Give Your Vineyard a Break
The Temptation of Vineyards from Eden to The Promised Land
Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a sabbath of the Lord. Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. (Leviticus 25:2-5)
Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he uncovered himself within his tent. (Genesis 9:20-21)
The tree from which Adam, the first man, ate, Rabbi Meir says: It was a vine, as nothing brings wailing and trouble upon man even today other than wine, as it is stated with regard to Noah: “And he drank from the wine and became drunk” (Genesis 9:21)
In this week’s parasha, Behar, the Israelites receive a commandment that pertains strictly to the land of Israel, shemita. “When you enter…” tells us that in other contexts the commandment to rest is optional, not obligatory. This makes sense: only in a sovereign territory would you have the level of control and predictability necessary to give the land a break. Regularity of abundance, of cash flow and crop flow, allows for regularity of saving, spending, and, retirement. As a nomad or a guest in someone’s home, by contrast, you don’t have the luxury of deciding when and how to harvest. Your life is filled with volatility. Politics or simple expediency requires that you create a cadence customized to the situation—one that can change on a dime. Said differently, nomads already give their land a rest, by default, since they rotate through it. But settlers run the risk of exhausting their place. On the seventh year, one must be a guest in one’s own home. One must be a kind of nomad in place.
The obligation to refrain from harvesting is a general commandment, but the text emphasizes that one not harvest vineyards, in particular. The first person in the Torah to plant a vineyard is Noah, so the example is evocative. According to Rebbe Meir, the tree of knowledge from which Adam ate was a vine (Brachot 40a). Note that, in contrast to Noah, Adam didn’t plant this tree. So Noah’s planting of a vineyard, read through the eyes of Rebbe Meir, is an attempt to create a tree of knowledge, to construct a new Eden after the deluge. In both cases, though, the result is a kind of exile. Adam is literally blocked from Eden and Noah loses his innocence and is de-humanized by his handling of the vine. How ironic that Noah’s arrival on dry land coincides with a kind of ontological displacement from it. All wine carries notes of exile. Grapes, which are used to sanctify, contain a 60th of eternity—but if we eat too many, we’ll find ourselves literally and figuratively naked and ashamed, another motif connecting Adam and Eve and Noah.
It’s worth noting that Ham, the son who violates his father, is himself the father of Canaan, the name of the land which the Israelites conquer and transform. At the heart of both vignettes stands the vineyard. The vineyard leads to Noah’s downfall and Ham’s curse. The vineyard requires a special status that marks the land as holy and the Israelite as distinct. The vineyard which causes exile and disorientation is one of the first things to be mentioned when the Israelites arrive in the land. Their handling of the vineyard determines their sustainability. It is their test.
The vineyard expresses agricultural innovation. In the case of Noah, it’s also a sign of life, of repopulating the world after its destruction. Noah takes freely of the vineyard, with no hesitation. His act is one of reshut, permission. But it is imprudent, if legally allowed, for no law can circumscribe wisdom and discernment. But the vineyard is also a marker of excess, not just drunkenness. It represents humanity’s infatuation with its own power to sew life. In tales like Frankenstein, Pygmalion, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we witness the human anxiety of tools and creations gone rogue. But in the case of Noah, the vine itself is harmless. It is the creator who goes rogue, or gets undone, by his own power. The vine produces what we expect. But our improper use of it destabilizes us. How sad that Noah manages to survive a flood for forty days, manages to have the premonition and faith to save for the future by building a contrarian escape capsule only to lose judgment in a single moment and fall. But this is the story of human catastrophe. Success takes years of foresight and mettle. Failure comes when we least expect it, and often when our guard is down because we are in a heightened emotional state. Arriving in the land of Israel, much like arriving on dry land, after a flood, is a risk to the soul of the people. Recall that the sin of the Golden Calf occurs at the apex of Revelation. The best of times and the worst of times come as a pair. Will the people become drunk on their own power just as they finally achieve self-determination? Will they admire their vineyard and think of themselves as gods? Will their celebration (“started at the bottom now we’re here”) cause them to lose focus on sustainability?
The vineyards will grow for six years, but letting them rest is not just a principle of general ecology and environmental sensitivity. It’s about appreciating the limits of human power. Following Rabbi Meir’s poetic suggestion that the tree of life was a vine, that knowledge is a kind of intoxicant, we might say that the sin that undermines Adam, Noah, and the people is the same. We can call it the violation of Sabbath, we can call it idolatry, we can call it hubris, but it’s the sin that comes from thinking you’ve arrived, that there is no gap between you and God, between you and your goals. Just lay back and get drunk, you’ve survived. Life is for coasting now.
For someone like Noah, a trauma survivor, it’s reasonable to conclude that a care-free life is the wage paid for an agony-riddled past. Take the Holocaust survivor or the person who grew up with a terrible childhood. One might be compelled to say that having endured the unspeakable, they deserve an easy life, thereafter (if such a thing were possible). They’ve front-loaded their suffering and deserve lifetimes of vacation, so to speak. But taking a page from Victor Frank’s Man’s Search for Meaning, we’d be selling them short—for that which makes life worth living is a sense of purpose, not merely a sense of survival. Being in “survivor” mode is no life, even in sunny weather by the pool.
Letting the vineyard rest is about accepting boundaries to human ambition. The temptation to get drunk on one’s own power and to exceed one’s limits is not one that befalls the slave or the nomad, but is a unique temptation of the garden tiller, the ark builder, the land conquerer. Shemita can be analyzed through a rationalistic lens as a common sense ecological principle, akin to crop rotation. But the spiritual teaching is that Shemita is not for the land so much as it is for the inhabitants. The principle of rest applied to the seventh year follows the principle of rest applied to the seventh day. But Shabbat is a rest that is universal, applying to both diaspora and sovereignty. Shabbat is about work, generally. The shemita pertains to the work of civilization-building. It is a “scaled up” up Shabbat, commensurate with the scale of the endeavor: one people, in one land, worshipping one God. Shabbat is an Minimum Viable Rest pertaining to a minimum viable work life. Shemita is a maximalist rest pertaining to a project whose scope is far greater. The greater the power, the longer the rest. The greater the technological capacity, the greater the need to step back so as to avoid over-intoxication.
Shemita isn’t simply a prophylactic against hubris. Like shabbat, it’s a way of sanctifying and affirming our human distinction. By recognizing that we are not God we make room for a relationship with the divine. By recognizing that we can’t and shouldn’t be totally in control, even as we seem to be, we become a nation of priests and a holy people. Ham’s uncovering of his father’s nakedness was a transgression of human dignity—the kind that would be justified in a world in which human beings are seen as mere bodies, mere algorithms, mere objects of scientific or social scientific analysis, mere data points. How easy it is to justify the Hamite transgression when you are a central planner and Noah seems just another demographic trend.
When we enter the land = when our egos risk inflation, take a break, pause, look up. Stay humble.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins