Author Archive | Hazon

by Yigal Deutscher At the core of many of the Shmita values is this sense that we do not own our resources; that, in fact, the resources we call ours are not our property at all. On the Shmita year, private lands become open as commons. Private harvests must be shared with the community. Even private stored foods must be opened to those in need. Food and land are no longer commodities on the marketplace. They no longer carry a price tag. And the people who lay claim to such land and food are transformed from private owners to community stewards, caring for communal property. An emphasis is placed upon the community, beyond the private individual. Perhaps the Shmita year pushed the edge a bit, putting us all in the same position together, where we had to rely on one another, enter into true interdependency, to get by on a such a year. Hopefully, the values of this year framed all others in a way that kept the community threads alive and vibrant, so that there truly was a healthy village culture. And vice versa, so that the community actions and values of the six years between each Shmita helped […]

The Shmita narrative is one that is founded upon great social ideals and values; as we begin to learn about the holistic, integrated models that Shmita is encouraging, the only way to really begin understanding this is to use the Torah texts as a springboard to action, to experimentation, to embodiment. Yes, there is clear value in learning for the sake of learning and understanding. But as the Rabbis famously ask, which is better: Action or Study? Study, they say, because it leads to action. Study is the first step into personally investing one’s self towards manifesting the values learned in their own personal and communal lives.  The Shmita Work Party model is one that begins with text study and follows with a tangible action that directly relates to the values learned. In this way, the learning continues seamlessly into the action, and the words of the text take shape in active creations. For example, one key principle of Shmita is the fact that primary harvests during this year were based upon perennial and wild plants. In a learning session, texts which can be studied would include anything about Shmita harvests, tree planting from a Jewish perspective, etc…and then followed by actual fruit tree plantings.  […]

During the Behar campaign to raise Shmita awareness on a local level, one of the models we suggested was to organize a community leadership council. The goal would be to gather together community leaders, such as Rabbis, educators, activists, directors of businesses & non-profits, etc to explore Shmita from the perspective of local needs, resources, and challenges. What would Shmita look like specifically for our own community’s social and economic landscape? For our own community’s educational institutions and community organizations? As community leaders, what specific role might we each take to support this shift towards Sabbatical values? What tangible golas can we reach for, and in what timeframe?  Guided by Jakir Manela, the Pearsltone Center hosted such a council for the region surrounding Baltimore, Maryland. Here is his recap for the event, which they referred to as a ‘Shmita Summit’: On Sunday April 28th, Pearlstone hosted our first Chesapeake Shmita Summit, drawing together a select group of local Jewish leaders to learn about Shmita and think strategically together about how its values can be manifest in each of our organizations and throughout our local communities.  It was a wonderful conversation, with deep Jewish learning lead by Rabbis Baruch Rock and Nina Beth Cardin—Rabbi Cardin focused on the Shmita […]

The following post by Rabbi Mordechai Liebling is cross-posted from the Sova Project blog. Studying the Torah laws about debt forgiveness (Shmita) can help us understand how to bring about a more just, equitable and sustainable society. The root meaning of Shmita is to let something drop. When Shmita is addressed in Deuteronomy 15:1-3i, it refers to letting debt drop. To understand the significance of this concept of forgiveness of debt, we need to look at the historical context. The law of Shmita was developed in an agricultural society. Farmers frequently needed to borrow money to buy seeds for the spring planting or to buy food in a time of drought. Not surprisingly, the Torah is filled with stories of drought and famine. In fact, every agricultural society is dependent on loans and therefore produces debtors. Debt leads to inequalities in wealth, the concentration of wealth, indentured servitude and prostitution. If a farmer accumulates too much debt he (men were the principal property owners) may need to sell the land to pay off the debt, or give the land to his creditor in lieu of payment. Or he may choose to sell himself or a member of his family to the debtor […]

This post originally comes from the SOVA Project blog, from May 7, 2013 Written by Adina Allen, a rabbinical student at Hebrew College. In his book To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, Jonathan Z. Smith writes, “Ritual is, above all, an assertion of difference…a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension with the way things are.”[1] Rituals help us to acknowledge the aspects of our world that we desire to change. Through the creation and performance of rituals, we direct our creative energy towards imagining the world as it could be. These rituals create the scaffolding for us to live—even if only for a moment—as if the world we imagine is already here. In Jewish tradition, the observance of the Shmita year, commencing after Rosh Hashana 2014, is such a ritual. The instructions for Shmita observation occur three times in the Torah.[2] These passages include directives that, for one year out of every seven, we are to abstain from planting our fields, allow the land to rest, and welcome the poor of our communities to come and eat from what is ours. In addition, all debts are to be forgiven and those who lack are to be given all that […]

It is with pleasure that Hazon, the Shmita Project, and the Siach Network are now partnering with the SOVA blog, a new initiative to further raise awareness around Shmita. SOVA is a web-based project helping to stimulate conversation about core issues of sustainability and Judaism, primarily from an economic perspective, in advance of the next Shmita year in September 2014. The SOVA blog can be found at http://sovaproject.org/ Below is the first post from the founding partners of the SOVA team, Dr. Jeremy Benstein, Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin, and Rabbi Or Rose. See the original post here. Welcome to Sova! Sova (“Enough-ness”) is a collaborative effort of the Baltimore Jewish Environmental Network, the Heschel Sustainability Center in Israel, and the Center for Global Judaism at Hebrew College in Boston. The goal of this shared endeavor is to help raise awareness across the international Jewish community and beyond about issues of sustainability—with a particular focus on economic justice—by engendering a multi-disciplinary conversation about such fundamental issues as responsible land usage, wealth and debt, work and rest, fair labor practices, private and public (commons) property ownership, and physical and spiritual revitalization. The recent economic crises in North America and the European Union emphasize the need for renewed collaborative thinking across disciplines […]