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After decades of practicing what they call “evidence-based medicine,” governments and large medical institutions are finally recognizing the obvious: Our environment is the biggest contributor to our health. We develop diagnosable conditions after years of dealing with poverty, polluted air, super-processed foods, racial discrimination, and other of life that the doctors now call “social determinants of health.”
Some doctors have actually embraced this truth to the point that they become advocates for social change, potentially angering large donors and other elements of the establishment.
It took us a long time to reach this point, and the Talmud can help us understand why. An arcane dispute breaks out in the middle of Tractate Gittin (which was supposedly about divorce papers, but turns out mostly to be about everything except that). The rabbis argue about what ordinary Jews take more seriously: the weekly Shabbat or the _shmita_ year that comes in a seven-year cycle. The next Shmita year will start on Rosh HaShanah in 2028 on the Gregorian calendar.
Gittin verse 54a.4 states that people are more likely to observe the weekly Sabbath than shmita. And this makes sense: We all love Sabbath. We know that we need to recover physically and psychologically from six days of hard labor and engagement with a world fraught with demands.
But as for the shmita year—well, the rabbis are less confident that we understand its importance. (As usual, opinions of the various sages differ.) The shmita year, or Sabbath of the Land, is crucial because it allows farms to recover their productive capacity. Not coincidentally, this year of release also involves the freeing of Jewish slaves. But shmita requires enormous life style changes (foraging instead of farming) and no small trust in God.
One would think that saving our climate, like preserving the capacity of land to grow crops, would take primary place in people’s minds today. But the rabbis undersand that we are more concerned with something that takes place every week, directly affecting our health today, than something that happens far off in the future and requires wrenching adjustments.
At least the the medical profession now has a framework for dealing with impacts of the environment. Can the rest of us make it a priority too?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.