Beating a soothing rhythm, the circular verses of Ecclesiastes swirl around how we experience this world. The lines neither start nor end, but ebb and flow, spiraling up and down, charting “a time for everything:”
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them.
A time to search, and a time to give up.
A time to be silent, and a time to speak.
The layers of implied meaning ripple on the surface of these verses. Each of us could sit with these lines and reminisce on times when we have wept, or laughed, when we have gone to battle or sought out rapprochement, on moments where we have torn down, or built up. These verses are an invitation to creativity, to thinking about what it means to shun embrace, to search, to give up, to maintain silence.
Though perhaps this timeless poem was never meant to be held down by the simplest meaning of the words, this year our family has taken one couplet in the most literal sense:
A time to plant, and a time to uproot what has been planted.
In November of 2023, we planted thirty dunam of wheat on our farm. That was our planting time, as were the months afterwards when we did nothing but observe, and wait. We waited through a dry month, and then we waited through the bounteous rainy season, which began with the yoreh, the hard and uncompromising earlier rains, and finished with the malkosh, the softer rains that round out the winter. We waited as the downy carpet of neon green poked through in January, and waited as the intensity of the shade gradually faded. We waited as the months progressed and the sheaves grew thigh-high. While most others on our moshav harvested their wheat around Passover, when the heads were still sticky in your hand but had grown mature enough for silage, we waited, leaving our wheat to turn gold, hard, brittle, with fat kernels fit for milling. Only then was it our time to reap–around Shavuot, in June, the seasonally-appropriate time for wheat harvest.
There is something very primal, and deeply satisfying, about growing your own grain. Grain means bread, and bread is the symbol of sustenance, of basic needs met. Overseeing the whole elemental cycle of sowing/seeding/harvesting/threshing/sifting/grinding/baking fed us in a way that even the most artisanal sourdough couldn’t. The moment when you bite into bread of your own making–bread that comes from flour that you have seen through from seed to plate–is a culmination of that long waiting that began with “a time to plant” and ended with “a time to uproot.” It is a moment where your soul sways in time with the rhythms of the world, a full-circle occasion that can feel as profound as birthing a new life, or standing with your child under the chuppah. We tap into something beyond ourselves in these moments; we glimpse a truth that encompasses much more than our limited selves, and we are in harmony with life. Wendel Berry described it thusly: “There is no better way to feel at home in the world than to feel rooted in a place, to grow food there, and to feed your own.” It is a deep soul-satisfaction, the sigh of settling into your rocking chair under your proverbial vine and fig tree, the raising a glass around the table with people you love. There is no pillow as soft and inviting as a clean conscience, as one of my favorite sayings goes, and I’d add to that the act of eating bread from wheat you have grown yourself.
To engage in the process of “planting, and uprooting what has been planted,” is a human impulse, which of course can mean so many different things. “A time to plant”: to start new projects, new relationships, new endeavors. “A time to uproot what has been planted”: to usher the project or relationship into a new context or stage, or perhaps to end it when the time is right. If, like us, you are Jews who have planted grain in Israel, and have harvested it and processed it into flour, then there is, indeed, a time to bake bread. That time is today, on Passover eve, when we bake our matzah to eat on Seder night. Though of course there is no mitzvah to use your own flour to bake matzah (nor is there a specific mitzvah to bake matzah–the mitzvah is to eat this lehem oni, the bread of affliction that recalls the Israelite enslavement in Egypt, on the first night of Passover), we had to take this process one step further, and use our flour to make matzah.
Another human impulse of engaging in a process is to take great pride and satisfaction in both the industry involved, and in seeing the process through to the moment of “uprooting what has been planted.” The deep emotions involved in realizing the culmination (or the failure) of a process might sideline God entirely. We might get overly involved in our creative role, believing that “my strength, and the cleverness of my hands, has brought me all of this” (Deuteronomy 8:17). The mitzvot that punctuate the stages of the processes of life are regular reminders that we partner with God in creation. They help make us thoughtful, sensitive, and deliberate in our actions. I plant my wheat seeds in careful consideration of not transgressing the mysterious prohibition of kilayim, of mixing species–perhaps a mitzvah in consonance with the speciation inherent in creation. I pray to God to send rain, and I thank Him for the right rains at the right time. The mitzvot of leket, shichecha, and pe’ah, three commandments which encourage awareness of social justice and care for the poor by enjoining the farmer to not be fastidious about his harvest and to deliberately leave gleanings for the less fortunate to collect, are no longer practiced in Israel due to modern food resources–but I think about their messages as I walk the fields that the combine has just rolled through. We separate the required tithes – one hundred and eighty kilo! – from the harvested wheat, connecting us to our ancient forebears in this land whose tithes would provide for the priests, levites, and poor when the Temple stood. I also separate a portion of the kneaded dough before baking the flour into bread, elevating the ordinary act of baking into a spiritual practice.
And yesterday, we prepared our milled flour from wheat which had been carefully “watched from the time of harvesting” – meaning that care and intention was given from last June until today to ensure that there would be no possibility that it might have come in contact with water. To me, this signals a level of intentionality that eclipses the creative act of bringing forth bread from the earth. It required commitment to a future mitzvah: we will be mindful of the wheat just harvested on Shavuot, ensuring that it remains in pristine, dry condition throughout the upcoming year, in anticipation of performing a mitzvah with this wheat next Pesach.
When we bite into our matzah on Seder night, it will symbolize for us many things: the ties that bind us to our traditions and our history, the memory of afflictions past and ongoing, the joy of gathering together with friends and family to bake this matzah with intention, the elementally satisfying human act of bringing forth sustenance from the earth.
Most profoundly, it will eclipse that wonderful moment last summer when we first tasted bread of our own making. It will signal a new level of “uprooting that which has been planted,” of deliberately marking the culmination of a process that we had set in motion long ago. With eating this matzah, not only are we marking our partnership with (and reliance on) God in the foundational act of bringing forth sustenance from the earth, but we are engaging with God by performing His mitzvot with that sustenance–and for this, I thank God for granting us the opportunity to literally plant and reap.