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.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/190547/twin-gifts-of-shavuot