The Earth in Jewish Perspective: Rabbi Jill Hammer

Rabbi Jill Hammer is a pioneer in exploring and restoring the relationship between the Jewish People and the earth through Jewish thought and ritual. In the eJournal interview and a recent dvar Torah (commentary on the Torah), she shares her wisdom on Judaism’s historic connection with the land, and the need to recover and renew that relationship today.

​Video Interview: Recovering Sacred Ground

In this video interview, Rabbi Jill Hammer discusses the intimate connection between humanity and the earth in ancient Judaism, and why many Jews seek to update and reestablish that connection today.
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Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, educator, midrashist, myth-weaver and ritualist. She is the co-founder of Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is also the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic Jewish seminary. Rabbi Hammer is the author of Sisters At Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, and the co-author of The Hebrew Priestess and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook.  Rabbi Hammer conducts workshops on ancient and contemporary midrash, bibliodrama, creative ritual, kabbalah, Jewish dreamwork, and Jewish cycles of time. She was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary and holds a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Connecticut. Read her writings at RabbiJillHammer.com.

"That's not dirt. It's earth!"

​Is there a connection between the Sabbatical and Jubilee years mentioned in the Torah, and the sacred character of the earth? Rabbi Jill Hammer shares her comments on the weekly Torah portion, Behar-Bechukotai at Romemu in New York City.

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"That's not dirt. It's earth!"

By Rabbi Jill Hammer

We’re all influenced by where we come from. I grew up on a decent-sized piece of land in the Hudson Valley, with a flower garden, a vegetable garden, a blackberry patch, trees, and a creek. Although I went to a civilized school like everyone else, at home I was a child of nature, using a forked birch tree as my secret entrance to the woods, and playing house in a nest of pine needles. My parents were gardeners and taught me many lessons about the human relationship to the earth. I remember one lesson in particular from my father. I told my father that I had dirt on my hands. My father looked up and said to me very sternly: “That’s not dirt. It’s earth.” In that one exchange, I learned so much about what it means to respect the soil, the few inches of fertile dust that make life on this planet possible.

My father’s lesson could have come from this week’s Torah portion. In Parashat Behar-Bechukotai, a double portion, God commands the people that the land itself is to have a Sabbath. After six years of sowing and reaping, the seventh year is to be a shmita, a sabbatical year. The people are not to plant or to reap, though they may act as gatherers, picking what the land produces on its own. Agriculture grinds to a halt. The land rests from its role in the food production industry and returns to its wild state. The people remember what it is like to be wanderers on the land, rather than its owners. In Israel, this law is still observed, but it’s largely circumvented by way of legal loopholes because it is so hard to observe. How to manage a society where agriculture stops dead every seven years? This is almost economically impossible. So why does the Torah ask this of us?

After seven cycles of these seven-year patterns, after forty-nine years, the fiftieth year is a jubilee year, a yovel. “That fiftieth year is a jubilee year, you shall not plant, you shall not sow, you shall not reap the aftergrowth or harvest the untrimmed vines. It is a jubilee and it is holy to you. You will eat the growth that comes from the field. In the fiftieth year, each person shall return to his or her holding.”

In this year, the land rests, and not only does the agricultural cycle cease, but ownership itself is transformed. Any land that you have sold to pay your debts or earn money for yourself returns to your tribe and clan—really, the land cannot be sold but only leased until the jubilee year. Any indentured servant that has been enslaved because of debt must be set free. And any loan must be forgiven. The jubilee year is an immense reset button. Economic inequalities are redressed. The people, like the land, must be returned to their free state, their natural or wild state, if you will.

Why this law of the jubilee year? The Torah tells us: vehaaretz lo timacheir litzmitut ki li ha’aretz ki gerim vetoshavim atem imadi. Uvechol eretz achuzatchem geulah titnu la’aretz. The land must not be sold in any permanent way, for the land is mine and you are strangers and temporary residents with me. In all the lands of your holding, you must give redemption to the land.” This text teaches us first that our natural state is as wanderers. Second, the text teaches that the land requires redemption. For people, redemption means being bought out of slavery or brought back from exile. For the land, redemption means leaving its own slavery to humans, and restoration to the state of connection to the divine. The land itself, and the people, need to be fallow, need this period of rest which is also wildness, to be whole. The jubilee is holy, just like the temple. It is the ultimate sanctuary in time. It is a sacred time when all space becomes sacred space, owned not by people but by God.

