IYAR TORAH
I’m going to look at 4 parshiot, the last three in Leviticus and the first one in Numbers. Numbers is actually read on a Shabbat that occurs in Sivan, just as I discussed Kedoshim last month even though it was read in the beginning of Iyar.
Here are the four themes.
· Wounded Healer in Judaism (Emor)
· Shmita (Behar)
· The promise of the elimination of wild animals (B’chukotai)
· The firstborn belongs to the divine and debts we owe (Bamidbar)
The perspective of a wounded healer is an authentically Jewish perspective and is in direct contrast to view of holiness offered in Emor.
Levites, descendants of Aaron, who are injured are still Levites. They partake in communal life as Levites, but they can’t offer sacrifices because they aren’t pure or holy. The list of injuries includes someone blind, crippled, mutilated, one limb longer than the other, a man with a broken leg or arm, hunchback, dwarf, someone with spotting in their eye or with scabs or scurvies or has crushed testicles. (21:17-20). Then sacrifices can’t be offered if you are polluted (22:2-9). This connection of purity and holiness is extended to sacrificial animals who have to be unblemished. (22:19-25).
The constant fear is that any of these imperfections will negatively impact the holiness of the system. It is as if the profane or the unholy spreads like measles or Covid, and the only way to preserve the health of the sacred is to quarantine it from the profane.
But there is another approach to the relationship between the sacred and the profane that I want to contrast and that is authentically Jewish. Many cultures have the idea of a “wounded healer.” This is highly common in shamanic cultures in which a major part of how people become shamans is through healing crises. We too have an authentic indigenous tradition of wounded healers.
Isaac Luria, the most prominent Kabbalistic mythologist believed that brokenness was at the very heart of the creation of the world. His cosmogonic myth was that God was lonely and wanted other creatures, so he poured the divine light into vessels--only the light overwhelmed the vessels and they cracked. Thus the job of Jewish mystics became to repair the Godhead and thus the world through “rectifications” (tikkun). As Leonard Cohen wrote “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” (lyrics to Anthem)
This belief in brokenness as an offering to the divine as opposed to offering only purity is also manifested in early Hasidism. The Kotzk, a 19nth Century Hasidic master is famous for saying "there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” Nachman of Bratzlav urged his followers and himself practiced spending time every day pouring out his problems to the divine in the vernacular language. This sensibility is radically different than the sensibility of the priesthood in Leviticus. Wounded healers believe that the profane world is already suffused with sacrality. The path to sacredness is to uplift the profane, rather than separate it from the sacred. The wounded healer is a path that embraces the cycle of birth and death and the imperfections of the world.
Can the sacred be contaminated by pollution (the belief in Leviticus) or is the sacred strengthened by the confession of imperfection (the Hasidic belief)? In your view, does the divine prefer purity or brokenness?
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.
Let me offer a radically different approach to how we should understand working with the land. There are 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 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.
How does Shmita speak to you? Where are you in a mutually beneficial relationship with the more than human world, if anywhere?
“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 the preceding parsha 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’m back to taking my dog out on a leash to pee at night because a wild coyote family has joined the neighborhood and even though he is 55 lbs, coyotes 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.
Where does wilderness or wildness play a role in your life? How well are you tending your wild edges?
The idea that the firstborn belongs to YHVH for services rendered sure sounds like a kind of Lord-vassal relationship where the vassals pay the Lord (usually in crops, labor and military service if called upon) in exchange for protection and land on which to farm—because the divine owns the land. Here’s our text. “And I here, I have taken the Levites from among the children of Israel in place of every firstborn, the first birth of the womb from the children of Israel. And the Levites shall be mine, because every firstborn is mine. In the day that I struck every firstborn in the land of Egypt, I consecrated every firstborn in Israel to me, from human to animals. They shall be mine. I am YHVH (3:11-13).
On this reading, YHVH claims the service of the Levites at the mishkan (and later the temple) rather than claiming the first born of every tribe. Further, this debt of service is hereditary. Born into the Levite clan and you owe this debt on behalf of all Israel, born into Benjamin and the Levites take care of it.
The idea of hereditary service in payment to a debt isn’t exactly a contemporary idea. And yet, I was the board president of my local Jewish day school for five years and have been the de facto treasurer for almost a decade despite the fact that I don’t actually enjoy the work. So why do it? I was asking myself this question a few years ago during my morning prayer practice, when the answer hit me: I was paying back a debt to my ancestors who had educated me as a Jew.
What debts do you believe you owe the divine? What debts do you believe you owe your ancestors? What debts do you owe the more than human world? How might you redeem any of these debts?
QUESTIONS
Can the sacred be contaminated by pollution (the belief in Leviticus) or is the sacred strengthened by the confession of imperfection (the Hasidic belief)? In your view, does the divine prefer purity or brokenness?
How does Shmita speak to you? Where are you in a mutually beneficial relationship with the more than human world, if anywhere?
Where does wilderness or wildness play a role in your life? How well are you tending your wild edges?
What debts do you believe you owe the divine? What debts do you believe you owe your ancestors? What debts do you owe the more than human world? How might you redeem any of these debts?
