AllCreation.org recently published a piece on the call of Shmita in our time by Earth Ministry/WAIPL board member Deirdre Gabbay. She beautifully articulates a vision of holding on by letting go through the paradox of Shmita. This article also speaks to our work together with Congregation Beth Shalom through the Shmita Project Northwest.
You can read an excerpt of an article below and find the full article at https://www.allcreation.org/home/call-of-shmita.
“The world seems to be collapsing around us, ecologically as well as socially. Climate change, which we have been warned about for more than 30 years, has arrived, and is in the early stages of reshaping life on Earth, already creating waves of human climate refugees across the world, including here in the United States. Meanwhile, the almost unimaginable financial wealth of the planet is held by a vanishingly small number of individuals, some of whom are striving to escape the Earth and colonize space, while others are snapping up increasingly scarce “natural resources” such as fresh water and arable land, and monetizing them as commodities to be traded by global investors.
But what if we are being dragged in exactly the wrong direction by the twin powerhouses of technology and financial markets? What if our actual goal is not to leave behind this place where we live—to seek out new worlds to exploit and then abandon—but to hold onto it as a sacred trust to be passed on, l’dor v’dor, from one generation to the next, an embodiment of love?
The religious worldview offers a unique toolkit for challenging these seemingly irresistible forces. It is equipped with concepts such as commandedness, limits, and the idea of the sacred. It engages with the world in communities of practice rather than as atomized individual consumers. It is unconstrained by national boundaries. It is experienced in the practice of counterculture. Furthermore, in the words of Amitav Ghosh writing in the Great Derangement.
Organizations with religious affiliations possess the ability to mobilize people in far greater numbers than any others. Moreover, religious worldviews acknowledge intergenerational, long-term responsibility. They are capable of imagining nonlinear change – catastrophe, in other words. Finally, it is impossible to see any way out of this crisis without an acceptance of limits, and this is intimately related to the idea of the sacred, however one may wish to conceive of it.
It is in this context that we turn to investigate the Hebrew Bible’s obscure commandment of Shmita – which means “letting go.” The values of Shmita feel provocative and relevant, as well as paradoxical: how do we hold on by letting go? That paradox is at the very heart of Shmita.”