You’re doing a great job lex!

can we please turn off the bell?

(in meeting settings)

from the internet: "Click Manage Participants to view the participant list of the meeting.At the bottom of the participant list, select More.From the menu that appears, disable the Play Enter/Exit Chime option"

Rachel Albert, Farm Coordinator at the Boulder JCC Milk & Honey Farm.

Hey I’m Dylan. I’m new to the food producing world. I don’t have any experience with Shmitah

Ella (she/her), current veggie farmer, proud Jew but no real knowledge of Jewish farming practice

tzomi, basic understanding of some of the principles of letting land go fallow but want to know more especially from a perspective where there is a lot of snow in winter

Jack. spent many years obsessively thinking about shmitta. farm educator. farmer. jewish educator

Caleb-young farmer- no experience with shmita

50 years old, 20 years veg farming. From Baltimore. I have heard Natti Schwartz talk about Schmitta several times. Tend to forget the key points.

I have studied about shmittah. Director of Jewish Learning at Irvine Hebrew day school.

I work on Indigenous solidarity and land care as a Jew, was a farmer

Hey y’all! I’m Sam, aspiring farmer, on Catawba and Sugaree land in NC. I attended a session on Shmita last year and that’s the extent of my knowledge lol

George Wilde, backyard microfarm, learning about Shmita for the first time this year

Xena, librarian with aspirations of growing some things. No experience with Shmitah

hi I am Rebecca Goodwin I am new to this topic. my husband and I are farmers in the mountains in western North Carolina

Some basic knowledge of smita and so excited to learn more

Hi! I’m Jennifer Grayson, journalist/author and beginning farmer. Learned about Shmita this year.

Lexi (she/they), i have experience in urban ag and hydroponic greenhouse work - new to shmitah!

Claire Friedrichsen- social scientist at University of Idaho studying connections between culture, well-being and soil health. No experience with Shmitah

Dylan, full time farm manager in CA, shmita beginner

Hello. I am a queer, non-binary gardener, herbalist, owning class person of Jewish and Serbian descent, totally at beginner stages of learning about Shmitta. Want to dig in. On occupied Cherokee and Yuchi lands, so-called asheville, nc

Jess here, veg grower, learned about shmita at the last JFN conference!

Farmer at Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans. I know about schmitta in a big sense, but am interested in learning about the text related to shmitta and its origins

Beth (they/them), 5 years of farming experience split between CA and NY. Learned about schmitta the last shcmitta year! excited to integrate it into farming/project building this time around

Seed and food grower on Monacan land (central Virginia). Know only about as much as was in the conference description, been considering all year how I can honor this tradition, but very limited knowledge

Lila (she/her), aspiring cooperative land steward / questioning farmer, deep in shmita learning!

Zooming in from Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary on Tutelo land in Floyd, Virginia, farming and beekeeping for more than a decade, new to learning about incorporating Shmitah into ag. practice

elliot they/them building relationships with sacred elementals .. learned about shmittah at first farming conference

help with safety

make it easier for cars

Prevents members of a society from getting hit by cars!

Shaming pedestrians for mussing up car infrastructure

protect pedestrians from

keep people safe from being run over by cars

being hit

Giving the state more ways to arrest people

jaywalking laws make pedestrians partly responsibility for their own safety

Cars are priority

cars need to check their privilege

james scott (sociologist) describes jaywalking as an opportunity to practice anarchist calisthenics

^^^^^^^ yessssss

Wear a garment with 4 corners

wear it during the day

to have a reminder/grounding of mitzvot

protection

g*ds arms embrace the margins

I love that

I am only looking down because of how many notes I am taking. This is amazing.

Or all the deer...

Does shmita disproportionally affect farmers?

usufruct

7x7

This is an indigenous understanding or our relationship to land.

I’m thinking of how some Indigenous people relate to land through responsibilities rather than rights, and have certain trees or territories that their family or larger group has responsibility to care for and harvest

^^

Was the property open to all peoples or only fellow Jews? Were all boundaries dropped or only within the Jewish community?

it is also about debt

all loans are forgiven

i'm thinking and feeling into the binary nature of this practice...and how there feels to me, a calling to have a more collective relationship, all the time, much like indigenous folks do...

also keep in mind that most people had crops no matter what their profession

Like the mana in the desert

Just to clarify because I feel like this is very striking: So Judaism says that nobody has the right to own land? Even when it’s not Shmitta? It’s only a system of 14 year use rights?

makes me think about the role farmers hold in community and society to steward/embody/redefine equitable and sacred ways of being in relationship with land.. for others to learn from, both in ancient times and today

Nina, will you explain what mana is? In case folks don’t know

It's potent to remember that in that first year in that land, the Hebrews were eating food taken from violent displacement of the people who tended the land before them

thank you shoshana

^^^

i wonder if living in such a fertile land set the ratio of 6 years to 1. if the israelites had been in the far ntrth, would they have had more years of working for a year of rest? is there something really universal about the seven year cycle? would they have even needed a reminder about our dependence on land?

curious to know more in response to shoshanah’s comment about the encounter between jews arriving in israel with those living there already

Shoshana, are you saying the mana was food the Jews were taking from the original inhabitants of Israel, who were already displaced by the Jews??

