Posts tagged Shmita
A New Year’s Resolution for the Earth (Erev Rosh Hashanah 5782)

Just as resting is the way the world begins, endlessly working the land will be the way the world ends. We watch anxiously as droughts and wildfires plague the West Coast and wider world. Extreme weather, hurricanes and floods, predicted to happen once a century now happens every few years. Our society demands we prove our value through doing; but it consistently fails in its capacity to invest in being. Our ancestors knew how dangerous this could be - how easily it could lead us to create vast inequalities between the haves and the have-nots, devalue elders, and cause us to exploit each other and our planet.

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Shabbat Behar-Bechukotai

These days, many of us are doing nothing – not to rest, but because we are trying to survive a pandemic. Many of you have told me how hard it is to do nothing right now: the feelings of pain, loneliness, boredom, frustration and helplessness. Your anger and grief about all you can’t do – attend birthdays or funerals, hug your families and friends; your deep desire to be, to do something. Alongside these feelings of loss, we experience another loss: When we aren’t doing anything, we sometimes come to believe we have lost our value, perhaps even our connection with that thing that is greater than us, which some of us call “God.”

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