BEHAR 5784
Behar (25:1-26:2) is the penultimate parsha of Leviticus. It is a short parsha tha is often shared with Bechukotai, which closes out the book.
Behar (at the mountain) is the parsha that contains the commandments of Shmita and Yovel. Shmita is the commandments 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.
The parsha ends with the typical prohibition against making idols, pillars or carved stones to worship—proving that all these practices were common amongst the Israelites and can be reclaimed as authentically Jewish. (26:1)
I want to discuss the following four themes in this short parsha.
Shmita
Land ownership
Community—who is in and who is out
How read the prohibition against idols, pillars and carved stones
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 written about it far more eloquently than I can. 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 a practical 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 and the land isn’t left fallow.
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. However, there are other ways to work with land that meet the needs of land without the fallowing that is the unobserved demand of Shmita. I want to briefly discuss four approaches to a sustainable agriculture.
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.
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.
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 agricultural system for thousands of years. 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 particularly 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?
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 parsha. “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 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 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).
What in your life do you feel like you own, and what in your life do you feel like you’ve borrowed the use of it for a while? What belongs to humans and what belongs to the divine? How does this relate to your relationships with the more than human world?
There’s a very clear distinction between Israelites and non Israelites when it comes to the laws of release in the yovel year. When it comes to Israelites “they are my servants, whom I brought out from the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold like the sale of a slave.” (25:42). In contrast, “And your slave and your maid that you will have, from the nations that are around you, you shall buy a slave or a maid from them…They shall become a possession for you. And you shall make them a legacy for your children after you to inherit as a possession.” (25: 45-46)
In ancient times, it was easy to know who belonged to your tribe and who did not. The question of who belongs to your tribe and who you treat as other because they don’t belong is an animating question of our global politics today, often for the worse. It’s such an animating question, to my mind because the boundaries between tribes have never been so porous and people are afraid of not having enough.
Our largest impact will be on the communities to which we are connected. Humans are tribal animals, in the same way that deer are herd animals and ants live in colonies. Who or what is/are your tribe(s) that you seek to impact and how do you want to impact them? I’m not talking about that larger group of people with whom you have casual interactions, even friendly ones with whom you talk coffee, shopping, sports. I’m talking about people with whom you want to make a profound difference such that they would say that their lives are different because they know you, share with you. This question sounds simpler than it is.
How should we read the prohibition against idols, pillars and carved stones? The parsha concludes with two short verses in Chapter 26. “You shall not make idols and you shall not set up an image or a pillar, and you shall not put a carved stone in your land to bot at it, because I am YHVH your God. You shall observe my Sabbaths and fear my sanctuary. I am YHVH. (26:1-2). It is certainly possible to read these in a straightforward way as things we should not do as Jews. We can also interpret them metaphorically and ask what are the idols in our lives or what do we view as the pillars of our modern world which actually undermine our relationship with the divine, or what sorts of things do we think are solid and immutable, but are actually human choices?
But I’d rather read these prohibitions against this kind of practice, here and elsewhere, as descriptions of what our ancestors actually did. I also believe, unlike others, that these practices are as authentically Jewish (or Hebrew if you prefer) as our Rabbinic tradition—just because the victors write the history, doesn’t mean you have to ignore the other voices. In fact, reclaiming them can be a crucially important project. And I believe that if we want to reclaim an authentic earth based Judaism, reclaiming the practices of our ancestors that the priests, scribes and Rabbis rejected is both legitimate and necessary.
Now, this snippet of text doesn’t give us anything really to go on. We can’t tell what idols or images were being rejected, and it’s unclear to me what is meant by a carved stone to which our ancestors bowed down. But this is fertile ground for our informed imaginations.
How would you read this prohibition in 26:1? How might you reclaim these rejected practices?
QUESTIONS
How does Shmita speak to you? Where are you in a mutually beneficial relationship with the more than human world, if anywhere? Where are you not in a mutually beneficial relationship with the more than human world?
What in your life do you feel like you own, and what in your life do you feel like you’ve borrowed the use of it for a while? What belongs to humans and what belongs to the divine? How does this relate to your relationships with the more than human world?
Who or what is/are your tribe(s) that you seek to impact and how do you want to impact them?
How would you read this prohibition in 26:1? How might you reclaim these rejected practices?
