Скачать или смотреть Jews and Indigenousness - an inquiry - Chochmat Halev, 12/18/2023

Even though Judaism's cycles and rituals are deeply keyed to the land and ecology of Canaan/Israel/Palestine, the Torah insists that the Israelites are not indigenous to Canaan. Why? Explore this question with Rabbi David Mevorach Seidenberg, creator of neohasid.org and author of Kabbalah and Ecology. In this session, we unlock how the rhetoric of indigenousness can become a foundation for co-existence today, instead of a battering ram against the "other side."

This learning session is for everyone who cares about what happens in Israel/Palestine, no matter what your relationship is to Zionism or to Palestinian liberation. Our conversation is grounded in Torah and in recent research on colonialism and indigeneity. Listen with your open mind and an open heart.

Can Judaism’s indigenous core help us rise above the damaging politics of our time? The answer is yes - find out how!

MORE INFO: About 40 people attended the session that we recorded. This was the first time I did this teaching since October 7. We did not turn the camera to the audience, in case people wanted to be anonymous in order to hold heated discussion about intense issues. But the session was completely calm, and everyone came prepared to listen well.

NOTE: At 34-36 minutes into the video, I start to explain what went awry with Sumer's ecosystem, but I forgot to finish the explanation! You can get that info from my article "The Third Promise", but In a nutshell, irrigation from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers raised the water table, and the brackish (salty) water underground rose up to the soil. The soil became impregnated with salt, first making it impossible to grow wheat, then making it impossible to grow anything. Subsequent civiliations were founded further and further up the river valley, leading to a similar collapses. (Rain patterns also changed because these civilizations denuded the slopes where the rain fell that fed the rivers.)

I conjecture in "The Third Promise" that our ancestors were aware in some way of that civilization's collapse, and wanted to be in a place where that couldn't happen. They intuitively realized that salinization could not happen in a rain-fed agriculture. AND they understood the meaning of that collapse to be this: since the river allowed people to control irrigation, the people did not need rain and became disconnected from the heavens, from the divine. That is one thing it may mean when we say that Avraham came from Mesopotamia.

You can read more about all this in my article on Jews and indigenousness, "The Third Promise", at tikkun.org/the-third-promise/, which has all the footnotes. It also includes commentary on Genesis 2, which is brought up at 31 minutes into this video. And for a whole lot more background, see Evan Eisenberg's book "The Ecology of Eden".