Sharon Astyk: The challenges of being a Jewish farmer
02:21 PM CST on Friday, February 6, 2009
I am a small-farmer and a Jew, an unusual combination in our society. In a country where less than 2 percent of the population still farms, and most Jewish and many other ethnic populations live in dense cities, I’m often asked why it is important for members of a minority culture to do something as strange as take up agriculture.
Judaism, like all faiths, is communal. Most Jewish observances require the presence of other Jews. Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, for example, requires us to pray in a group with a minimum of nine other adult Jews every day. Kosher food and Jewish goods are available where it is reasonably profitable to sell it. Maintaining any minority culture requires a critical mass other people committed to the culture’s future.
Experiencing Jewishness as an identity means immersion in that identity — and without that immersion, the attractions of secular cultures and identities can be overwhelming. In New York City, the old Lenny Bruce joke goes, “Even if you are black, you are Jewish.” That simply isn’t true here in the snowy hills of upstate New York.
Thus, being a rural Jew comes with some hard compromises. My kids attend synagogue a 30 minutes’ drive away. Before we moved here, we did not “ride” on Shabbat — that is, in accordance to Jewish law, we didn’t use our car on the Sabbath. We looked for a long time for a rural area that would allow us to walk to a shul — and couldn’t find one with land we could afford.
So while our denomination technically permits riding on the Sabbath as preferable to not coming to synagogue at all, we made a compromise we’re still not comfortable with. We look longingly at our friends who walk home, talking and pushing their strollers, as we drive past, knowing something special has been lost.
Maintaining Jewish culture pushes Jews towards living closely. In many ways, this is good — observant Jews eschew commerce and driving on the Sabbath and enable walkable communities. These are positive things for the future and the environment. But they also come with a price — the loss of the agrarian roots of Judaism and a lack of space to grow food.
Historical factors are also a force driving Jewish urban identity. Throughout our history, Jews would settle on a farm, improve the land and, then, when the next round of anti-Semitic scapegoating came about, governments would displace Jews and take over their land and wealth. For thousands of years, Jews were taught by events that land ownership was tenuous, that other forms of more portable wealth were more valuable and secure, that the solution to hard times was a passport, a new and safer land. The difficulty with us is that a world climate and energy crisis can’t be escaped by moving.
My husband’s great-grandfather had a farm on the German-Danish border in the 1930s — taken from him by the Nazis. Thriving Jewish agrarian cultures all over the world have been systematically destroyed and, with it, the faith of Jews in their relationship with the land. Thus, most American Jews feel stronger ties to Israeli soil than they do to the soil that provides their food. (The deep irony and grief that some Jews are so willing to displace Palestinians by force and justify it with their history seems to me one of the saddest and most troubling results of our disrupted agrarian ties).We are not the only people who have lost their ties to soil — many refugees and minority cultures have been driven from their farms and pushed into cities and seen their food security suffer because of it.
So why be a “Jewish farmer” or, indeed, preserve the agricultural traditions of any faith or culture? We farm, despite the difficulties, because Judaism is, at its root, an agrarian religion, one that prescribes ways of living in relationship to the land. We believe those ways have a heightened importance in this time of environmental crisis. A sustainable agriculture isn’t just a good idea, it is integral to our faith. The integration of principles and practices by all people of faith is one of the most powerful tools we have to address the challenges of climate change and peak energy.
Jews have a special food culture that deserves to be preserved. The food we eat must be good food, raised ethically, and in practices that accord with our belief that our purpose is “tikkun olam,” or “the repair of the world.” Eating food that is raised through industrial agricultural practices that do harm to the world is a betrayal of our belief that food is a gift from God and our table an altar.
That means we need farmers who understand what Jewish food is and can be. For this reason for some years, we ran a Jewish-themed CSA (at the time the only one in the country, but this has fortunately changed) that delivered vegetables, fresh eggs, challah and flowers. We no longer run community-supported agriculture, but we’re still a Jewish farm. We still leave a portion of our ground fallow, feed our animals before we feed ourselves, end their lives in a humane and kosher manner and glean our own garden and donate to local food pantries.
The other reason we farm is that we are concerned about food security — for both Jews and non-Jews. Because Jewish culture is so urban, so disconnected from its agricultural traditions, our current economic and environmental crises could hit American Jews hard. Elderly Jews and those on a low income are already struggling, because a kosher diet is generally much more costly than a typical American diet. The stereotype that all Jews are wealthy simply is untrue — Mazon, the Jewish Hunger agency, reports that Jews experience hunger at the same rate the same amount of hunger as most other Americans.
Most of us are fairly far removed from growing our own food. And yet more and more Americans of all stripes are going hungry — one in nine Americans now needs food stamps. Without local farmers who care about urban neighborhoods, food security may suffer. That’s why we need farmers cued to every minority population’s particular needs — more African-American farmers, more Somali and Hmong, Muslim and Russian farmers, and more Jewish farmers. If oil prices rise again, as they almost certainly will, we may not be able to afford food from far away. How will kosher foods — or the traditional foods of any culture — reach ethnic neighborhoods without engaged local farmers who care about their urban brothers and sisters?
As a writer who focuses on food and energy issues, I am concerned that there will be real and serious hunger in the U.S. — among Jews and Christians, Muslims and Buddhists. Our industrial food system’s impact on our climate and its dependence on imported fossil fuels have left us vulnerable to the specter of hunger, even as our economy deteriorates.
The best possible strategy for dealing with this danger is more farmers on the ground, victory gardens in cities and suburbs, and a heightened awareness of the importance of food. The best possible strategy is the creation of a nation of people engaged with their food systems.
And that will mean many more non-traditional farmers, including, I hope and pray, many more Jewish farmers.
Sharon Astyk is a writer and small-farmer in upstate New York. She is the author, with Aaron Newton, of the forthcoming book “A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil.” This essay was adapted from a post on her blog, .
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