Radical Rejuvenation: Shmita and the Oneness of Being - Rosh Hashanah Sermon 2021

 

Rosh Hashanah Shmita 2021-5782

“Barech aleinu, grant blessings upon us, our God, and upon this year and may its harvest be for the good.  Bestow a blessing upon the face of the earth and satisfy us with your goodness, and give blessing to this year, [as you have done] in all good years past."

Isn't it beautiful? For centuries, our ancestors recited that blessing every day of their lives. They knew in their hearts, as we today can so easily forget, that humanity's survival depends entirely on the cycles of nature. When they asked for God's “blessing upon the face of the earth," what they meant was rain in its proper season -- for rain meant life.

How lucky we are to live in an age of bounty such as our ancestors could never have dreamed! All you need is a phone and an index finger and, within two hours, a cornucopia of delights from all over the world appears on your stoops  -- contactless delivery guaranteed.

 But this miraculous, nourishing miracle has left us almost oblivious to something indescribably precious:  our connection to, and total dependence on, this earth, this land from which our species arose, ever so gradually, over three-and-a-half billion years. Think of it!  Not long ago, I'm told, a mother asked her toddler if he knew where food comes from. "Yup," the kid replied. "It comes from a phone."

 No wonder our planet is in crisis!

 Our Torah is rooted in our connection to the land. Its tales and commandments are, as we say, "a tree of life" for they contain all the values we need to be loving stewards of this planet -- and especially for the land of Israel that God set aside for our special care.

Now, in reading the Torah, it's impossible to miss that our ways are based on cycles of seven. We work for six days and rest on the seventh. Shabbat is a deeply personal, intimate tradition that nourishes our souls. And the wisdom of the Torah teaches us something which we -- still in exile from our promised land and cut-off from the natural world by our 21st century ways -- have overlooked:  Just as we need our cycle of work and rest, so does the land itself. And that is why our Torah commands us to give the land a sabbath of its own -- a "shabbat haaretz."

"For six years you are to sow your land and to gather in its produce," Leviticus commands us, "but in the seventh you are to let it go (tishm’tenah) and to let it be (u’itashta), [so] that the needy of your people may eat; and what remains, the wildlife of the field shall eat. Do thus with your vineyard, with your olive grove.” 

Do thus: m’tenah u’itashta – let it go and let it be; from this phrase comes the word shmita, release, our name for the sabbath of Eretz Yisrael.

My teacher at the institute for Jewish Spirituality, Rabbi Sam Feinsmith for Jewish Spirituality, notes that  “The Torah recognizes that we human beings can easily fall into delusion, imagining ourselves to operate independently of the Great Oneness Of Being. A natural outgrowth of such a misperception is the mistaken belief that we own the earth and are therefore entitled to exploit it as we see fit to increase our power and wealth. [So during shmita],  this year-long sabbatical, we are asked to release [these destructive] tendencies and [recover our] awareness of our interdependence within the Great Oneness."

We are learning the hard way that Shmita is no archaic tradition -- far from it! Now, more than ever,  it is a way of keeping us grounded in vibrant, healthy and diverse relations between self, community, ecology, economy & spirit.  The more I study shmita and learn from great teachers past and present, the more I feel uplifted and even hopeful in a time of overwhelming disaster.

But since shmita practices are specifically directed at those living in  the Land of Israel, our exiled ancestors had no way to observe them -- unti the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, when our return to the Holy Land began in earnest. Tens of thousands arrived, many of them penniless refugees from pogroms, wars, and other disasters that were then sweeping across Europe. With scant resources to get them started, their prospects for rebuilding the Jewish homeland seemed bleak -- at best. Nonetheless, in 1909, a community of several dozen families could be seen just outside the city of Jaffa, gathering on a twelve-acre patch of sand dunes that they'd somehow managed to buy. Here they intended to build a town -- the  town we know today as Tel Aviv.

How in the world did they do it?!?!?

