyond our fences. But if you have ever seen independent American preschool students attempt to share art supplies for a communal project, you know this is a hard reality to achieve.

What does it look like to teach shmita?  How can we best bring shmita values into our classrooms and shul gardens, tzedakah projects and playgrounds?  And, honestly, why dedicate classroom time to shmita when so many other subjects feel pressing?

If You Love Torah, Set It Free

By Aharon Varady

Those of us who make a living as crafters, educators, and servants of the Jewish community: how do we feel about sharing our work? I mean, really sharing? When, in working with Torah, I create a lesson plan or feel like I have some brilliant insight or analysis or make a translation, how do I give it, release it to the world at large so that my work can spread through adoption, adaptation, redistribution (and attribution)? Further, what are my anxieties and vulnerabilities in sharing my Torah? What honestly are my desires, aspirations, and needs? How, through my method of sharing, can I satisfy and reconcile these concerns?

Green Choices for the New Year

By Rabbi Joshua Stanton

When I was a senior in college, a friend came into the dining hall one evening filled with excitement. She had been working on her honors thesis in economics and had come to a surprising conclusion: environmental education and awareness among young people might be changing what they bought. Their consumption patterns were being altered by their care for the environment.

While I am not sure how robust my friend’s findings were, I have found my own choices impacted by an awareness of the environment, and I sense a similar awareness in many colleagues and friends. Perhaps an unrepresentative sample, it may also suggest a major change in the way that people across many segments of society choose to consume — namely with an eye towards green products.

The Right Amount

By Alan AtKisson

At the age of forty, I moved to Sweden, and learned Swedish.  Like any wealthy country, Sweden is full of shopping malls and the advertisements that drive us to them. Although once feared by US leaders as a bastion of socialism (President Dwight Eisenhower once gave a speech on the topic), this Nordic country has always been a tiny capitalist powerhouse, from Alfred Nobel’s string of European dynamite and gunpowder factories in the 1800s, to today’s global brands like IKEA or H&M.  A visiting colleague from Tunisia, who had spent time in both the US and Sweden, reflected to me that Swedes seemed to him even more obsessed with shopping than Americans – which was saying quite a lot.

But despite the usual consumerist excesses that one can find here (mostly in the major cities), Sweden also has something that many other countries do not have:  the concept of lagom.

Indebted Countries and the Sabbatical Year

By Rabbi Micha Odenheimer

Norman Gottwald, an American biblical scholar, expressed well the challenge of applying ancient wisdom to contemporary issues: “So we are left with the logically perplexing but morally empowering paradox that the Bible is both grossly irrelevant in direct application to current economic problems and incredibly relevant in vision and principle for grasping opportunities and obligations to make the whole earth and its bounty serve the welfare of the whole human family.”[1] When we speak about Shmita, our task is to imagine and reflect on how Shmita should and could be observed and celebrated today. This requires a double feat of the heart and mind: analyzing and intuiting the intent and meaning of Shmita as it appears in our texts and traditions while understanding our current context and reality, how it has been constructed and how it might be healed.

Shmita as a Force for Social Change

By Rabbi Yedidya Sinclair

In October 2007, at the outset of the last Shmita year, I was interviewed on NPR, New York, about the Shmita controversy then raging in Israel. It was the latest twist on the century-long heter mechira (permissible sale) story. Rabbis were denouncing other rabbis for their excessive leniency and communities were boycotting other communities’ kosher certifications.  Word of the whole sorry saga reached the US and NPR wanted to know what was up.

Shmita: The Rhythms of Life

By Rabbi Natan Margalit

What can we, in our present moment of great environmental, social and economic peril and also enormous and exciting potential, learn from the ancient biblical idea of shmita? With its requirement to let all land lie fallow and all debts be forgiven every seventh year, shmita offers us not just an example of progressive social and ecological legislation, but also an insight into an alternative world-view. Shmita tells us to put limits on our activities because we are not the center of the universe, because we are in relationship to something larger than ourselves. One way to look at this is to say that shmita reminds us that whereas the ethos of our times is to move forward unceasingly, in a more sane and inter-connected world there are rhythms.

Sacred Work, Sacred Rest: Free Time for a Free People

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow

“Six days shall you labor and do all your work; but on the seventh day you shall rest.”

Why? Because this teaches you the deepest truth of the Cosmos, that a rhythm of Doing and Being is part of every molecule and every galaxy, every human and every tree and tiger. (Exod 20: 8-11)

Why? To make real your own freedom – and the freedom of the workers who are bound to you. For only slaves must work all the time. (Deut. 5: 12-15)

Six years shall you labor and make economic growth, but on the seventh you shall rest, yes rest: Restfulness to the exponential power of Restfulness. (Lev. 25: 1-24).

Why? Because the Earth has a covenant with God that requires its right and its duty to rest. If you – that is, WE—refuse to let the Earth rest, it will rest anyway –on our heads. Through drought, famine, flood, plague, exile. (Lev. 26, esp. 31-38 and 43; II Chron. 36: 20-21)

“Six days shall you labor …” But American society is now afflicted by mass unemployment – fourteen million people who want and need full-time jobs but have had their jobs abolished by banks and bosses who are refusing to invest the money that would hire them, and are refusing to let the US government invest that money.

The Land Shall Rest: Exploring Shmita in the Diaspora

By Rabbis Ebn Leader and Margie Klein

In the Jewish calendar, the next Shmita year will commence in 2014, and Jews around the world are beginning to think about it.

In North America for example through the Shmita Project and other efforts, Hazon, the Jewish Farm School, and other groups are embracing Shmita as an opportunity to explore Jewish values around land, food, and sustainability. The Shmita Project encourages people not only to hold study groups, but to plant “Shmita gardens” that follow the Shmita laws in our own backyards and practice alternate economic models that promote collaboration and sharing.

The Torah’s mandate to let the land lie fallow for a year raises many serious questions. What would it mean to forgo agricultural activity and the economic structures that follow from it? What would it mean to spend a year treating the fruit that then grows of its own accord as ownerless, so that everyone has the same right to resources of the land?