When you decide to move, does it make a difference if your reason for making the move is tied to leaving behind the place you are currently in, or tied to the place you heading toward? Sometimes the place we are heading towards is also a place we once chose to leave (coming home after camp, leaving the home town where we grew up, then coming back there later in life). Sometimes that ‘return’ is from a place our ancestors left generations before (Jews going to live in Israel, second or third generation immigrants returning to their parents/grandparents’ country of birth). Is a return to place always motivated by the desire to be there or can there be other reasons to ‘return home’? Susan Babbitt, writing on American slavery notes that the decision to leave often also involves a bold step of imagination. In going to this involves the capacity to imagine one’s life differently from how it is, and perhaps to imagine yourself capable of things you have not yet done. To have both to desire change and some imagined life that you are moving toward. In going from imagination also comes into play, as it may involve playing out the consequences of staying where we currently are. Of course both might be the matter of implusive action (without much forethought) – but is that the case here? Hagar has left Avram’s house and she is ‘on the road to Shur’ – heading back toward her place of birth, Egypt. It looks like she is fleeing from one home and returning to another home. Yet she turns around and returns to the place of conflict – her home with Avram and Sarai (and that doesn’t seem to turn out too well for her!). These discussion plans explore going form and going to and the reasons we might have for making these journeys.
Intertextual Source: Deciding when to leave – Reasons not to leave
Look up these further references in the Torah: What do they tell us about reasons people have for leaving and reasons they have for staying? In what ways do they involve ‘going from’ and in what ways are they a matter of ‘going to’?
Bereshit 12: 10 – Abram goes to Egypt
Bereshit 27: 41-45 Ya’akov leaves the family home
Bereshit 30:25 – 31:18 – Ya’akov decides to leave Laban.
Ruth1:12-19 – Story of Ruth. Orpha decides to leave Naomi, but Ruth decides to stay with her.
19 When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them, for you may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a man, to go into the siege before you?
20 However, a tree you know is not a food tree, you may destroy and cut down, and you shall build bulwarks against the city that makes war with you, until its submission.
… These verses toward the end of the parashah, Deuteronomy 20:19-20, form the basis for the mitzvahbal tashchit, “do not destroy.” While the verses themselves deal specifically with cutting down trees during war, the Sages extended their meaning to cover all forms of wasteful destruction. They taught that anyone who deliberately wastes our resources, either natural or man-made, violates the law.
For over 3,000 years Jews have been concerned about the environment. Although these instructions are specifically directed to the care of fruit trees during war, the lesson gleaned from them has far-reaching implications for life on this planet. Our ancestors understood that life depends upon preserving the land. Although they didn’t use words like “ecology,” “global warming,” or “environmental crisis,” they clearly understood and respected these concepts.
The tree in the Torah text is read by the Sages as a metaphor. They understood that the prohibition to destroy fruit trees implies that it is forbidden to destroy anything that was beneficial to humankind. Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah tells us that a tree may be cut down if it damages other trees or causes harm to neighboring fields. According to Maimonides, the Torah only forbids willful destruction. We are not precluded from making use of God’s creations but are warned against unnecessarily destroying gifts of nature. Needless cutting down of a fruit-bearing tree is forbidden not only in wartime, but at all times. Similarly, we may not destroy or waste anything useful, whether it be food or money or clothing.
In the creation story in Genesis 1:28, humankind is granted dominion over the earth. The same biblical passage that gives us this dominion also requires that we care for the earth; we are reminded that even as we till the earth, we must also preserve it. God’s command to “rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth” gives us the responsibility to guard the world. Because God created the natural world, it is sacred. It is ours on loan, to be used and cared for. We are granted both dominion and stewardship of our world; therefore we are not to pollute its water or air or waste its precious resources.
As a child in religious school, one of the first stories I heard was that of Honi and his planting of the carob tree. When asked why he was planting a tree that would not bear fruit until long after his death, he replied that when he came into the world he found carob trees that had been planted by those who came before him, so he was doing the same for his descendants. It’s a simple story that we tell every Tu BiSh’vat, but one that teaches an age-old truth.