Well, it was their good fortune to have settled outside Jaffa, because the chief rabbi of that city was none other than the great (if controversial) sage, Rav Avraham Kook.

 Rav Kook was deeply conscious of the regenerative possibilities shmita could provide to the Jewish people in eretz yisrael. But he wisely saw something else:  These greenhorn pioneers could never have survived a sabbatical from growing crops. They had arrived, he wrote, "bleary-eyed from all the darkness of exile after exile" and "their spirits [had] not yet revived [because] the  spirit of God [was] not yet revealed in full force." And so, Rav Kook decreed that Jews should be permitted to temporarily "sell"  their land to non-Jews for the duration of the shmita (just as we sell our hummetz to non-Jews during Passover) allowing them to continue to feed themselves and grow stronger. "Our precious nation is small and weak, " Rav Kook noted, "but our spirits are lifted by what we can fulfill of mitzvot connected to the land."

Rav Kook truly believed in the promise for social and spiritual reawakening embodied in the shmita cycle. He wrote that the goodness, justice, equality, and calm within us would come into full expression, because it is who we are, both individually and as a people.  For during shmita, we must release our "business as usual" attitude to the world in order for a redeemed world to come to fruition.

 My friends, as we enter the shmita year this Rosh Hashanah 5782, we have an opportunity to make Rav Kook's vision our own. Shmita is practiced even today in the modern state of Israel though it has been marred by politics and disagreements among orthodox factions on precisely how it should be done.  But in our current state of crises, in Israel, in the US and around the world,  shmita is emerging according to its true vision, and the values extend far beyond the boundaries of Israel.

As Julian Sinclair writes, “Rav Kook paints a picture of Shmita as enabling a renewed connection to the divine life force in each individual and within us collectively. Like Shabbat, shmita quiets the tumult of the intervening periods and restores a more authentic relationship to ourselves, to each other, to nature, and to God.”

We have never needed shmita more than we do today.

By now, we are all aware (I hope!) of the horrifying scale of climate change -- trillions of tons of polar ice, melted away in just a few years; in just twenty years, half of the spectacular corals of Australia's 1,400 mile Great Barrier Reef have turned white with death and the rest will like die over the next 20 years ; and catastrophic weather -- storms, floods, fires, more fierce than at any time in recorded history.

But many of us are only just coming to realize that climate change is perhaps the greatest existential threat to the state of Israel in the next fifty years. Just weeks ago, a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, confirmed major changes to the Earth’s climate in every region of the globe. 

But according to Tel Aviv University climate expert Amir Givati, temperatures in warming in the Mediterranean region are rising at a staggering rate -- about 20 percent faster than the global average.  Israel's precious streams are drying-up and its fields and forests are being consumed by ravenous fires, invasive plants and animal species and the proliferation of harmful pests. The cost of agriculture is rising, and will rise ever higher, as crops deteriorate.  Summer temperatures, already soaring over 110 degrees, are certain to grow substantially hotter.  

"In this harsh glare, the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beyond tragic," Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg wrote just last week in The Washington Post. "Why should Israel insist that it cannot give up settlements, or Palestinians insist on the individual right of return of refugees to homes in pre-1967 Israel, when both peoples may end up as climate refugees knocking uselessly on the gates of Canada and Finland."

"If it sounds apocalyptic," writes climate scientist James Hanson . . . "it is." I know, I know -- at a time when we want nothing more than to get back to normal, we must instead set to work and change the world  -- or else!.

“In the end," says Nigel Savage of the Jewish environmental organization Hazon, "COVID is a kind of wake-up call to the American-Jewish community, and to the world, about the need to plan for potential disruptions to human civilization…as huge as COVID-19 has been, it pales beside the changes that a changing climate will bring." 

What we need is a strategy for facing these changes and one that appeals to me comes from Buddhist scholar and activist Joanna Macy. She suggests a four-step process that's thoroughly compatible with views of Rav Kook -- and with the Jewish notion of teshuva, or turning, that is a focus of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. 

