ON OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH WORKED LAND AND WILDERNESS BE’HAR AND BE’CHUKOTAI
Behar (25:1-26:2) is the penultimate parsha of Leviticus. It is a short parasha that is often shared with Bechukotai. Bechukotai, By My Laws (26:3-27:24) is the last parashah of Leviticus, although Numbers (1:1-10:10) are also priestly documents and would have fit in perfectly well in Leviticus. The divisions into books of the Bible were finalized sometime around 400 BCE during the Second Temple period after the return from Babylon. Bechukotai is read in conjunction with Behar in non leap years such as our current year of 5785.
Behar (at the mountain) is the parsha that contains the commandments of Shmita and Yovel. Shmita is the commandment to let the land have a rest. Yovel, which is usually translated as Jubilee, is the restoration of the status quo ante in terms of debts and land ownership.
Bechukotai has two basically unconnected parts. Chapter 26 is a list of all the blessings we will receive if we observe divine commandments and then all the curses if we do not. Naturally, the curses capture the imagination of our authors, and the list is longer and much more colorful than the list of blessings. Chapter 27 is all about the details of appraising the value of different things—people, land, animals and having a surcharge of 10 or 20% for YHVH. This surcharge goes to the priesthood and helps support them because they do not have any land.
I’m going to discuss Shmita and Yovel from Be’har and the promise of the elimination of Wild Animals from B’chukotai. I have a lot to say about these topics which is not the usual earth based drash, so this blog is going to be much longer than usual.
Shmita is the set of commandments to let the land have a Shabbat and rest every seven years. It is incredibly popular and important in the earth based Jewish movement, and many people have championed it. Arthur Waskow wrote about it decades ago, Hazon has done a lot of work, as have Yigal Deutscher, Nati Passow, Justin Goldstein, just to mention a few.
I think the great driver behind its popularity, as Waskow has emphasized, is that we are supposed to be human beings, not human doings, but we are so busy doing, doing, doing, in our modern world. Shabbat is a partial antidote, but then we resume our frenzy come Saturday night, if not before. So we need a rest, a real rest, and we need to give the earth a rest from our relentless human action upon it. Hence the importance of Shmita.
Shmita is patterned after the double portion of manna given to the Israelites in the desert. After all, the first question many of us reading this should ask is how we are going to feed ourselves if we don’t seed our fields, prune our vineyards, or do any kind of harvesting (25:3-4)—this is the same question the Israelites asked about manna which is why they tried to stash extra back in Exodus. The idea is that the harvest will be so good the year before the shmita that we will simply live off of it during shmita.
But this idea is simply not dependable as an everyday matter. There isn’t a natural cycle that has bumper crops every six years. That’s why, as a practical matter, shmita isn’t observed and land is not left fallow. Instead there are a variety of legal work arounds.
The idea of shmita for the land rests upon a conception that farming is some kind of mining that uses up soil which thus needs to rest. That’s often enough true even in indigenous societies. For instance, slash and burn agriculture is a common indigenous practice where land is cleared, farmed for a few years and then abandoned to let it recover. This is a sustainable kind of agriculture, if we have few enough humans. It’s not sustainable in the context of larger human populations.
There are, contrary to the conception of shmita, a myriad of ways to work with land that meet the needs of land without the fallowing that is the unobserved and unobservable demand of Shmita. I want to briefly discuss four possible approaches to a sustainable agriculture. These are approaches for agriculture, and are not a call for any kind of reversion to a focus on gathering and hunting as humans practiced for most of our time on this planet.
Sustainable agriculture, by my definition, means an agriculture that is mutually beneficial for the land, for the humans whose livelihood depends on a fertile earth, and for all the beings involved in the web of agriculture. It is sustainable in that it can be practiced generation after generation. As F.H. King wrote about Asian farming, a sustainable agriculture is an agriculture that can be practiced for 40 centuries.
The first approach is farming that enhances the natural fertility of the soil rather than mining it. The soils on the farm I had the privilege of stewarding in the 90’s were better when I left that when I started, measured by organic matter, hay yield, carrying capacity (how many livestock I could graze) and by old timers saying that they’d never seen the farm look so good. The soils of Joel Salatin’s place are both better than the soils of his neighbors because of his agricultural practices and better than they were when he took over the farm almost 40 years ago. If you have gardened some place for a long time and done it well, those soils should be better than when you started. A mutually beneficial relationship with the soil should be our goal, and that’s missing in our text. The key practice here is enhancing soil fertility by returning manure from animals and/or green manure from plants to the soil while successfully harvesting the sun through the plants.
A second approach is being championed by the Land Institute. The Land Institute has developed and is commercializing the idea of perennial grain crops. All of the grain we eat globally are annual crops, which means they need to be planted every year and that involves a series of trade offs that make it difficult to be sustainable. But think of a native Midwest prairie, as existed in Salina Kansas, the home of the Land Institute. That was a sustainable ecological system for thousands of years before we humans plowed the prairie. Perennial grains planted in a polyculture setting (more than one crop) is the goal—"farming in nature’s image” as one of the books from the scientists at the Land institute express it. Thus we can harvest a perennial wheat year after year (the commercial name is “kernza”) without mining the soil.