Today’s environmentalists raise the same concern as Honi. Since the mid-twentieth century, we have become aware that restoring our planet’s diminishing resources is a crucial issue. The destruction of tropical forests, lumbering without reforestation, burning of land, and the general wasting of other natural resources will leave future generations with diminished resources. Just over forty years ago, author Rachel Carson warned of the dangerous effects of our lifestyle on the environment. Silent Spring spoke of our reckless attempt to control our environment by the use of pesticides and warned that destroying the balance of nature would ultimately do more harm than good.
Since Carson’s best-selling publication, others have written on the same subject. Just ten years ago, Al Gore, in his book Earth In the Balance, wrote of his conviction that only radical rethinking of our relationship with nature could save our ecology. Whether or not we believe that we must save our resources because God has commanded us to do so, we cannot ignore what we have done to our world or sit idle without trying to correct the mistakes we’ve made.
Judaism does not separate people from nature. We’re taught that the earth is one unit, just as God is one. Whatever affects plant and animal life affects humans as well. If we destroy other kinds of living things on this earth, we are also destroying ourselves. The most important lessons we can teach our children are that not only do all living things depend upon each other, but also what we do today affects what the world will be like tomorrow. Each generation is linked to the next by its actions. Like Honi, we depend on what those who came before us did, as our children will depend upon us. Whether it is wartime or peacetime, we must care for the natural resources entrusted to us.
Your Guide
Throughout the Bible, we are urged to respect creation and not waste or destroy. Living things range from the human being to the simplest of species, and the rich variety of nature is to be cherished. In addition, Jewish tradition is distinctly linked to trees and to water; in fact, our Torah is referred to as the “Tree of Life.” Jewish tracts entreat us time and again to respect and enhance trees and water.
Torah has a multitude of verses regarding the care of our resources. How do we decide which ones to follow? Do we pick and choose only those that affect us personally, or do we move beyond our own neighborhoods, cities, and even countries for the betterment of all humankind?
How, in this age of technology, can we ensure that we don’t do more damage to our natural resources-our drinking water, our rivers, the soil, or the air?
When our military goes into another country to liberate it, as we have recently done in Iraq, do we have any obligations to the people of that country regarding the protection of their natural resources?
19 When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them, for you may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a man, to go into the siege before you?
20 However, a tree you know is not a food tree, you may destroy and cut down, and you shall build bulwarks against the city that makes war with you, until its submission.
While the verses themselves deal specifically with cutting down trees during war, the Sages extended their meaning to cover all forms of wasteful destruction. They taught that anyone who deliberately wastes our resources, either natural or man-made, violates the law.
For over 3,000 years Jews have been concerned about the environment. Although these instructions are specifically directed to the care of fruit trees during war, the lesson gleaned from them has far-reaching implications for life on this planet. Our ancestors understood that life depends upon preserving the land. Although they didn’t use words like “ecology,” “global warming,” or “environmental crisis,” they clearly understood and respected these concepts.
How, in this age of technology, can we ensure that we don’t do more damage to our natural resources-our drinking water, our rivers, the soil, or the air?
How do you care for your environment within the school/institutions you are part of? Could you reduce wastage of resources further? If so, how?
Make a ‘Handmade Midrash’ that draws on how you understand this text in light of the distinctions you explored in your community of inquiry. Make your midrash from colored construction paper by tearing forms out of the paper and sticking them onto a background sheet of paper.
Handmade Midrash is a process of interpretation developed by Jo Milgrom. Her process has a number of stages:
Text Study
Creation of an artwork
Discussion in small groups
Reflective writing on what you can learn through looking at what you created more carefully.
Return to the text
The artwork is created through tearing paper and attaching it to a background. It is not about creating a realistic kind of picture, but capturing ideas and representing them – often through symbolic representation –the torn paper represents ideas in relation to one another. It doesn’t require you to be ‘good at art’ as you can represent ideas through abstract shapes, a blob, color, etc.
After you have created your midrash, divide into small groups to share what you have done and what it means. Here what other people see in what your midrash. Describe what was the hardest and easiest elements to do, what role color plays in your midrash, why you placed things where you did, how the parts relate to one another, etc.
After the discussion, take some time to do some reflective writing. You might like to think about some of the following prompts: Did anything surprise you in what you constructed? In what people saw in it? How did the ideas come together? How does what is happening in the picture relate to your own feelings and thoughts about the world you live in? How does it relate to your own feelings and thoughts about the Divine human connection?