Now you might suppose, as I did, that the first step ought to  be "recognizing the problem" -- that is, understanding as much as we can about how we mistreat the earth.  But on the contrary, Macy says, our first step must be to learn to recognize the wonder of this planet -- not only with our minds, but in a spiritual way, with our very souls -- and how to keep recognizing it, every day of our lives. Such gratitude makes us happier people, steels us for the challenges we face, and gives us the resilience we will certainly need to make the painful choices that lie ahead. We need to make gratitude a truly transformative spiritual practice, not just for individuals, but for entire communities.

In fact let's start right now: I want to express gratitude to our Sisterhood for once again compiling holiday gift bags for everyone under challenging circumstances Their caring, and that of others, have been invaluable in helping us to stay connected.

I'd like to call attention to one particular item you will find in those bags -- this card [hold up card] with a selection of ancient prayers that can help us build our gratitude on a daily basis. Did you know there's a barucha to say whenever you reach the banks of the sea? And others to say when you behold the terrible beauty of lighting, or the magnificence of a rainbow.  There's even a prayer that thanks God for the miracle of digestion, to be said after a satisfying visit to the loo. Yes I am serious -- ours is a down-to-earth tradition. Isn't it? .

When we say blessings we are connecting back to the Source – the source of our food; the source of morning and night; the source of love and relationship; the source of teaching and wisdom. Through blessings, we connect to the wisdom of our bodies and the beauty of our souls. Gratitude invites us to take action out of our love for ourselves, our love for the world, and our love for one another.

 But we mustn't t stop with gratitude. We need to appreciate all that is beautiful and good, but we also have to acknowledge all that is broken. The second step is to take in all the catastrophic ways we are destroying God's earth and to feel, deeply, the pain it causes. And then step three -- to understand the connections, shared hopes and goals, that we have with others, for we cannot bring change without their help.. In the end -- step four -- we set out to heal the world, holding in our minds and hearts, an inspiring, realistic vision of the better world we hope to create. These four steps are a cycle, which we must repeat, over and over again, much like the cycles of shmita and Shabbat working, creating, resting and rejuvenation and beginning again.

Rav Kook hoped that one day it would be possible for all the halakhot of shmita to be practiced in the real world, including a year-long respite from toiling in our fields. . But he envisioned much more: a periodic outbreak of justice, equality, and  universal human dignity -- in short to a comprehensive spiritual and social renewal.

   Well, I can't promise that; but I can promise that Shmita and all of the intersecting values it brings forth, will be a theme in our community throughout 5792 -- and especially our  school. We are planting a fall harvest in our peah garden – and could use a little help. especially from some green-thumbed gardeners,  to work with our kids. We are also  incredibly excited about our new commitment to music as a source of  comfort and solace, uplift and joy, as it has been for Jews across many centuries. It's already been my pleasure to introduce singer-songwriter Aaron Zev Katz who has joined our congregation to bring more new and old music to our community.

 I hope we can be a community that takes on serious spiritual practices together, such as the practice of blessing and of gratitude and the practice of compassion, for ourselves and others. I hope we can be inspired this year by the prospect of shmita, in its deepest and truest sense.

 We will be sending out a link to join a Shmita team, to create and implement programming, like climate action, helping people in need, adult education, mindfulness – really whatever we all want.

During these High Holy Days we come together to perform this service, this ancient ritual of judgment and transformation, of forgiveness, and of life and death.   We make confession, we open our hearts, we acknowledge the futility of our actions in difficult times.  We are emboldened to transform our perspectives, our lives, our relationships, and our world. During these High Holy Days we stand together as a single, spiritual unity.  We need each other and we always will.

May this new year bestow us with blessings of awareness and compassion.  May everything it produces, and everything we produce in it, be used in support of what is good. 

Barech aleynu Adonai Eloheynu. 

 Shana Shmta tova umetukah—a good year, a sweet year, for all.