Throwing off the Yoke

Over Yom Kippur, I was struck by one line of the Vidui prayer where we are meant to reflect on sins that we as individuals and as a community have committed over the past year.

“For the sin we have committed before you in throwing off the yoke.”

I never really thought about this line so much in the past – I had always focused on more specific things that I could think of in very practical terms.

What does it mean to throw off the yoke? It means we have shirked responsibility. It means that we had a duty to do something, and we neglected it.

I began to think about some of the major problems facing the world – genocide in Darfur, man-made global climate change, terrorism, hunger, natural disasters – and the list simply didn’t stop.

I started thinking nationally to both America and Israel, wondering what I should be doing to influence the outcome of the upcoming election, and what I could do to work towards peace for Israel and her neighbors.

I thought locally about the community I lived in, and the people who I saw every day who might be in need of help or assistance in some way – my synagogue, my neighbors, my friends and family.

That’s not a yoke, that’s hundreds of yokes! Do we really need forgiveness for not solving every woe in this world? Who is not guilty of throwing of one of these countless yokes?

“It’s not possible to do everything,” I told myself, but it’s imperative that I do something. Throwing off the yoke is unacceptable. We don’t need to carry every yoke, but we need to be thinking about what need there is out there in the world, and how we can best fill it.

Shana Tova.

A Green Torah: Jews and the Environment

When thinking about the Jew’s relationship and responsibility to the natural world, it is worthwhile checking out a mishnah in Pirkei Avot that might make you think that Environmentalism is a waste of time for Jews.

The mishah reads: “Rabbi Yakov said: If you are walking along the road reviewing your studies, and you stop to look up and say ‘what a beautiful tree’ or ‘what a beautiful field’ then it is considered as if you committed a corporeal sin.”

This seems to be quite damning for anyone who might be interested in appreciating the beauty of nature. The mishnah isn’t simply talking about the problem with interrupting your Torah study, because it specifically mentions someone who is outside and distracted by nature. In addition, the punishment seems quite severe.

In order to understand this Mishnah, we need to really analyze the specific language that was used. The word the Mishnah uses is “hifsik” – he stopped learning. According to _______ the mishnah was talking about someone who thought that he could relate to G-d better through Nature than he could through the Torah. He felt that he would leave his Torah and rely solely on the Environment to become close with G-d.

Rabbi Kenneth Brander further emphasized the point by explaining that some people have the misconception that Nature and Torah are completely separate. That in order to appreciate Nature, they have to abandon the Torah. The Mishnah teaches us just the opposite – by using the Torah as a lense to view the world, we will have a richer and fuller appreciation of Nature.

Achad Ha’Am took a very different approach by saying that the issue at hand was that this person was not in the land of Israel. Israel is the Holy Land, and only there is there strong enough of a connected between the Jewish people and the Land for a distraction in learning to be justified. We cannot become distracted by the Land outside of Israel because it will pull us from our learning. Only in Israel can we have the synthesis of the Land of Israel and the Torah of Israel.

With this new understanding of the Mishnah in hand, we can  use this year’s Tu B’Shvat to better appreciate Nature, and find those links between our Torah study and the world we live in.