Growing Holiness
The month of May in Seattle brings out the philosopher in all my neighbors - by which I mean, an embodiment of the view with which Voltaire (1694-1778) concluded his philosophical novel Candide: “We must cultivate our garden.”
Rakes, hoes, and spades. Mounds of rich earth, new little sprouts of life, and the sturdy joy of tending to what’s within a few square feet around you. In a worrisome and complex world, gardening opens the gate to peacefulness and work whose good results you can witness with your own eyes. In a letter written a decade after his novel, Voltaire returned to his theme: “Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.”
Many centuries before Voltaire, a rabbi told another story about rakes, hoes, and spades, although used in quite different ways than you might expect.
There was an incident involving Abba Yosei of Tzaitur, a villager, who was sitting and studying at the entrance to a spring.
A certain spirit that dwelled there appeared to him. It said to him: ‘You know how many years I have been dwelling here, and you and your wife come and go at night and in the morning, and you are not harmed. Now, you should know that an evil spirit seeks to dwell here, and it harms people.’
He said to it: ‘What shall we do?’
It said to him: ‘Go and warn the residents of the city: Anyone who has a hoe, anyone who has a spade, anyone who has a rake, let them come out here tomorrow at daybreak, and let them look at the water’s surface. When they see a whirlpool in the water, let them strike with their iron and say: Ours is victorious, and they shall not go from here until they see congealed blood on the water’s surface.’
He went and he warned the residents of the city, and said to them: ‘Anyone who has a hoe, anyone who has a spade, anyone who has a rake, let them come out there tomorrow at daybreak, and let them look at the water. When you see a whirlpool in the water, strike with the iron and say: Ours is victorious, ours is victorious, and do not go from here until you see congealed blood on the water’s surface.’
Keep your gardening tools handy, I guess!
Some misread Voltaire as advocating for a retreat from public life and the civic sphere, abdicating responsibility for matters too large to confront and doing your best to live life in your little corner of the world. Our folk tale departs from the studious circles of the rabbis and brings us to just such a corner of the ancient Jewish world, a village of gardeners and the like, each with a rake or a hoe or a spade.
Of course, as a folk tale told by rabbis, we still encounter the villager Abba Yosei sitting and studying! A book, like a garden, can become a place of refuge where wondrous growth offers beauty and nutrition. And a book, like a garden, can be a place we go to hide from the outside world.
Not so in this story, however! Abba Yosei is interrupted by a water spirit warning that although this spirit has been totally pleasant and no harm whatsoever, another evil spirit is about to take up residence. There are no little corners of the world that will forever be a refuge if we don’t address the forces of harm.
Following the good spirit’s advice, the villagers gather their iron tools to defeat the spirit. In the world of magic, it seems iron works well against malevolent spirits. I’m taken, however, with two other facts in this story.
First, the iron is in the shape of gardening tools. It is almost as if the act of gardening has prepared them for a type of fight that can’t or shouldn’t be won with iron shaped into weapons.
Second, in this ancient village, each person is asked to contribute whichever they have of the rake, spade, and hoe. Apparently, few if any of the villagers have all three. But those tools accomplish different tasks which everyone would need to do. Hidden between the words is a vision of interdependence, where people lend each other tools.
In fact, the teaching in which this story is embedded continues with its moral:
Can the matters not be inferred a fortiori? If the spirits, which were not created to require assistance, require assistance, we who were created to require assistance (אָנוּ שֶׁנִּבְרֵאנוּ לְסִיּוּעַ / anoo sheh-neevreinu l’see’oo’ah), all the more so. That is the meaning of: “may God send you help from the Sanctuary (kodesh)” (Psalms 20:3). [And this is the meaning of: “You shall be holy, for I Adonai your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2).
To be holy, in this reading, is to be bound up in a grand mutual aid society, sending and receiving help. To garden, perhaps, is to “sit and study” the remarkable interdependence of human and other-than-human life. Along with tomatoes comes an intuition of justice.
After cultivating his own garden and writing Candide, Voltaire became one of the first human-rights campaigners in European history, with one scholarsuggesting that far from being a false retreat, “his garden broadened Voltaire’s circle of compassion. When people were dragged from their gardens to be tortured and killed in the name of faith, he began to take it, as they say, personally.”
Together, we have all the tools we need this season.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
