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| Orchard in Winter | |
(This article of mine was published recently in the spring 2013 issue of Jewish Woman, the magazine of Jewish Women's International. It seems to belong here as well.)
The Jewish people is known as the People of the Book. But the
Book that defines us, that is our heritage and our destiny, tells us that we
are also the people of the land. From Eden to Israel, from our love poetry to
our agricultural laws, from the prayers we recite to the Revelation at Sinai – our
spirits have been fashioned by the landscapes of our lives.
This bond begins in the first name we are called: adam.
Genesis 2 says that “the Lord God formed the human, adam, from the earth, adamah.” Adam is
not a proper name here, but a noun signifying all humanity. We are all adam, for we all come from adamah. Hebrew has two words for land: eretz, (as in eretz Israel) and adamah. Eretz is land that defines a country and
a people. It has borders and politics, those who belong and those who don’t. Adamah is soil, dirt, earth, the stuff you
plow or pick up in your hands. Its borders are Earth itself and there is no one
who does not belong.
In the Bible, the land, adamah,
in all its majestic wonder, with its peaks and valleys, oceans and deserts,
thistles and roses, is not just the stage on which human history is played out.
It is a character in the Bible’s unfolding sacred narrative.
Consider these three essential roles that this adamah and the natural world of ours
play in the stories of the Bible.
First, the world, created by God, was given to us to cherish
and tend. We did not make it or earn it or set sail to discover it like
explorers of old. We were gifted it. We were created and placed here to enjoy
it and take care of it. That is our task. That is, the Bible tells us, God’s
plan. The rabbis embellish the story this way: “When God finished creating the
first adam,” they say, “God took him
and led him around all the garden, showing him all the trees and said to him:
See how lovely and awesome is the world I have made. Know that everything I
created is here for you. Be mindful not to ruin and destroy my world, for if
you do, there will be no one to repair it after you.” (Kohelet Rabbah 7:13) We
were created to be partners with God, endowed with sentience to admire all that
God wrought, awed by the unfathomable majesty of the Earth, and tasked with the
responsibility of taking care of it.
Second, the Bible portrays the natural world as the medium,
the currency, the vocabulary with which God speaks to us and we, in turn, speak
to God. When God wished to bestow gifts on us, God did so through the bounty of
nature. The land of Israel, Deuteronomy tells the Jews as they stand on the
banks of the Jordan, is not like the land of Egypt. The land of Israel flows
with milk and honey. It is made of hills and valleys and drinks from the water
of the rain of heaven.
We recite words from Deuteronomy daily in the second
paragraph of the Shema, showing God’s blessings in the currency of nature: If
the people Israel heed God’s commandments, and love God, then “I will favor the
land with rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and you will
gather in ample harvest of grain and wine and oil. And I will give grass in the
fields for your cattle, enough for them to eat and be satisfied.”
And we the people responded with our sacrifices, gifts from
our harvest and the first born of our herds. We were asked in kind to be godly
and repay God for God’s goodness through the goodness of nature, by giving to
the poor, the needy, and the stranger from the corners of our fields and
offering a tenth of our harvest to those without. Even today, we are not
permitted to eat until we thank God for the different kinds of food we are
given: those that grow from the land, and those that grow from the tree; those that
grow on the vine and those cooked up by us from a variety of sources. We thank
God every morning for bodies that work, eyes that can see, backs that stand
straight. We thank God, too, for the universe that stays its course, allowing
us to gather from it all that we need.
Third, the natural world is God’s revelation, proof of God’s
caring presence. The Bible continually reminds us that though we can never see
God, we know God through God’s handiwork. The rabbis celebrate this, asking us
to recite blessings upon witnessing these shadows of God’s presence. Upon
seeing the ocean, we praise God for fashioning the great seas. Upon seeing some
majesty of nature, the mountains, a shooting star or a jaw-dropping sunset, we
praise God for renewing the work of creation. Upon seeing trees in spring bring forth buds of
renewal, we praise God saying, “Blessed are you whose world lacks nothing, and
who created magnificent creatures and gracious trees that we humans may benefit
from them.”
It is through these witnesses in nature that we can more
deeply feel the presence of a Power beyond us. When Job seeks an answer to his
unbearable suffering, and calls upon God to answer, God responds with witnesses
to the depths of nature’s mysteries: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s
foundations… and set its cornerstone? Who closed the sea behind its doors when
it gushed forth … when I clothed it in clouds and swaddled it in midst? Have
you ever commanded the day to break, assigned the dawn to its place… penetrated
the vaults of the snow, seen the storehouses of hail?”
This questioning goes on for sixty verses, at the end of
which Job is humbled. Though he doesn’t understand, he is oddly comforted by
being part of a universe that is so much bigger than he, so much larger than he
can comprehend.
We are the People of the Book. But also the people of the
land. We are the people of Israel and the denizens of the earth. No matter
where we are, we are adam of the adamah. It is our calling to take care
of the land so that the land can always take care of us. And it is in these
quotidian tasks that we can ultimately find our most sacred calling.
