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Emor

Leviticus 21:1-24:23

Ezekiel 44:15-31

How do you turn a cemetery from hallowed ground that is consecrated for the dead into a place devoted to the living? This is no riddle or joke; it is a question I posed three years ago to the members of Congregation Emanu-El at Rosh Hashanah worship.

To set the tone for what I was about to ask the temple members, I told the story of Rabbi Moshe Leib, who believed that every impulse, good or bad, could be put to the service of God. "How," he wondered, "could the denial of God become a way of serving God? Even disbelief must have some purpose," he thought, "or God would not have created it."

The rabbi fell into deep thought and when he realized that even this impulse could be put to good use, he taught: "If someone comes to you and asks you for your help, you must not say, `Have faith; God will help you.' You must act as if there were no God, as if help could come only from you, and then you must take the place of God, as it were, and act with loving kindness." This approach to spirituality and helping others is summarized by a terse statement in the Gates of Prayer, the prayerbook of the Reform movement: "Pray as if everything depends on God; act as if everything depends on you."

Bearing in mind our personal responsibility to serve as God's partners in creating a perfect world, I challenged the members of Congregation Emanu-El in 1994 to utilize a small piece of unused cemetery ground for a different kind of sacred purpose. This suggestion arose from a practice detailed in several places in the Bible, including this week's Torah portion, Emor: "And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I the Lord am your God" (Lev. 23:22; also see: Lev. 19:9-10; Deut. 24:19-21; Ruth 2:2ff).

This portion, which mentions the harvest holiday of Shavuot with its attendant feasts and rejoicing, admonishes a worshipper not to forget the orphan, the widow, the needy, and the poor. Jewish law understands the concept of leaving the edges and corners of the field for the poor to obligate the farmer to leave one-sixtieth of a field uncut for the poor. This law is considered in a section of the Mishnah called Pe'ah, meaning "corner." Pe'ah concerns itself with maintaining the dignity of the poor by allowing them to anonymously enter farms to gather any unharvested crops or grain that has fallen to the ground. Thus, for the biblical author, God demands justice for the disadvantaged; every citizen shares in the responsibility of easing the burdens of the poor.

A small band of faithful members and friends of Temple Emanu-El accepted the challenge to act on their faith by not leaving the care of the poor just to God, and the Pe'ah Garden Project was born at Home of Peace Cemetery. This is now the third year of this remarkable program. Each year our conscientious volunteers, aided by the classes from the religious school, plant successively larger plots of ground. Each week the San Francisco Food Bank receives another shipment of the harvested crops for distribution to its constituent recipient organizations. In the first two years of operations, Pe'ah has provided 4,066 pounds of fresh produce for the poor and the needy.

I am so proud of the gardeners of Pe'ah who have taken the words of the Torah to heart by embracing an almost 4,000-year-old custom and, in doing so, have transformed a cemetery, ordinarily devoted to the dead, into sacred life-giving ground.

The crops for the 1997-1998 season are already planted and in a few weeks we will celebrate Shavuot, the wheat harvest mentioned in Emor. We think of the fidelity of Ruth and Naomi, who were themselves gleaners. And we rejoice, not only in the life-giving words of Torah, but in the lives of our Pe'ah participants. They have taken up the ancient call to reach out to those who are in need and act as if the lives of those who are less fortunate depend only upon them.