By: Yossi Quint
God spoke to Moshe and tells him to speak to the Israelites and tell them: “When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a Sabbath of the Lord” (Lev 25:2). The next verses explain that every seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath of complete rest. Each seventh year, the Israelites are told not to work the land because the land needs to rest. Every 50th year, the Sabbath of Sabbath, servants are freed from their masters and land goes back to its ancestral masters: “proclaim liberty in the land unto all the inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to his holdings and each of you shall return to his family” (Lev 25:10). Rabbi David Fohrman explains that the liberty of the land is so overflowing that it affects its inhabitants. The land is not returning to its masters, but the masters are hearing the call of the land and returning to it.
The earth may have its own voice, its own melody, and it has this voice because God created it. It is a part of God and when we are in touch with nature, when we are one with nature, we are encountering God. Rav Nachman of Breslov writes:
You should know that each and every shepherd has his own melody.
You should know that every herb and grass has its own melody . . .
And from the song of the grasses is created the melody of the heart. (Likutei Moharan II:63)
The earth is Godly and we are Godly and when we are able to attune ourselves to the sound of nature we can hear things, which we usually miss. We can access parts of God, parts of ourselves, which are too often hidden from us.
Over the past few months, I have spent a lot of time looking at and thinking about trees. At first I thought it must be lonely being a tree. Every tree in a forest is surrounded by many other trees, but they can never move closer. They live in a world surrounded by people and yet are so lonely. I was sharing this thought with my friend Çan, and he told me something incredibly wise. The roots are touching you just can’t see it. In The Little Prince, the prince explains to the pilot “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Once in a while, we see trees that have exposed roots. R. Shmuly Yanklowitz has an essay about these trees in The Soul of Jewish Social Justice. Upon reflecting on this exposed trees he “realized that this tree was strong and beautiful enough that it could expose its roots to the world” (48).
I am not sure how many of us are ready to expose our roots to the world. I am not even sure if many of us know what are our roots. The journey into the self is not easy, but one step in the journey may be to become one with the world around us and realize just how much there is to learn from God’s other creations. As George Santayana said, “The earth has music for those who listen”, and I believe each one of us does as well. Each one of us is filled with a song the question is will we ever be able to hear it.
Hava Amina 