A third approach is the kind of agriculture practiced in much of the eastern part of this country from Colonial times through WW2. This involved integrating animals and a focus on crop rotation. The fertility needed for corn, the main grain crop, was provided by some combination of animals grazing a particular field or through the nitrogen fixation of legume crops, some of which were turned back into the soil.
A fourth approach is embodied in the idea of permaculture. Permaculture seeks to create sustainable land use through a specific design process where certain parts of a given piece of land are used for specific purposes. I personally have trouble understanding permaculture design, and I’m not sure how applicable it is on anything beyond a homestead level, but I would be remiss not to mention it.
We make a radical mistake if we believe that the only possible relationship we can have with land is a relationship of harm. That’s just not true. Can we harm the land? Absolutely, and standard American agriculture as practiced since WW2, including plenty of “organic” farming absolutely does this. But what we need is a spiritually right agriculture, not no agriculture at all, because without agriculture we don’t eat.
Shmita also provides another example where our ancestors viewed land as a living being with some of the same rights and obligations as we humans have. “and in the seventh year, the land shall have a Sabbath.” (25:4), just like we humans have a Sabbath every week. This is an expression of the Animist world view of our ancestors.
Our usual conception of land ownership is that we (and the bank) own a certain piece of property. But that’s not the conception of land ownership in our parashah. “But the land shall not be sold permanently because the land is mine, because you are aliens and visitors with me.” (25:23). We are just guests on the land which belongs to YHVH.
Traditional face to face gather-hunter societies “owned” land communally. That is, a certain area of land from which they gathered food and hunted belonged to the tribe as a whole. They could and did lose it in war to other tribes—and they lost it as a collective. “Owned” might well not be the right word at all here, because it wasn’t viewed the same way as a cooking pot or a spear—more like the tribe had the use of the land. Agriculture, a relatively recent innovation in human history, made being settled in the same place and land ownership possible. Our text is working out the issues of land ownership; it’s important to remember that the question of individual vs communal ownership of land was an issue in the developed world as recently as the 19nth Century in England where there were lots of conflicts over the “enclosure” of the commons. The enclosure laws basically meant taking land that was used by a village for grazing and hunting and actually selling it to someone.
There’s a saying in the alternative agricultural community that land doesn’t belong to us, but we belong to the land. This saying shifts the orientation from an anthropocentric perspective to one that centers the land and the more than human world. Most of us gather/produce/hunt little to none of our own food, and the lack of an economic connection to land makes it easy to be distant from the more than human world, a point Wendell Berry has focused on in many essays (see his book Home Economics, for instance.)
Yovel, which is usually translated as Jubilee, is the restoration of the status quo ante in terms of debts and land ownership, a great equalizing of society mitigating against the accumulation of riches and the kind of radical economic inequity we see everyday. The release involves the cancellation of all debts between Israelites and the return of land to its original owner. Note that this only applies to Israelites: non Israelite slaves can be passed on as an inheritance. Note also that houses in walled cities are exempt from the yovel requirement.
JPS actually translates yovel as “release”, because there’s no celebration as part of yovel and thinks that the translation as Jubilee is because one of those weird cross language sound alikes (Yovel sounds like Jubilee, though there’s no relationship) Lastly, most scholars think that the yovel was never actually instituted (probably because it was too threatening to the monied classes).
“I will give you peace in the land, and you will lie down with no one making you afraid and I shall make wild animals cease from the land and a sword will not pass through your land.” (26:6). This vision, which is echoed and elaborated by Ezekiel, a priest and a prophet who prophesied during the Babylonian exile (Ezekiel Chapter 34) is that rightly ordered worlds don’t have any wild animals. We all want security and this is precisely the promise being extended. As YHVH says in Be’har talking about shmita “And you shall do my laws and observe my judgments and do them, so you will live on the land in security. And the land shall give its fruit, and you will eat to the full, and you will live in security on it.” (Leviticus 25:18-19).
I love security. I’m a huge fan of predictable patterns in my life. Wild animals scare me. I tend to keep a really tight leash on anything unpredictable.
The promise of no wild animals is a wrong promise for both spiritual and anthropocentric practical reasons. Practically, wilderness serves a great variety of beneficial functions for humans that we don’t recognize and therefore, in our hubris, mistakenly assume don’t exist. Think of the destruction of forests for palm plantations in Asia or the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest to provide grazing land as simple examples. Think of the destruction of coastal wetlands providing protection for places like New Orleans from hurricanes. The examples are literally countless.
On a spiritual level, we need wilderness. We need a counterweight against our tendency to be human centric. Wilderness impresses us as a place where we simply aren’t the center. We also need to incorporate wilderness within us because it is the source of so much of our creativity. If we were completely civilized, if there were no wild animals outside or inside of us, we would be spiritually and eventually literally dead. This is a vision of a mutually reinforcing relationship between internal and external wilderness. Most of us, certainly including me, suffer from a wilderness deficit.
I wanted to ask this question “how well are you tending your wild edges?” There is an interesting inherent tension in this question. On the one hand, wildness can’t be tended, else it wouldn’t be wild. On the other hand, if we don’t tend it, the overwhelming gravitational pull of human centric civilization will swallow us whole.
As the title of this overlong blog suggests, I urge you to reflect upon both your material and spiritual relationships with worked land and with wilderness. Both are necessary and we can only be fully human if we align ourselves with both.
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