How Farming Can Help Us Understand the Torah

Sarah Marx, like most American Jews, grew up with little exposure either to agriculture or to the Jewish tradition. To her surprise, a summer on a farm after her first year of college led her to discover Judaism:

Maimonides . . . writes: “When a person contemplates [God’s] wondrous and great deeds and creations and appreciates His infinite wisdom that surpasses all comparison, he will immediately love, praise, and glorify Him, yearning with tremendous desire to know His great name.” For Maimonides, himself a doctor and astronomer, exposure to nature was an imperative for Jews. . . .

Strangely enough, the first reading of my sophomore year—the first assignment after my farm summer—was Genesis. The coming weeks introduced me to the other four books of Moses, and then David’s mesmerizing rise to kingship, and then the Psalms and many of the prophetic accounts. . . .

The stories were laden with slices of agrarian life: Isaac waiting for Rebecca in his field in the early afternoon, Jacob tricking Laban by means of a flock of sheep, Ruth scooping up bunches of golden grain in the afternoon breeze. They provided me with language to talk about the divinity that I’d found imbued in the natural world—a language that evokes God through physicality and relationships, through fruit trees bearing fruit and fathers and kings and whirlwinds in the desert, that trains us to recognize the order of creation in our own fields and backyards. Most powerfully, they presented a theology tied inextricably to land, not only an abstract spiritual realm but a particular land with a particular history, botany, and collective memory. The land in Torah isn’t passive; it has its own connection to God and to us, despises the blood it soaks up when human beings kill one another, [and] requires a Shabbat of its own every seventh year.

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More about: Bible, Judaism, Maimonides, Religion & Holidays, Zionism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society