Greetings Snackers,

My lovely and talented sister forwarded me a fascinating New York Times article the other week about Israel and it's attempt to adhere to an age-old Jewish tradition of leaving land fallow every 7 years.  To make a long, complicated story short, the Torah dictates that every 7 years (or shmita, sabbatical year), Jews should let their lands go fallow and, presumably, spend the year eating canned peaches.

Typical of holy texts, the Torah parcels out few details.  It implies that the land spends the year feeding live-stock and the poor.  But could it also be a manner of forced crop-rotation?  Seeing as the Jews came out of a thinly soiled land, they certainly had some incentive to avoid over-farming.  Whether it's an economic, social, or environmental tool, back in the day the law surely impacted all three.

But back in the day, there weren't 7 million citizens to feed.  Imagine if such a law were in place today in, say, California.  Granted, the soil would probably LOVE the break, but imagine the sudden lack of, say, almonds (California grows 60% of the world's almonds).  There would be "bring back the almonds" riots from Bangor to San Diego, and needless to say, Peeled Snacks would be TOAST.

According to the NYT article, Israel's found a strange, legalistic way around the problem (wherein Jewish farmers sell their land to Arabs for a year), but the haven't found a way to give the land the break it surely needs.  Therein lies the problem- in the era of looking at a future filled with environmental blight, do we have the means and discipline to take drastic steps to protect our natural assets?

I believe in part that's what ancient orthodox practices like this shmita were implemented in part to curb excessive environmental abuse.  I consider the ancient Jews to have been very practical people- if eating pigs kills people, stop eating pig.  If working too hard makes people less productive, invent the weekend (or sabbath).  This break of lands seems similarly very forward-thinking.

But we still need to feed people, and insure that people, say, 400 years from now get fed as well.  Can we adobt sensible practices like the shmita that don't mean people starve for a year, but DO preserve the land?  That's one of the (many) challenges facing us as we look to dealing with a changing environment, and religion can certainly help make solutions to such problems stick. 

Old orthodoxies can, surely, get in the way of progress (like, if you ask me, the current "solution" to the shmita problem in Israel is a total cop-out), but I dare not take that topic on- this is, after all, a SNACK blog, not a THEOLOGY blog.  Though a theology blog WOULD be fun to write....

Nah.  Just the snacks, man.  Just the snacks.

Regards, Peeled Skinny