By Deborah Secular

At the beginning of this week’s parshah, God reminds the Israelites that he’ll make sure there’s plenty of food and rain if they follow all the rules—but that if they don’t, he’ll get ‘em!

My favorite punishment is the one for not following the shmita (a rule described in last week’s parshah, which says you shouldn’t farm your land once every seven years):

I will make the Land desolate, so that it will become desolate [also] of your enemies who live in it.

And I will scatter you among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword after you. Your land will be desolate, and your cities will be laid waste.

Then, the land will be appeased regarding its sabbaticals. During all the days that it remains desolate while you are in the land of your enemies, the Land will rest and thus appease its sabbaticals.

It will rest during all the days that it remains desolate, whatever it had not rested on your sabbaticals, when you lived upon it.

God is basically saying there is no way to game nature. If you don’t follow shmita (a.k.a. follow sustainable agriculture practices!) then you’ll ultimately lose out…the land will lose its fertility and you’ll be forced to migrate. Then the land will get some chofesh!

This sounds a lot like the typical climate change dystopia stories: we don’t take heed fast enough, we keep using a limited planet like it goes on forever, and then, eventually, we end up with giant waves knocking down iconic buildings in major cities in the northeast (never mind all the climate change that's already happening right now...).

So I was feeling pretty good about this parshah…until I got to the next section!

The fourth Aliyah is about people “pledging

the value of lives to the Lord” which according to the commentary means saying you will donate someone’s value in money to the Holy Temple. I think it’s like a walk-a-thon, except instead of basing your donation amount on how many miles someone walks, you base it on their age and gender. And (what a surprise!) men at every age are worth more shekels than women.

This is definitely a sexist part of the Torah, and at first it made me angry. But then I tried thinking about it as a description of reality, instead of a recommendation for what should ideally be going on. And in that sense, it’s not far off from the truth: women don’t get paid for a lot of work they do (like housework and stuff), so in a sense we are worth fewer shekels.

I decided to think about this passage as a critique of the capitalist system that evaluates people in terms of how many shekels they’re worth and ignores any labor that isn’t remunerated. To accomplish this, I started reading it with a sarcastic voice. It really helped.

Living in air conditioned buildings in our capitalist world makes it easy to forget a lot of things: that our actions all have effects on the planet that sustains us, and that work goes on all the time that is disrespected or made invisible. When I don’t have to visually engage with environmental ruin or experience many of the more acute forms of sexism, I can often avoid engaging with them emotionally.

This Shabbat, I’ll be at ma’apilim seminar. I hope together we can use group discussion as a way to shine lamps on the monsters that capitalism wants us to hide from! Only then can we turn them into friendly monsters through the power of partnership.