Farming Jewishly: or, some thoughts on Burke and agriculture

by J.L. Wall

When I was in Israel last December, my trip stopped off at some sort of “Biblical-farm” thing—it set out to follow all the rules for farming and life in pre-Diaspora Judaism. An intriguing—and, in its way, quite admirable goal—but it came across as more kitschy than anything else. (That’s as delicately as I can find to put it.) So that’s the only “Jewish farm” I’ve ever actually seen or been on. But I discovered Sharon Astyk’s blog this afternoon when trying to free my mind from the tyranny of Aristotle’s students, and in a wonderful post on—what else?—Jewish farming, she wrote this lovely paragraph:

“For now, I’m recognizing that with young kids, producing a lot of our food, and writing, I can’t farm on the scale I’d like to. I’m not always sure whether it would be better for me to grow more food, to do more and talk less about it, but right now it feels more urgent to help other people get started on their journeys. But we’re still a Jewish farm. We still leave a portion of our ground fallow, still feed our animals before we feed ourselves, still glean our own garden and donate to local food pantries.”

Of course, I’ve never seen her farm, but those last few sentences made it come to life quite vividly for me. They also took me back to the day in Hebrew school when the rabbi was explaining why a particular girl’s bat mitzvah portion was actually important to Judaism. And what a tithe is (think of that—we didn’t have the slightest clue; the thought of a set amount to give was oddly alien at that point). And about why one let their land lie fallow, and didn’t pick up anything that fell to the ground. Now that I think about it, there’s an entire agricultural tradition hidden—but preserved—in several millennia of Biblical exegesis.

In my first post over here, I promised thoughts on Burke and the environment. That seems to have been an adequate introduction to these (more abbreviated than anticipated) notes.

In his Reflections, Burke defines society as, in part, “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” A social contract among generations, if you will.* Whatever one may think of it (and I’m sure we could debate its merits all day), it sets out the proposition very neatly: we are obliged to listen to and give their due those who came before us, and consider those who will come after us. Those who came before brought us, in a sense, to our present place: we stand on their achievements (and failures), just as they stood on those of the generations before them.

The second half of the proposition is a little trickier. The next generation(s) have done nothing for us yet; they will, in a sense, do nothing for us but continue the species (or the family). You can make the case for an evolutionary obligation to future generations, but I’m hard pressed (I was running a low fever earlier today, just so we’re clear on the present state of my mind) to find a contractual obligation to future generations, barring religious feeling or commandment. (I suppose one could read love—more than evolutionary—as being something beyond “reason” but not necessarily “religious”; I’ll toss that in with religious as well but use the term as shorthand for it all; if I’ve forgotten about something I shouldn’t have, please correct me—and I probably didn’t mean to seem crass if this is the case.)

Because one loves, or one is commanded, or both, the second half of the contract obtains. Contractually speaking, one could put it that the present generation acknowledges the equal humanity of future generations with the expectation that they will acknowledge the humanity of past generations. “Love,” in its way, is simply a much warmer (possibly more accurate) term for it. The present generation should strive to leave the world no worse than we found it for those who follow, and, if possible, better.

You can have a farm or an agriculture or an environmental policy that respects what we’ve been told from the past—that listens to how to grow the most at the fastest rate and the cheapest cost, but if it does not consider the state of the land for those who follow—if it leaves the land worse than we found it—it violates that generational contract which, if I may be so bold, is a secular abbreviation of a sentiment found in, but not necessarily particular to, the Judeo-Christian view of the generations.

So when Sharon’s describes her farm as Jewish, it seems true to me because the three things she lists first are not difficult technicalities, but about life. She doesn’t bring up how to harvest, or how to slaughter, or how much to charge, but how to treat them all in life. What really makes her farm Jewish, she’s saying, is love for the land, love for the animals, and love for her fellow men.

*N.B.: I’m totally ignoring the rest of Burke’s political philosophy when talking about this line; that is to say, I’m not considering any of it unless I explicitly say I am: my interest is in the line as it relates to farming and the environment, not to government and constitutions. This is also why I’m simply taking the truth of the statement for granted; religiously, it’s hard to argue against some basic truth at its core.

Filed under: agriculture, religion