GREENING SYNAGOGUES RESOURCES

Sh’ma, Part Two:
Deut 11, Stewardship, and Eco-Radicalism

R. Fred Scherlinder Dobb
COEJL & Adat Shalom, 6/04

13. And if you all listen, really listen (v’haya im shamoa tish’m’u), to My commandments which I am commanding you today -- to love YHVH your God with all your hearts and with all your souls (b’khol l’vav’chem uv’khl naf’sh’chem) --

   “If you really listen/ed to the old (b’yashan), then really listen to the new (tish’m’u b’chadash)” -- Rashi, based on Sukkot 46b
   (on “to love God”): “That you shouldn’t say, ‘I will learn in order order to become rich, in order to be called ‘rav’, in order to receive a reward;’ rather, everything that you do, do out of love.” -- Rashi, based on Sifri 41

14. Then I will give your land moisture, in its season -- the early rain and late rain -- and you will gather your grain and your grape juice and your oil.

   "Yoreh -- the first rain, which makes the land fit (makh’shir, from kasher) to sow. Malkosh -- the last rain, after the plants have sprouted.” -- Saadia Gaon

15. And I will give (‘cause to sprout’ -- Saadiah) grasses/vegetation in your fields, for your cattle; and you will eat, and you will be satisfied (v’achalta v’savata).

1. Are the grasses significant only for ‘your cattle,’ or directly for us? For other critters? For the fields or grasses themselves?
2. What does this verse say about Israelite origins -- nomadic shepherds, rooted farmers, both?
3. Compare to Deut. 8:10, the basis of the birkat hamazon / blessing after the meals -- “v’akhalta, v’savata, u’verakhta” -- “and you eat, and you’re satisfied, and now you bless.”

16. Guard yourselves (hishamru lachem), lest your heart be led astray, and you turn and serve other gods (elohim acherim), and bow down to them --

   “When you eat and are satisfied, take care that you don’t scoff / rebel -- since a person only rebels against the Holy Blessed One from the midst of satisfaction (s’viyah). As it is said, ‘lest you eat and be satisfied, and your cattle and your flock grow fatted’-- and what is said right after that? -- ‘and your heart grows big, and you forget YHVH your God’ (Dt.8:12-14).” -- Rashi, cf. Sifri 43 (He adds “v’sartem / turn”: separate yourself from the Torah”).

17. [For then] God’s anger will be kindled toward you, and God will stop up the heavens, and the rain will not come, and the land (adamah) will not yield its produce -- and you will quickly be evicted (v’avad’tem m’hera) from the good land that God gives you.

   “Evicted -- in the language of ‘exile,’ as in ‘the captives in Assyria’ (Is. 27:13)” -- Hizkuni

18-21. [So,] place these words of Mine on your hearts and on your souls; and bind them as a symbol (ot) upon your hand, and let them be frontlets between your eyes. And teach them with/to (et) your children, to speak them while sitting in your house, and walking along the way, and lying down, and rising up. And write them on the doorposts (mezuzot) of your house, and on your gates. [Do this] in order to increase your days, and the days of your descendants, on the land (adamah) that God swore to your ancestors, to give to them; like the days of the heaven above the Earth (ki’mei hashamayim al-ha’aretz).

1. How does this entire text apply beyond the particular land of Israel? (See Brad Artson in E&tJS).
2. What hands-on rituals or objects -- like the mezuzah -- can remind us of eco-responsibility?

COMMENTARY.
What human action could result in the destruction of the rains, the onset of crop failure and famine? Abuse of the eco-system upon which our very lives depend. And how could such an event occur? When we lose sight of our place in the world and the wondrous gift in all that is. The traditional second paragraph of the Shema was replaced by another biblical selection in earlier Reconstructionist liturgy because the traditional paragraph was understood as literal reward and punishment. However, today in the light of our awareness of the human abuse of the environment, we recognize that often this reward and punishment rest in our own hands. This ancient and yet vital message of the Torah urges us to choose life.
     -- Rabbi David Teutsch, in Kol Haneshama: Shabbat V’Chagim, JRF 1994, p. 283

All of the first paragraph of the Sh’ma…is written in the singular. You as an individual are responsible for upholding this law… The consequences of obeying or not obeying are in the next paragraph of the Sh’ma, which is written in the second person plural. What a difference! If you, and you, and you, and the majority of other individuals who make up the community live right, then the community reaps the reward: the rain in its season… and the satisfaction of good food. The rabbis who first created the Sh’ma as a prayer were farmers or the children of farmers. They knew that the common wealth comes to a community, any community, only when its individual members live just and righteous lives and pass this way of life on to their children. As Wendell Berry writes in The Unsettling of America, “The use of the world is finally a personal matter, and the world can be preserved in health only by the forbearance and care of a multitude of persons… One must begin in one’s own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.”
     -- David Ehrenfeld, “What Is the Common Wealth?”, in Ecology and the Jewish Spirit, ed. Ellen Bernstein, 1998, p. 187.

See also Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s powerful writings on the Sh’ma.