Happy Camper: Entering a Year of Letting Go

For Rosh Hashanah 5782

In the spirit of the season, I have a confession to make. It is a small confession by High Holy Day standards. Here it is: while you generally know me to be an upbeat person, I am in fact not a happy camper. 

I mean that literally. I’m not a happy camper.

I do not come from a family of campers or outdoors people in any way. Picnics begun in the park concluded in the car with windows rolled up against the arrival of bees and bugs. The words “soil” and “dirt” were interchangeable in our household. And imagining my mother in a tent is always good for a cheap chuckle when I’m down in the dumps.

But through my life I have been called upon to go camping, and I have done so with determination and a smile on my face. But I’m generally not happy. At least not until the second day.

Because for me, the camping struggle is not about the elements themselves. It’s about the struggle to relinquish control.

When you go camping, on Day One you are still exerting nearly all the control that you are used to exerting back home. You have the tent and cot and pillow and hiking boots. You have the cooler with carefully planned meal ingredients. You have the water bottles and the lantern and the lawn chair and all the other comforts and clever non-relinquishment strategies that you can fit in your trunk. And so there you are, in the glorious beauty of nature, triumphant at having reasserted domestic life in the wild. 

This all begins to change after one night of sleeping in the tent. A long night where you wake up over and over because you’ve been immobile on one shoulder or one painful hip, all your weight pressing against the most deflated spot on your air mattress. 

Finally, you sleep a sleep of exhaustion. But this is not exhaustion from setting up camp or even from your uncomfortable tossing and turning. You begin sleeping off the exhaustion of civilization; the exhaustion of trying to be – of having to be – in control.  

On the morning of Day Two, you realize there is no shower coming, and there is no mirror to reflect how well you’ve tamed the wild of your face. There is no internet to amuse you, and no savior to bring the important item you forgot. This is when you begin to surrender. Letting your existence, along with your appearance, go fallow. 

This is when I begin to feel all the grief that has welled up inside of me. The sorrow that comes from living in human civilization, in constant battle with nature, even though I’ve mostly, politely, outsourced that battle to food manufacturers and petroleum companies. I begin to see – and grieve – the outrageous complexity of my life; the expense and fossil fuels and other people’s labor required for me to live the way I do. 

My body gasps with release. At last, for a moment, I am back in the context we actually evolved to be in – mah tovu ohalekha – how good to return to the life of the tent. 

So I want to talk just a little bit tonight about complexity and relinquishment. We are, all of us, living in a civilization that maintains itself through the ever-deeper, ever-more painful extraction of resources and profit from the Earth. Sitting here, breathing smoke, we are all aware of the consequences. We all struggle to figure out how not to make it worse; while still reliant on complex systems of energy and production.

Our ancestors were onto this problem long ago. They saw how moving from nomadic life to agriculture taxed the Earth, and created inequalities through the new phenomena of land ownership and labor for pay. And they saw the way their culture had come to rely on these harms.

And so Torah steps in to offer a corrective. A shmitah year. A year of letting go. A year of relinquishment. Every seven years, Torah says, is a time to let go. And this year is it! We are entering a shmitah year right now as we speak. A year to let our fields go fallow. To give Earth a shabbos. And to give ourselves one as well. 

Shmitah, on its face, is about agriculture. Just let the Earth rest. 

It’s is also a little bit about faith – because if you’re going to give up all farming for a year, you have to have faith that there will be enough to eat from last year’s harvest. 

It’s is also a little bit about equity – because during the shmitah year whatever grows on its own belongs to whoever is hungry: whether it’s you, your family, your servants, your neighbors, or strangers. The very concept of trespassing withers on the vine.

And shmitah is also about humility. In one of Torah’s shmitah verses, God says, “Remember, the land does not belong to you; you are but guests and residents.” This de-centering of humanity, this idea that it is not all about us, feels downright unnatural, given how we were raised and how we live. It seems unexpected, considering that Torah pretty much opens with humanity being granted dominion over, well, everything. 

But now, in these shmitah verses, Torah is saying, it’s not yours. You don’t get to do whatever you want. And to remind you of that, every seven years, you don’t get to do any of it. 

Our civilization’s long conquest of Earth is so ingrained in us that it is hard to think of new ways of living. New ways of being. But this is another point of shmitah. It’s not just letting the land rest. It’s letting us recover from the toxic effects of our own mastery. It is not just the Earth and our fellow creatures that suffer for Earth being subdued. We suffer too by being stuck in a mindset, the nonstop habit, of dominion. 

The shmitah year is an open invitation not just to let the Earth rest by living more simply and tightening our footprint. It is an invitation to reexamine who we are, each of us, in relationship to Earth and in relationship to the circumstances of our own lives. To notice what in our lives feels like a struggle for control; problems to be fixed. To notice where we value our lives by our productivity, our output. To notice where we spend more time doing than being. Where we see nature as something outside of us and beneath us rather than around us and in us. Where we rely on technologies we don’t understand and injustices that we do in order to maintain our supposed quality of life.

Shmitah says, “Give it a break.” Shmitah say, “Free your mind.” Shmitah says, “Imagine.” 

What would it be like for us not to be at the center of everything on this planet? 

While shmitah is rooting for us to find a new way, it is not demanding that we all go off the grid tomorrow. Shmitah comes every seven years. Its goal isn’t to end human manipulation of the environment, but to slow it  and give us opportunities to examine our path. One in seven is the ratio Torah gives us. It’s a good and doable proportion. What if we began by drawing back 1/7 of our footprint, 1/7 of our impact? What if we spent 1/7 of our time doing things that are not quite so reliant on the harms that our civilization has inflicted?

There are plenty of days when I wake up and smell the smoke in the air and think gornisht helfn – it’s too late, there is no way to repair the damage, and I want to pull the covers back up. But shmitah gives me strength. Shmitah steadies me and reminds me that we don’t need to solve it and repair it all today; we just need to slow it – and us – down. 

This isn’t an easy ask. But this is the teshuvah we owe the planet. This is the teshuvah that we owe our own souls that don’t want to be caught up in the machinery. In Talmud, the sages decided that it would’ve been better had humanity not been created at all. (Eruvin 17b). But since we are here, they continued, it us our obligation to examine our actions. To take account of ourselves.

So now is the time to do that. It is hard to let go. To decide to do less. There can be painful loss and grief involved. And it requires courage and faith. But as I can tell you from day 2 of camping, to be with and of nature and not over it is the birth of wonder. To be out of the center is relief. To be still is to be connected to every creature. And to emerge from the experience of quiet and surrender is to be wholer, saner, and better able to assist in the healing of this world.

This is the shmitah year. May it be a year of true rest and release from the harms and the habits, and the hold of dominion, in every part of our lives and every corner of this World. Let us free our minds. And rejoice with the resting, repairing, reviving Earth.

And may all os us – human, animal, plant, spirit, earth – together be happy campers.