October, 2022 Megillah
RABBI'S NOTES
The shmitah year is over; that beautiful seventh year of fallowness, of resting our fields, concluded at Rosh Hashana. We again pick up the plow. Except that it is fall now, not time to plant new crops. We’ll still be eating out of the stored-up grain for a while longer. It is a slow return.
Largely because of the brilliant work of Hazon: the Jewish Lab for Sustainability, many of us have known about the shmitah year at least since the last cycle. I have just finished my annual ritual of putting new post-its in my High Holy Day machzor to lead us through this year’s services.
At the place where we chant a verse about the sounding of the shofar, I found a post-it that I must have put in there seven years ago, at Rosh Hashana 5776 (2017). It says, “Now shmitah ends—we: foraged for apples, gathered Tu B’Shevat fruits, learned about fabric waste, and patched and up-cycled our jeans.” I remember those delightful activities, spawned as we tried to incorporate the notion of shmitah into our own lives and concerns.
In the seven years since, the folks of Hazon and others have helped us all to enlarge our sense of shmitah to address many kinds of fallowness: taking a holiday from consumerism, looking at how we work and rest, undertaking debt forgiveness (check out the astonishing RIP Medical Debt project at https://ripmedicaldebt.org), and contemplating the wisdom of cycles of productivity and cessation.
Shmitah is such a powerful teaching, in its literal agricultural and economic sense and in its metaphoric extensions.
Imagine a year with no crops—not because of drought or fire or overgrazing, but built into the cycle of things. You know for six years that the seventh year is coming. There is time to plan, to store up. It is the opposite of a crisis. There are deprivations in that seventh year: no Early Girl tomatoes! But the community has set aside provisions, and you get along. It is not a crisis, not an emergency. It is something that happens, that must be remembered and planned for and lived throug
I recently read an essay by Kyle Whyte called “Against Crisis Epistemology.” Whyte is Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potowatomi Nation. I learned about this essay from my brilliant and inspiring friend and teacher Rabbi Dev Noily, who is, among many other things, the co-chair of Jews on Ohlone Land down in the Bay Area (https://www.jewsonohloneland.org/about). Dev has been probing connections and disjunctions between Jewish and Indigenous ways of knowing.
Whyte says that what makes something a crisis is that it is cast as unprecedented and urgent. Identifying something as a crisis allows people in power to suspend their ethics and impose “solutions” which often incur more harm than benefit. Framing a situation as a crisis allows the building of dams and the drilling of oil wells, brutalization of animals, imprisonment or enslavement of Native people, seizure of Indigenous land, and many other responses that end up privileging the powerful.
Whyte focuses on climate. Remember when we learned that we shouldn’t talk about “climate change” but about “climate crisis” in order to underline the unprecedented urgency of the situation? He does not deny that global climate change is real and serious, but he asks some hard questions about how to deal with it.
In case you want to read the essay, it is online at https://bit.ly/3M8bLRF
It’s a hard read—it sat on my desk for months before I finished it. But I’m glad I did. I can’t stop thinking about the problem of crisis thinking in so many realms, close-to-home as well as distant. I’m thinking about how even well-meaning activists frame so much of what is happening around us in crisis language which may make us numb and hopeless. Endemic crisis thinking not only makes us chronically anxious, but might also keep us from thinking well and acting wisely.
Just today I saw a headline saying that a panel of medical experts has recommended anxiety screening for everyone under age 65.
Whyte talks about another way of understanding the world and responding to difficulties that calls for “kinship” rather than “crisis” response. He quotes Dan Wildcat, author of Red Alert: Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge, who describes this sense of kinship as “requiring respect for the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life.”
Whyte cites another author, Jeannette Armstrong, Canada Research Chair in Okanagan Indigenous Knowledge and Philosophy from British Columbia, who studies traditional ways and values:
“…every year, continuously, the people who are caretakers, and the people who are careful of the harvest, whoever they might be, are reminded at our ceremonies and at our feasts, that this is what our responsibility and our intelligence and our creativity as human beings are about.
That’s what the gift of being human is about. If we cannot measure up to that, and we cannot live up to that, we’re not needed here, and we won’t be here.”
The most powerful piece of Whyte’s essay to me was the suggestion, made by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, an Indigenous Brazilian educator and land rights activist, that we need to “hospice” the earth, which:
“would entail sitting with a system in decline, learning from its history, offering
palliative care, attending to the integrity of the process, dealing with tantrums,
incontinence, anger and hopelessness, ‘cleaning up,’ and clearing the space for
something new. This is unlikely to be a glamorous process.”
Unglamorous, yes, and also, to my ears, so much more realistic. It’s painful to think that we might be called on to “hospice” our world. But I think that might mean to gently care for ruined landscapes, nurture animals and plants away from the brink of extinction, practice slower and more thoughtful consumption of resources. Not totally unlike shmitah values.
I don’t know exactly where this line of thought leads, and I am certainly no expert from reading one essay. I think there is a need for identifying some events and situations as crises, but I am also persuaded that much can run amok when we feel under the gun, literally or figuratively. For a start, I think it might be worthwhile to just notice crisis thinking when it comes up and to wonder a bit about what it calls forth, in our own guts and souls, in our actions, in the policies we advocate and the voices we lift up.
As we return to the world of plowing and sowing, I’m sort of glad that it starts slowly, with a winter in there before the real action can begin. As we enter this new season and this new year and this new cycle, I wish us all some slowness, some time to deliberate and not to panic.
And I wish us all a sense of kinship with all that we sustain and all that sustains us.
