וַיְדַבֵּר יְהוָה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה בְּהַר סִינַי לֵאמֹר׃
Eternal Presence is transmitting these word-things to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying
דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם כִּי תָבֹאוּ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי נֹתֵן לָכֶם וְשָׁבְתָה הָאָרֶץ שַׁבָּת לַיהוָה׃
Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land is to cease, a Shabbat-ceasing to Eternal Presence.
Leviticus 25:1-2
וְהָאָרֶץ לֹא תִמָּכֵר לִצְמִתֻת כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ כִּי־גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי׃
But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.
Leviticus 25:23
When my friend Sulieman Khatib, one of the Palestinian leaders of Combatants for Peace, came to speak at the synagogue I belong to in Asheville, he said, “When we Israelis and Palestinians look at the land we share, do we think, the land belongs to us, or do we think, we belong to the land?”
In Torah, the message is clear. The land doesn't belong to humans. In Torah, the children of Israel are "given" a land AND are "merely resident strangers." The land belongs to Universal Presence. This is the message from this week's Torah portion by the Sefat Emet, the Hasidic Rabbi who lived in Poland at the end of the 19th century into the 20th century:
The Great Spirit gave us the land of Israel to show that the entire earth belongs to Spirit.
The giving of the land is not to accumulate power over other people or exploit the land and its resources. The giving is so the Israelites play their part in making Spirit's ownership known.
This explains why Spirit's first instruction for entering the promised land is for the generations to come, the children of Israel, to observe a "ceasing for the land." This isn't a ceasing for the people. This is a Shabbat for the land. The land has a Shabbat from people as soon as people enter upon it. The land doesn't stop working. It grows wild for a full year, the sh’mita year. The land needs a full year free from human workings.
What happens when humans forget that the land doesn't belong to us. War, occupation, fracking and pollution. An imbalance that destroys us and the land. The door is opened to putting profits and power of a few over preservation of the life giving resource.
In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari turns on its head the idea that human dominance of the land through agriculture has been an evolutionary step forward. He uses wheat as the example. 10,000 years ago wheat was just one of a multitude of wild grasses in the Middle East. Harari writes:
Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost 10 times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?
Before wheat was domesticated, humans had survived as hunters and gatherers for almost 200,000 years without wheat. Our immediate sibling, Homo erectus had flourished for more than two million years as hunters and gatherers.
Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space, water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women labored long days, weeding under the scorching sun.
He asks, "Did we domesticate wheat or did wheat domesticate us?"
By 8000 BC, we were guarding and protecting wheat from insects, blight, and rabbits. We dug ditches and carried buckets of water to irrigate it and collected animal poop for fertilizer. Wheat forced us to stop wandering and settle permanently next to our fields. Instead of depending on myriad food sources and species, we often got stuck with a single staple such as wheat, which is poor in "minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums".
It also messed with our bodies. "Humans," writes Harari, "adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price."
He points out the word "domesticate" comes from the Latin domus, meaning house. "Who's the one living in a house?" asks Harari, “Not the wheat. It's us.”
Returning to the Mountain
Humans need a radical change in our relationship to the natural world and to each other. Like Moses, we need to climb out of our defined camps to where we can see the unified and interdependent reality that Great Spirit sees from the mountaintop. There we too will have access to an expansive consciousness of seeing each human and every formation as part of the whole, each as important as any other.
All religions and spiritual paths offer practices and rituals that call us to abide in this consciousness. I live on the historic land of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee people in Western Carolina, USA. A friend taught me the morning Cherokee chant that she translates as, “I am of the Great Spirit.” In Judaism, the first prayer of the day is thanking the Great Living Spirit for returning our soul-breath to us.
When we stand quietly and look from the mountaintop, we see what Dr. Martin Luther King saw, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is why God calls Moses up to the mountain: to see the view that includes everything and highlights the interrelationships between all things. From the mountaintop we see an integrated world that we can trust.
From that big view, our body and mind are calm. We experience that we fit into the bigger scheme of things, that we too have a place, are interconnected. From that comes the consciousness of interconnection. We can embrace new strategies for living. That is the promised land. A consciousness that embraces new strategies for living.
Unbalanced Human Consumption Is Threatening All Life.
Torah traces this imbalance to the narrow consciousness that originated in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of duality, the tree of "good and evil." The Sefat Emet explains that when the first earthlings consumed dualistic consciousness by eating unmindfully from that tree, they created an imbalance between humans and nature. The result is that, “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat food." (Genesis 3:19)
This isn't "punishment." It is reminding us that we will never find the security we seek until we live from the consciousness of interdependence and partnership. As long as we judge ourselves as "good" and others as "evil," we will live with jealousy, domination, and wars. Until we accept all humans, revere all life, stop centering ourselves and "othering" everyone else, we will be overcome by insecurity.
Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh has offered us Five Mindfulness Trainings to guide us in finding harmony with each other and our planet. Here is the fifth:
Nourishment and Healing
Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I am committed to cultivating good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming. I will practice looking deeply into how I consume the Four Kinds of Nutriments, namely edible foods, sense impressions, volition, and consciousness. I am determined not to gamble, or to use alcohol, drugs, or any other products which contain toxins, such as certain websites, electronic games, TV programs, films, magazines, books, and conversations. I will practice coming back to the present moment to be in touch with the refreshing, healing and nourishing elements in me and around me, not letting regrets and sorrow drag me back into the past nor letting anxieties, fear, or craving pull me out of the present moment. I am determined not to try to cover up loneliness, anxiety, or other suffering by losing myself in consumption. I will contemplate interbeing and consume in a way that preserves peace, joy, and well-being in my body and consciousness, and in the collective body and consciousness of my family, my society and the Earth.
— Plum Village Practice Center
Widening Circles
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
— Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
I’ve Been to the Mountaintop
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
— Dr. Martin Luther King, the day before he was assassinated, https://www.afscme.org/about/history/mlk/mountaintop