Thanks to Tuv Ha’Aretz farmer and founder of the Shorashim:Roots program at Chava v’Adam farm in Modi’in, Israel, Yigal Deutscher, for this insider look at the shemita year). 

22 days have passed from the moment we celebrated the New Year with the blowing of the shofar until yesterday, when, after hours of dancing, drinking, and singing, we rolled the Sefer Torah back to her beginning and read the story of creation.

This stretch of time has been a stretch out of time, a microcosm of creation itself, mirroring the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the 22 building blocks that God used in creating the world we live in.

Yesterday, we stepped back into time, into the Hebrew year 5767, the seventh year of the seven year cycles that guide the flow of time in the land of Israel. This year itself is an extended dimension out of time, one Shabbat stretching from now until next Rosh Hashana. We are already 22 days into Shemita but only now will we come face to face with this moment.

We cannot make this transition alone. We can only begin our year if the land begins with us. Our awakening, reemerging into the normal flow of time, is hand in hand with the earth itself. We have been in a cocoon, nursing from spiritual banks of forgotten reservoirs. The soil of Israel has been in a cocoon herself, deep in sleep after 5 months of hot sun and barren skies.

On Hoshana Rabba we beat the ground with willows, branches from a tree that feeds on the depths of hidden waters. Our beating is a plea for awakening. Arise from your slumber! Get yourself ready; the rains will shortly be falling!

On Simchat Torah, we are all high priests, raising our hands and calling to the skies of God and the angel Af-Bri. Impregnate the clouds! Bring the rains!

If Rosh Hashana is the birth of the world, of time, of human being, then Simchat Torah is the birth of history. And we begin our history this Shabbat with Bereishit. First, the distant recollection of a paradise of gathering, of abundance, of natural harmony. Then, the transition of humanity from this space to another world completely, sparked by the birth of the farmer and the murder of the gatherer.

And here we are, 5767 years later. Finally, after months of cloudless skies, rains will begin falling. The soil will come to life. Worms will find their way back to the surface. Sleeping roots will begin pushing deeper with new growth. Seeds will germinate. Green growth will shyly appear, soon to blanket the naked soils.

Even though it is Shemita, for the most part, history will recycle itself. Farmers will till ground and sow seeds. Trees will be pruned and fertilizers will be spread. Contracts will be signed. Crops will be harvested. Produce will be packaged and shipped, processed and labeled. Modern agriculture will have a healthy year, undisturbed. The marketplace will be as hectic as any previous year.

In the months leading up to Rosh Hashana, the marketplaces, the shuls, the fields were full of the sounds of dialogue, of argument, of tension. Everyone was asking questions…what are we supposed to do with Shemita today, in the modern world? How will the farmers make a financial living? What will people have to eat?

The Rabbinate of the land was split. Some argued that the only kosher food would be those imported or grown by Arabs. Others were outraged by the ultra-Orthodox ruling and upheld the legal loophole of Heter Mechira, which allows the symbolic sale of land to a non-Jew for the year, similar to selling chametz during Pesach. I observed every farmer in the valley where I work sign their fields to Heter Mechira, even watched as my own farm hired a farmer to replace me for the year.

All the questions and arguments were attempts to bypass this burden of a tradition, efforts to keep on living normally without inflicting the wrath of our own subconscious guilt. No doubt, there are some serious pressures and challenges. The financial security of many families in Israel depends on continued farming. There are enormous contracts for export to Europe that can’t simply be ignored for the year. Most of the population of Israel is concentrated in the center, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, a mostly urban and suburban region. Their only access to food is through the marketplace. The diet of most Israelis is heavily dependant upon annual vegetables, crops needy of tilled soil, irrigation, and fertilizer. The population is growing every year and tillable land is lost to highways and development towns.

This Shabbat, as we read the story of creation we will simultaneously be reading our own stories. We are continuously kicking ourselves out of the Garden. Cain is still killing his brother, daily. More than we can possibly understand. We are lost in this cycle, in this spiraling of history. Modern business-led agriculture, more than ever before, controls our future, our nutrition, our social and communal structures, our natural resources. This is the world of the marketplace, where food is commodity and land is a factory. We are eating oil, pesticides, the byproduct of slavery and deforestation.

Maybe God threw us out of the Garden in the first place, but he also gave us the key back in. All the laws that guide agricultural practices in Israel, such as Kelayim, Orlah, Bikkurim, Peah, and, most of all, Shemita, are meant to help us transcend the illusions created by agriculture…land ownership, private property, class divisions, food as commodity, land as factory. Following these Mitzvot, even as we embrace the agricultural system for our own survival, we also have a glimmering spark of the ideals and ethics of the Garden and the Gatherer.

Shemita, once every seven years, offers us a way out of our own history, just as Shabbat offers us a way out of the week, and back into the Garden. For sure, in the modern world, this tradition seems impossible and impractical. Maybe it is impossible. Maybe we’ve gone to far following Cain.

Nonetheless, if we keep on blindly studying just what we can and can’t do on Shemita, and argue about how to survive and keep on farming while staying legal to God, sure, the Oral Torah lives on but it becomes nothing more than neurotic arguments with no root. If we keep on approaching Shemita this way, yes, everyone will have food to eat. The year will pass and be forgotten. No lessons will be learned and we’ll go back to sleep, to be abruptly awoken in another seven years with the same confusions. Now is the time to wonder what Shemita offers us, how to celebrate it even if we can’t fully keep it, how to harvest her lessons even as we break her rules.

From the organic farmer’s perspective, from the pastoralist, from the ecologist, Shemita is not a step away from farming but a step towards correct farming. Just because the land is resting does not mean it is dead. If anything, it is raging with song and life, returning to her natural state. And we get the chance of relating to the earth again in a wild way. What the earth provides, gather. Enjoy the nuts, berries, and fruits of all the native plants that produce perennially. Enjoy the grains and seeds from storage. Enjoy the wild edible weeds and let your animals pasture, as well, so you can have dairy and meat to eat. Enjoy all the vegetables that grow on their own from seeds that fell from their Mother plants last season. Do not be fooled into thinking your field is yours and no one else’s, and feel free to go to your neighbor’s orchard to harvest your own needs. Barter and share but do not sell. Forgive all agricultural loans because you will need to be forgiven one day, as well.

Maybe in our current day, Shemita is an ideal more than anything else. But it offers us a language that we can use to understand the land we are living on, the land that we have been separated from in exile for thousands of years. And it offers us a chance to stop our regular agricultural practices and ask the important questions. Are we planting the right plants for this climate and landscape? Are they perennial, drought-tolerant and resistant to pests or are they needy annuals, products of modern agriculture? Are we eating the correct foods in our own diets? Are we taking full advantage of the limited rainfall and preserving the little water that we have in nachalot and mayanot? Is our agriculture completely changing the face of Israel’s natural landscape? Is it putting too much of a burden on her natural resources? Are we supporting monocrop large-scale farms or are we supporting family-owned organic farms? Do we even know where our food is coming from in this tiny country? Why are we buying imported dried figs when there are great trees in the wild full of fruit? Do we know what weeds are edible and what their medicinal properties are?

If we begin asking these questions now, then seven years from now we might be in an entirely different Shemita. And an entirely different Israel.