The necessity of having fallow space on our planet cannot be overstated. I recently read of how a team of researchers in the Amazon, a group of students and professors from Yale University, discovered a fungus that eats plastic. Can you think of a greater miracle than an organism that eats plastic? Nothing eats plastic; that is the point of plastic. And yet in the vast unfarmed diverse alchemical cooking pot that is the Amazon jungle, they found something that did. What a gift from the Holy One, a fungus that eats plastic. This, plus the other plastic-eating bacteria we’ve developed, could save us from drowning in our own garbage. So many medical and biological miracles have come from the fallow spaces in our world, where hunter- gatherers still live. We agriculturalists and cattle-herders keep cutting these places down because they are not useful; we can’t grow anything there. This is not so bright. The wild spaces of the world are where God invents, not us, and this we must respect. The rule of the sabbatical year should not only be a technical mitzvah but a reminder that letting some of the earth be free of our control is a divine mandate and a human necessity. The wild spaces are a delight for God, they’re a necessity for us, and they may just save our lives.

This is also a teaching for our inner soil, the ensouled bodies we have been given to walk this earth. We too need fallow time. We too need to stop the cycles of work, of planting and harvest, of making ourselves produce, and give ourselves true rest. True rest is play. True rest is rediscovering the wild self, the self of dreams and visions and prayers, the self that God invents, not us. I can’t help but think of the artist and author Maurice Sendak of blessed memory, who died this week, and who taught so many of us about the importance of being among the wild things for a while before we go home for dinner. We too need to go back to our original owner, who is not our employer or our customer or even our beloved families or friends, but the holy blessed One. We need to free ourselves from the indentured servitude of our assumptions and routines. We need to remember that the messy stuff inside us is not dirt, it’s earth, and earth grows things.

I want to suggest that there is an even greater mystery in the law of the jubilee year. The freeing of the land and its inhabitants is not only a matter of ethics or of self-discovery; it is also a matter of quantum physics. You can’t own land. The topsoil of this planet isn’t a thing; it is a life-giving mystery permeated with water, air, and organisms. You can’t own space. Space is full of atoms that are mostly nothing; it is an immensely potent and dynamic emptiness. You can’t own souls. What we call ownership and control and inheritance and commerce is really stewardship. The Torah teaches that our interactions with all physical entities, including the earth, need to be touched by humility and by holiness.

I want to share a teaching I have been thinking about ever since I heard it. Shneur Zalman, called the Alter Rebbe, was the writer of the mystical work known as the Tanya. He writes that: “The radiance [of the Divine]... manifests its power and ability in the element of the earth in an immense manifestation, in more enormous strength than even the hosts of heaven.” This means that all people and all creations emanate divine radiance, but the soil itself, the physical earth which was considered by the kabbalists to be most distant from the ethereal realms of God, has an extra portion of the divine radiance, even more than the angels.

Why is this so? The Alter Rebbe goes on: “For the other creations do not have it in their power and ability constantly to bring forth something from nothing, like the element of earth which constantly makes grow something from nothing—these are the plants and trees—from the creative power it possesses, which is Ayin [Divine void].” This means, very simply, that the earth can do what God can do. The earth can make a space for creation to happen. You put a seed in it and it grows. This is God’s power, to make something exist where there was nothing. The Alter Rebbe suggests to us that the earth is full of divine radiance and transmits that radiance to us in the form of life. We are all part of that sacred economy. When we rest, and treat our lives and everything around us as a gift rather than something we own, we have the opportunity to feel that radiance. As the liturgist Marcia Falk wrote in her creative translation of the Shema: The Divine abounds everywhere and dwells in everything. The many are one.”

Every Shabbat morning at Romemu, guided by Rabbi Ingber, we pray a healing prayer for our loved ones and conclude it by praying for the earth, which also needs healing. May it be that we come to invest that prayer with the power of our hearts, voices, and hands. To that prayer I want to add one more prayer. In Parashat Bechukotai, near the end of this week’s reading, God promises: “Venatati shalom ba’aretz,” I will give peace to the land. But what this really means, in the original Hebrew, is “I will put peace in the land.” The peace is there in the soil, in its power to create and sustain. We only have to listen with our wild selves. When we encounter the soil, the body, the world, may we see not dirt but earth.

​Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, educator, midrashist, myth-weaver and ritualist. She is the co-founder of Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is also the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic Jewish seminary. Rabbi Hammer is the author of Sisters At Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, and the co-author of The Hebrew Priestess and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook.  Rabbi Hammer conducts workshops on ancient and contemporary midrash, bibliodrama, creative ritual, kabbalah, Jewish dreamwork, and Jewish cycles of time. She was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary and holds a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Connecticut. Read her writings at RabbiJillHammer.com.