To Till and to Tend

Last spring, David Elcott tore up much of his front lawn to plant a farm.  Last we heard, he was just beginning to enjoy the bounty of his labor. Now, during Sukkot – the Harvest Festival – David shares his reflections as the season comes to a close. This has been a guest-blog initiative with jcarrot.org. To catch up or refresh, here are his first and second posts. 

Who would have imagined that from June until the middle of October, we would only be eating vegetables from our own garden: multi-colored summer squash souflee and barbequed okra, leeksand parsnips and carrots in a cabbage soup, eggplants in abundance, stuffed Napa cabbage, baby spinach and enough spicy greens and snap peas to feed an army, a cherry tomato tartine in gold, red, yellow and orange, a banquet of roasted fingerling potatoes, beans that never stopped giving, all flavored with garden herbs. I prepared cold sweet cucumber soup with the added tartness of rhubarb and ate beets for the first time as part of a root vegetable medley. We decorated our salads with nasturtium and zucchini flowers. And corn, corn, corn – much of which never made it to the kitchen but eaten fresh off the stalk.  A time for rejoicing indeed!

The pleasure was not just for the eleven of us in our family. I would look out my window to see neighbors and friends stooped over, harvesting from our farm. Olivia next door and the two sets of twins behind us, none over six years old, lugging a finally discovered zucchini almost as big as they are.  The repeated line of “is this all from your garden?” brings such enormous pleasure.

And here is an additional reality of creating a mini-family farm:  Once the clearing and tilling and initial labor of planting are over, with good mulching and a bit of hoeing and weeding, maintaining the garden throughout the season is not so much work.  These are plants that have developed over millions of years to want to grow, to soak in the sun and water, to resist disease and insects, to produce – just for our family.  So I sprayed the aphids with a soap solution and handpicked the beetles that wanted to eat the leaves of my eggplant, but really did not fight too much.  The garden seemed in balance and I shared with the rabbits and squirrels and birds.  None of us went hungry.

It is Sukkot now, the holiday of the harvest, the one holiday that is called “the time of our rejoicing.”  The crops are in, we will not starve, the world works, and all my hard work paid off.  The Rashbam, a Medieval Jewish commentator on the Bible, warns us to avoid the hubris of saying, “My power and the might of my right hand has gotten me this wealth (Deuteronomy 8:17).” He is so right. I had to control the ego that swelled when I walked by my little farm. Who am I kidding?  I am so dependent on the farmers that provided me with organic seeds and soil, the workers who mixed the organic fertilizer for me, the sun that warmed my plants and the plentiful rain that kept my crops watered, the bees and birds pollinated the flowers, even the wind which is necessary for corn to produce. Sustainable agriculture for me means that I remain acutely aware of this balance, that I am a part of the process and not its master.

We sat in our sukkah, that fragile booth open to the elements, decorated with corn stalks from our field, eating from the cornucopia of our little farm, and recited with great fervor: Blessed is the Eternal who has nurtured us with life that sustains us and allows us to celebrate this moment. This certainly has been a growing season of great rejoicing.    

This weekend, as Jews around the world greeted each other in a Sukkah built to honor our relationship with our earth, the environmental community commemorated a different kind of annual event: the anniversary of the Clean Water Act, signed into law on October 18, 1972. Along with the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Clean Water Act is considered a cornerstone of our national environmental policy. Under the Act, more than one billion pounds per year of toxic pollutants have been removed from our nation’s waters, moving us far along the path to make all rivers, lakes, and coastal waters in the United States ‘fishable and swimmable,’ the original goal of the Act.

This year however, debate over the Act reminds us that the fight for a healthy environment is never fully won, and that we must continually engage in the effort to preserve our natural resources for ourselves and our children. Progress on water issues is in danger following a series of federal court cases that restrict protection by narrowing the definition of waters that fall under the Act. In response to the 2006 Supreme Court decision on the definition of ‘navigable waters,’ 22 Senators and 177 House members are co-sponsoring the Clean Water Restoration Act (CWRA). The CWRA ensures that the Clean Water Act can be effectively enforced to protect all of the nation’s waters from pollution. Since clean water is the backbone of the healthy ecosystems that provide barriers against natural disasters and climate change, a strong Clean Water Act is more important today than ever before.

Clean water is essential to us all, both as users of the public water supply and as Jews.  The history of the Jewish people- dating back to the Great Flood and the Exodus from Egypt and continuing with the modern struggles of Israeli society to adequately hydrate its people and its fields – is the history of our relationship with water.  The Baal Shem Tov, the Jewish mystic and scholar, explained, “If we were to walk in the woods and a spring appeared just when we became thirsty, we would call it a miracle. And if on a second walk, if we became thirsty at just that point again, and again the spring appeared, we would remark on the coincidence. But if that spring were there always, we would take it for granted and cease to notice it. Yet is that not more miraculous still?”  If we stop to appreciate the miracle of water, we realize that we must also act to ensure that we keep our water clean and safe for us and for generations to come.

Many experts fear that the next great resource wars will be fought over water, as millions around the globe still lack access to safe, drinkable water.  While we cannot fix this problem with national legislation alone, we can start facing it by fighting for clean water here at home, and raising awareness about water issues. As we celebrate the harvest festival of Sukkot, take action by supporting the Clean Water Restoration Act and speaking out on the importance of water issues in your community, in our country, and in our world.

Rachel is an Eisendrath Legislative Assistant working on environment and energy issues at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, DC. She will be a regular guest blogger on To Till and To Tend this year, posting entries every other Monday. This, and all of Rachel’s entries, can also be found on the Religious Action Center blog.