Recordings of this class archived HERE
5782 is a Shmita year. The Torah presents Shmita, the Sabbatical year, as the ultimate solution to hunger, poverty, classism, xenophobia and environmental degradation, and to protecting habitat, human rights, and animal rights. The Torah’s highest goal and the purpose of the Sinai covenant is to create a society able to observe Shmita. On a mythic level, we will see how Shmita also aims to fix the first sin against the Tree in the garden of Eden that is in our stories the origin of all these inequalities and oppressions. On an anthropological level, Shmita is the plan our ancestors came up with for turning agriculture into a sacrament of service to the land. The alternative, as they saw it and as we are learning in our time, is the industrial agriculture that is the ultimate sacrilege, desecrating the land and destroying those living on it. Shmita also answers the very contemporary political question of how a people can claim to be indigenous to a land without using that status to deny the claims and identity of another people. It reconnects human beings to a world where we live in solidarity with other people, with both neighbor and stranger, and it also connects humanity’s fate and freedom with the well-being of the other animals, domestic and wild. Shmita also has deep connections to what we know as permaculture, and to fixing the harms that have led to the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. Finally, Shmita builds up to the Jubilee year, which gives us a model for how a society should undergo reparations for inequality not just once, but in every generation, in order to achieve a just world. This class will include Torah, halakhah, and Chasidic texts about Shmita.
This class is presented as part of our partnership with Hazon’s “Seal of Sustainability” program.
Rabbi David Seidenberg is the creator of neohasid.org and author of “Kabbalah and ecology: God’s Image in the More-Than-Human World”. He has smikhah from Reb Zalman and from JTS, and teaches music, nigunim, dance, spirituality, Jewish thought, & intellectual history.