Earth Etude for Elul 11

God’s eyes on the Land: Why our ancestors chose a land “of hills and valleys”

by Rabbi David Seidenberg

~In Parashat Eikev, Deut 11:10-12, the Torah compares the land of Egypt to the land of Canaan. Egypt is sustained by a river-fed agriculture, whereas the land of Canaan is “a land of hills and valleys — she drinks rain from the heavens.” And, unlike Egypt, the eyes of God are upon the land of Canaan continually. Each of these distinctions bears close reading; each is needed to explain the other.

Egypt is described as a place where you could water crops from the river “with your foot” / hishkita b’raglekha. There is a great difference of opinion on how to interpret this verse. Does it mean you worked harder in Egypt because you had to bring water to your field “by foot”? Or does it mean the work was easier, because you could bring water to your field by using simple foot-pedal technology to raise the Nile’s water and send it far across the floodplain?

The p’shat (plain meaning) is clear: in Egypt things were easier, because you had control over water. But that is exactly why Canaan is better: not having control means having a closer relationship with God. That is what the verse means when it says YHVH’s eyes are on the land “continually, from the beginning of the year until the end of the year.”

This interpretation is made certain by what follows, the second paragraph of the Shema. Deut 11:17 explains exactly what it means for God to be watching over the land: if the Israelites don’t follow the commands, within one season they will be “lost from off the ground which YHVH swore to your ancestors.” Those commands include most prominently not committing idolatry, seeing oneself as strangers rather than owners of the land, and doing justice.

Quite literally, Canaan is better because you can suffer famine more easily. But the New JPS (1962) changed verse 10 to read “the grain you sowed had to be watered by your own labors, like a vegetable garden.” Perhaps the translators were uncomfortable with the physicality and obscurity of watering “with one’s foot,” but the new JPS translation made the plain meaning of the verse—that in Egypt you had control over water—inaccessible to anyone who does not know Hebrew.

That translation is found in Etz Hayyim (Conservative), the Women’s Torah Commentary, and the Plaut (Reform) Chumash. (The old JPS does not make this mistake, but the Hertz commentary does.) Of course, it’s not fair to only call out JPS. Rashi himself explains that in Egypt, “you would lose sleep to labor, and have to bring water from the low places to water the higher places,” but in Canaan, “you could sleep soundly in bed, because the Holy One would water the low and high together.”

But that is the difference between an ecological view of the Torah, which focuses on the bedrock of the Torah coming to life within an ecosystem, and an ideological view of the Torah that learns beautiful lessons but is not always concerned with how the text evolved.

The bottom line is that our ancestors had a beautiful vision of a land where they were so close to God they would know immediately if they were doing well or not. Egypt, and other river-fed agricultures, like Mesopotamia, were the opposite, going along blithely until they had a proverbial seven years of famine or ten plagues, or in the case of Sumer in Mesopotamia, a complete collapse of agriculture because their way of farming made the soil salty over hundreds of years.

Our ancestors dreamed of a civilization where agriculture was an act of service to the soil. They imagined a world that was the opposite of the Anthropocene we live in, where agriculture has become one giant step toward the sixth mass extinction. But as our tradition teaches, it’s not too late to change this reality. The present disaster does not define the future. What defines the future will be our capacity to make ecological t’shuvah. May we be strengthened to do so!

Rabbi David Seidenberg is the creator of neohasid.org and the author of Kabbalah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-Than-Human World. His teaching most often focuses on human rights, animal rights, and ecology. David is also an avid dancer, and a composer of Jewish liturgical music and classical instrumental music.

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