|||. ארץ ישראל – Agricultural Tradition
To paraphrase Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the story of the Hebrew Bible is an effort to infuse joy into self-restraint.
Self-restraint undergirds the Jewish story, beginning with God’s warning to Adam and Eve about the tree of knowledge. It is most present in the massive treasure house of agricultural law so often overlooked by modern Jewry. This is a body of law and wisdom imparted by the Torah, developed in depth in the Jerusalem Talmud, and lived out for centuries by Jews in the Land of Israel. The Land plays an outsize role in Jewish tradition; it is a character in our story, harmed by our maltreatment, enhanced by our morality.
Consider these instances of self-restraint towards the land, as ordained by the Torah:
Bal Tashchit: The Torah expressly forbids destroying fruit trees for the sake of waging war (Devarim 20:20), destroying long-term stability for short term gain. Rabbinic restrictions on consumption flows from this mitzvah; this includes needless destruction of dishes, clothing, buildings; stopping up a spring, destroying food in anger (Maimonides, Mishnah Torah Melakhim 6:10) – indeed any wanton destruction. However, if humans stand to benefit from such destruction, it is allowed.
Yet some rabbis went further: “Righteous people of good deeds...do not waste in this world even a mustard seed,” wrote the 13th century Sefer HaChinuch. “They become sorrowful with every wasteful and destructive act that they see, and if they can they use all their strength to save everything possible from destruction” (Sefer HaChinuch 529).
In the modern period, the German Orthodox Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch understood needless waste as a profound flaw of character: “If you destroy, at that moment you are not a human...and have no right to the things around you. I lent them to you for wise use only; never forget that. As soon as you use them unwisely...you commit treachery against My world, you commit murder and robbery against My property, you sin against Me!
“In truth, no one is nearer to idolatry than one who ignores that all things are creatures and property of G‑d, who presumes to have the right, because he has the might, to destroy them...That one serves the most powerful idols—anger, pride, and above all ego, which regards itself as the master of things” (at Deut. 20:20; Horeb 56).
Shmita: “Shmita is the public property of the Jewish people – and a gift from us to the whole world,” writes Hazon president Nigel Savage, a great populizer of Shmita in the 21st century. “There are few concepts as beautiful (and as radical) as the Jewish idea of a sabbath for the land every 7 years,” says climate leader Bill McKibben.
“Six years you may sow your field….But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of the Lord” (Leviticus 25:3-4). During the Sabbatical year, and its profound cousin, the Jubilee, all agriculture ceases; slaves go free; land becomes ownerless; debts are forgiven...the land rests. During the Jubliee, all people return to their ancestral holdings – no one is allowed to slip into a landless underclass.
To paraphrase Dr. Mirele Goldsmith, Shmita teaches moderns three truths: (1) human existence depends on living in rhythm with the earth, (2) environmental and economic justice are intertwined, and (3) we need deadlines: we cannot put off environmental and economic changes until its convenient – it must occur on regular multi-year time scales.
“It is a year of equality and rest, in which the soul reaches out towards divine justice, towards God who sustains the living creatures with lovingkindness,” writes R. Avraham HaKohen Cook (Shabbat HaAretz). “Sanctity is not profaned by the exercise of private acquisitiveness over all this year’s produce, and the covetousness of wealth stirred up by commerce is forgotten.”
The Torah warns that if shmita is not observed, the land will vomit us out. Are we not living this prophecy today on a global scale?
Shabbat: Traditional understanding of Shabbat requires ceasing all labor, electronics, cooking, driving, commerce – a mini-shmita. The farmer stays home, the fields grow unheeded; servants, farmers, draft-animals, the Land itself – all take a rest.
What would happen if the whole world observed a true rest, once a week? Not a weekend of driving or shopping, but a true rest? It has not yet happened.
"’Sabbath in our time! To cease for a whole day from all business, from all work, in the frenzied hurry-scurry of our time! To close the exchanges, the workshops and factories, to stop all railway services - great heavens! How would it be possible? The pulse of life would stop beating and the world perish!’ The world perish? On the contrary, it would be saved.” (R. Samson Raphael Hirsch, Judaism Eternal 2:30, cited by R. Fred Scherlinder Dobb)
“To set apart one day a week for freedom...a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our [fellows] and the forces of nature - is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for [our] progress than the Sabbath?” (A.J. Heschel, The Sabbath, 1951, 28, quoted by Dobb)
During the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world received a glimpse of “יום שכולו שבת” – the messianic vision of a “day that is all Sabbath.” Early in the pandemic, pollution plummeted; New York City’s nitrogen oxide levels dropped more than half; global daily CO2 emissions dropped 17%; cities like New Delhi (below) had unprecedentedly clear April skies.
Yet this was a dark Sabbath indeed; the fringe benefits of a terrible tragedy that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
A more joyful model of self-restraint exists in the Torah’s Sabbath. In 2013, Israeli research measured study shows daily pollution levels of nitric oxide (NO) in Tel Aviv during the week of Yom Kippur (Ilan Levy, “A national day with near zero emissions,” Atmospheric Environment, Vol. 77, 2013). Nitric oxide, emitted by cars and industry, harms human health. On Yom Kippur itself, “the Sabbath of Sabbaths,” many Israelis refrain from driving, and emissions plummet.
If anyone doubts that Jewish law and spiritual practice can have a profound impact on the climate, show them this graph.
