Giving & Returning

Some weeks it’s hard to wrap my head around the world, and how it seems to perfectly line up with the week’s Torah portion. This week was one of those weeks.

I’ve been reading Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, in the same week the Torah presented the laws of shmitta—our cyclical obligation to treat the earth with integrity, trading the produce of our toil rather than the land itself.

Leviticus 25:1

The LORD spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai:

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.

But you may eat whatever the land during its sabbath will produce—you, your male and female slaves, the hired and bound laborers who live with you, and your cattle and the beasts in your land may eat all its yield.

You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years.

Then you shall sound the horn loud; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his family.

That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, neither shall you reap the aftergrowth or harvest the untrimmed vines, for it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you: you may only eat the growth direct from the field.

In this year of jubilee, each of you shall return to his holding.

When you sell property to your neighbor, or buy any from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. In buying from your neighbor, you shall deduct only for the number of years since the jubilee; and in selling to you, he shall charge you only for the remaining crop years: the more such years, the higher the price you pay; the fewer such years, the lower the price; for what he is selling you is a number of harvests.

Braiding Sweetgrass is about alternative forms of indigenous knowledge, outside of traditional Western science, drawing heavily on the author’s own Native American heritage, the knowledge she received from her ancestors, and the knowledge she gained on her way to becoming a distinguished professor of ecology and forest biology. Along the way she interweaves Native American mythology, and spiritual practices connected to the land and the plants which grow from it.

I found it impossible to read both of these texts in the same week. Parshat Behar offers an economic and societal reset, returning lands to their ancestral holders every 50 years, with it’s rules about trading harvests rather than land. Braiding Sweetgrass offers equally ancient traditions, based in the same ethical treatment of the land as the laws of shmitta, but which have been almost lost after multiple generations of Native Americans were systematically expelled from their ancestral homelands, and from the lands they were resettled on, so white settlers could claim ownership of those lands, to subdue the land and dominate it.

I can’t imagine how the United States of America could even begin to make reparations for centuries of systematic persecution, theft, and genocide against Native Americans. The Jewish answer, however, seems to be simple, at least in theory.

Leviticus 25:29

If a man sells a dwelling house in a walled city, it may be redeemed until a year has elapsed since its sale; the redemption period shall be a year.

If it is not redeemed before a full year has elapsed, the house in the walled city shall pass to the purchaser beyond reclaim throughout the ages; it shall not be released in the jubilee.

But houses in villages that have no encircling walls shall be classed as open country: they may be redeemed, and they shall be released through the jubilee.

Rashi suggests that a walled city in this case means a city which has been encircled by walls since the days of Joshua, which is a pretty high bar. The idea here is that the Earth belongs to us all, it’s a gift from G-d, and it should be treated as such. In almost all cases, the land should be returned it its ancestral holders in the Jubilee year.

I’m not saying that we should be returning Manhattan Island, which was purchased by Dutch settlers from the Lenape Indians for a handful of beads with little value, and then traded to the British as a war restitution. Except that maybe we should be, or figuring out a way to do something just as bold, a gift of sorts to rectify generations of wrongdoing.

I’ll leave you this week with a final nugget from a source cited in Braiding Sweetgrass—The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde–about the term Indian giver, and its origins in the approach Native Americans took to property and commerce, which doesn’t sound so far off from the laws of shmitta the Torah offers us this week.

When the Puritans first landed in Massachusetts, they discovered a thing so curious about the Indians’ feelings for property that they felt called upon to give it a name. In 1764, when Thomas Hutchinson wrote his history of the colony, the term was already an old saying: “An Indian gift,” he told his readers, “is a proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.” We still use this, of course, and in an even broader sense, calling that friend an Indian giver who is so uncivilized as to ask us to return a gift he has given.

Imagine a scene. An Englishman comes into an Indian lodge, and his hosts, wishing to make their guest feel welcome, ask him to share a pipe of tobacco. Carved from a soft red stone, the pipe itself is a peace offering that has traditionally circulated among the local tribes, staying in each lodge for a time but always given away again sooner or later. And so the Indians, as is only polite among their people, give the pipe to their guest when he leaves. The Englishman is tickled pink. What a nice thing to send back to the British Museum! He takes it home and sets it on the mantelpiece. A time passes and the leaders of a neighboring tribe come to visit the colonist’s home. To his surprise he finds his guests have some expectation in regard to his pipe, and his translator finally explains to him that if he wishes to show his goodwill he should offer them a smoke and give them the pipe. In consternation the Englishman invents a phrase to describe these people with such a limited sense of private property. The opposite of “Indian giver” would be something like “white man keeper” (or maybe “capitalist”), that is, a person whose instinct is to remove property from circulation, to put it in a warehouse or museum (or, more to the point for capitalism, to lay it aside to be used for production).

The Indian giver (or the original one, at any rate) understood a cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead, the way a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the felt, its momentum transferred. You may keep your Christmas present, but it ceases to be a gift in the true sense unless you have given something else away. As it is passed along, the gift may be given back to the original donor, but this is not essential. In fact, it is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party. The only essential is this: the gift must always move. There are other forms of property that stand still, that mark a boundary or resist momentum, but the gift keeps going.

Shabbat Shalom