Our society is more and more deeply concerned that intrusive human action toward the Earth is turning into a weapon endangering Humanity itself as well as the earthy web of life. Is this danger new, or is it an extension of a long-felt weakness arising from a strength too far?
Judging from provisions of ancient Torah, long ago shepherds and farmers learned from experience that unremitting mastery of the Earth brought danger upon a "masterful" society. To prevent those dangers, the Torah prescribed a rhythm of sacred work and sacred restfulness. For us today, living with a much different economy and technology that masters the earth much more intensely, would it be useful to draw on these ancient teachings to avert the dangers that the ancients warned against?
Let us begin by exploring how the ancient wisdom planned to prevent overworking the earth, as well as overworking ourselves and each other:
The Torah provides that not only every seventh day but every seventh year is to be a time to pause from working. The seventh year is to be Shabbat Shabbaton, Restfulness to the exponential power of Restfulness. (Lev. 25).
The passage calls special attention to its teaching by beginning "B'Har, On the Mountain" -- uniquely going out of its way to say this is revelation from Sinai.
In that seventh year, all regular agricultural work would pause; the community would eat from stores of food that had been previously laid aside, and from the freely given fruitfulness of the land, not shaped by organized sowing, harvesting, and pruning.
And the Torah goes on to say that if human society does not allow the land to rest each seventh year, it will rest anyway -- through drought, famine, exile. (Lev. 26.) Indeed, the land -- for each year its Restfulness was robbed -- will be repaid by a year in which it gets to Rest because the community that made it work suffers a year of Exile. (See also II Chron 36: 20-21, at the very end of the Hebrew Scriptures.)
The Restful Year is not merely a nicety: It is like the Law of Gravity.
This practice, says the Torah, is to renew the understanding that no human beings "own" the land; only YHWH, YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh the Interbreath of all life, can be said to own the land, the Earth.
In Deuteronomy, the Torah adds that in this seventh year, all debts are to be annulled. This is to be a year of Shmitah -- Release, Non-attachment -- in which no human boss or banker can subjugate another human being, just as the human community as a whole cannot oppress the Earth. Sh'ma: Listen, you Godwrestlers: We all breathe together, and our breath -- YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh -- is One. That's God.
Today our scientists have learned that the sense of Interbreathing as the root of all life is not only rich metaphor but factual truth: We breathe in what the trees breathe out, and the trees breathe in what we breathe out. The resulting balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen in our atmosphere keeps all life in balance - and it is the disturbance of this balance by human action, the overburning of fossil fuels, that we call the "climate crisis."
For the shepherds and farmers of the indigenous land-rooted community in which the Torah emerged, it was obvious that this Restful teaching applied to their own land, and to agriculture.
But does this mean there is wisdom in the Teaching only for the tiny sliver of land on the Eastern edge of the Mediterranean, not for the great round Earth at large? And even if it does apply throughout the world, does it bear wisdom only in the sphere of agriculture, or can it also teach us how to behave in an industrial/ information economy -- lest we also find our earth ruined by drought and flood, famine and the Death Marches of millions of exiled refugees from every land and culture?
I believe the "climate crisis" and other aspects of human over-reach to over-control the Earth teach us that the ancient Torah teaching does apply world-wide: indeed, it is exactly what ecologists are saying in our own generation. And I believe it applies not only to farm, food, and forest, but - all the more! -- to all the much more intrusive technologies we use today.
Then what might it mean to apply the Year of Restfulness to our own society?
Could we shut down almost our whole economy (preserving only life-protective medicine -- since pikuach nefesh, saving life, trumps Shabbat)?
Hard to imagine?
OK. We might explore something one step less all-embracing: What would it mean to give all our engineers and techies, and all scientists not working directly on life-threatening diseases, a year off from their regular work, every seventh year? A year for them to spend the year reflecting on and reevaluating their own work and the whole direction of modern technology..
Their regular work is what not just carries out but speeds up our present race to go over the precipice into planetary disaster. Not because technology is inherently destructive, but because technology created with no Shabbat, no Shmita, IS inherently destructive. (See Leviticus 26.)
Suppose they all had a paid year off from even being allowed to create new technology, and during that year were paid instead to rethink and reshare the values technology should be enabling, and to work out how to make sure technology does in fact support humane and life-affirming sacred values?
A year of "Don't just do something, sit there!"
That might be one example of an industrial Shmita.
Or imagine requiring an environmental-impact assessment before the introduction of any new product -- mechanical, electrical, biological, digital, or chemical: a new automobile model, a new vacuum cleaner, a new soap, a new computer program. That would not fit the "seven-year" pattern of Shmita, but it would address some of the same concerns the Torah expresses.
An even broader application of Shmita to our society -- and this could draw on the seven-year cycle -- would be to enact something like the proposal from Rabbi Michael Lerner/ Tikkun/ Network of Spiritual Progressives for an Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Their proposal calls for a review every five years -- I would make it seven -- of the operational license of every corporation over a certain size, to see whether it is operating with care toward not only its stockholders and executives but to its customers, its geographic neighbors (human and ecological), its workers, and the Earth.
This whole approach sees the Torah provisions for Shmitah /Shabbat Shabbaton, as a seed of wisdom that in our own society can sprout into new creativity. Who among us will gently tend these seeds into their growing?