Haha, yes Lexi

These original displaced peoples are also excluded from Jubilee, since clock is set after that.

does anyone know of people who have included that element (owning rights to harvest vs. owning the land) in legal agreements / documents for land stewards here?

And we can hold some for the end too

I think conservation and other easements are one way people make distinction between uses and the land itself.

its such a blessing to be able to read difficult things and acknowledge their difficulty but also see beauty in them at the same time

mmm good point, thanks Rachel :)

something I struggle with

Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe shoshana is saying that the first year of shmita is food collected from the work of the farmers that were displaced by the israelites

You touched on this briefly, but was there a means of community accountability?

Can you talk about (and maybe you’re already heading there), but in present day contexts, if one is planning to observe Shmitta, how do Jews contend with the realities of these laws not being widely known? By goyish neighbors, indigenous neighbors, let alone fellow Jewish neighbors? I feel like, my animal neighbors and microbial friends may be the only ones who come? Maybe that’s ok? Is what it is for now?

^ When the Israelites first entered the land of their ancient kingdom, they displaced people. I don't think they were regularly displacing people every seven years after that.

true true, its really difficult to do shmita in modern day because doing and still surviving depends on everyone around you also doing it

Isn’t that the basis of modern bankruptcy law?

it requires a whole ecosystem, a whole community, in it together

I used to only see the beauty of schmita and now I’m wondering why did there have to be poor in the first place? how could shmita/ag practices be radically imagined to be done with the category of poor

^^^!!!

Sarah, yes I have a similar response to the tradition of gleaning -- it is a way to provide for widows, etc. -- who don't otherwise have access to food because of social and legal structures, consolidation of wealth, etc.

thanks for that connection rachel. makes me think of charity vs. justice

it actually makes me think of how if you keep watering crops with irrigation and never let the land rest and don’t rotate what you are growing, the land will become salivated and depleted. “god removed us from the land for not observing shmita” could also mean that where we were farming became unusable because of poor agriculture, forcing us to migrate. there are many areas in mesopotamia where it is shown this happened thousands of years ago, in some places those lands are still too salinated to support crops

salinated not salivated, darn autocorrect

thank you for that answer!

thank you for the beautiful explanation and for teaching this. these concepts are transformative for how to think about a balanced society. I was wondering what role can shmitta play for thinking about practical near term as well as big picture steps for the United States food system?

ooo thank you for this Tzomi

wow so many good questions

been learning torah my whole life and still so much I have never heard of! truly an ever flowing wellspring

Question from Leroy: Can you talk about (and maybe you’re already heading there), but in present day contexts, if one is planning to observe Shmitta, how do Jews contend with the realities of these laws not being widely known? By goyish neighbors, indigenous neighbors, let alone fellow Jewish neighbors? I feel like, my animal neighbors and microbial friends may be the only ones who come? Maybe that’s ok? Is what it is for now?

yeah. and vice versa is true too- you cant look back on the biblical period and call it capitalism and stuff. it was a completely different framework.

What do we know about the history that led to the creation of Shmita? What did ancient Jews witness that led first to yishuvo shel olam and then the creation of this law?

thank you for the beautiful explanation and for teaching this. these concepts are transformative for how to think about a balanced society. I was wondering what role can shmitta play for thinking about practical near term as well as big picture steps for the United States food system?

Thank you

i think there's possibility around honoring schmita with another cycle of 7- and integrating rotational grazing, gifting days, rotational crops etc....do every 7 days/weeks/months etc

Thanks rabbi-this has been wonderful

Shabbat as mini seventh-year-of-schmita

This has been so wonderful. SO much to chew on and I’m so grateful

Ya’asher Ko’ach, Nina!!

Truly!!!

This has been wonderful!!

Ya’asher Ko’ach!!!

thank you! 💞

maybe now would be a good time to stop the recording

Yes, thank you, Rabbi Nina for laying the groundwork/ offering seeds for us to co-create a habitable world !

unless its recording all day continuously