Shani Mink is the executive director of the Jewish Farmer Network, an organization she co-founded in 2017 along with SJ Seldin. The group works to foster community among Jewish farmers, with the aim of cultivating “social, cultural and spiritual well-being.” The organization hosts Shabbat dinners and creates educational resources, among other activities — in the process, shedding light on the deep and often under-appreciated connections between Judaism and agriculture. I spoke to Shani about the importance of agricultural thinking for all Jews, and how farming is still a vital part of contemporary life.
What drew you to farming?
I grew up in suburban New Jersey, in a modern Orthodox community. My parents are fairly outdoorsy. I can’t quite remember when I first got interested in agriculture, but I can say that when I was in college, my first year, I had a professor in environmental ethics who said, You seem really interested in food ethics. I get a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscription from an organic farm down the road. Why don’t you call them and see if you can get an internship? I called and asked if I could have an internship. And the guy said, I don’t do internships, I pay people for their time, and I said, Great, can I have a job? So I ended up spending the rest of my undergraduate career also working on this organic farm. I came out of university with a degree in philosophy, but also nearly four years of practical experience in organic agriculture.
You went from always being outdoorsy to realizing that agriculture was something that you can literally sink your hands into.
Yes, and I will say one of my sassy answers to people asking me why I like being a farmer is that I’m not one of those people who come to the work from a values-based position — I like to be physical. I like to be dirty, and I like to be outside. And that’s it. That’s kind of how I ended up in agriculture. Now I sit behind a desk running a network for farmers, so I’m not actually doing that anymore. But it’s a very embodied thing that brings me to farming.
Farming was not a Jewish practice for me at first. That didn’t come until a couple of summers later, when I started working at Eden Village Camp, which is a Jewish farm-to-table sleepaway camp in New York State. The rabbi there, Pesach Stadlin, told us during staff training that Judaism is one of the oldest agricultural traditions still being practised today. I think, during my time in college, I was looking to my philosophical studies for spiritual, emotional, or intellectual substantiation for my feelings of connection with the work of agriculture. And that statement from Pesach was a kick in the head for me. Everything that I’d been looking for elsewhere was here in my own tradition, and in my own body of ancestral wisdom. That sent me on this journey of reintegration of my farmer self and my Jewish self, and of understanding how those two can be mutually enforcing and a braided whole.
How did you start to see those points of connection between your farm life and your Jewish practice?
One of my teachers, Rabbi Psachyah Lichtenstein, says, The Jew is the calendar. The thing that makes us Jewish is how we move through time. For me, that is the most potent way of connecting with Jewish agrarianism: intentionally stepping into the Jewish flow of time, especially in terms of the Shalosh Regalim, the three holidays that are harvest festivals that anchor the Jewish calendar.
What’s been meaningful for me has been bringing deep intentionality to these festivals: being with my farmer friends, who are often not Jewish, and inviting them to Pesach, bringing some of the first greens and fruits that are showing up on the farm on Shavuot. The stopping and appreciating where we are at in the season is so impactful for me, and for everyone that I’ve invited into that experience. It’s not normal for farmers to take a break in June for two days — that’s a busy time. What, you’re going to stop and take stock of where you’re at? No, there’s shit to do. But Shavuot particularly makes you stop and say, Wow! That gratitude for the first of the season is something I think about as a farmer. When I think about growing cherry tomatoes or strawberries, the joy of the very first ripe one that you’re able to eat is a perfect moment. Taking the moment to appreciate the first is so huge, and our tradition tells us to do that on Shavuot.
I don’t think many people have this awareness of Judaism as an agricultural set of holidays. They think of all of the things that we map onto the holidays: the exodus from Egypt, getting the Torah, living in huts in the desert. How do you walk yourself through the year, through these holidays?
Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot are all agrarian holidays. They are all pilgrimage holidays in which our ancestors brought some of their harvest to the Temple in Jerusalem. That pilgrimage was an ancient farming conference, the time of year that you see all your farmer friends and you’re just like, How are you? How’s your family? I heard your daughter got married. You’re reconnecting. It’s when you see everybody.
At Pesach, we’re coming out of the rainy part of the year, where we’ve been in our liturgy since Shemini Atzeret. Every day we’ve been praying for rain. On Pesach, we change our liturgy and we start praying for dew because the rainy season’s over. The rainy time is when we’re seeding and when we want things to be greening and growing. When we enter into Pesach, we enter into this very special period of time that’s centred around the harvest of grain, specifically of bar- ley and wheat. [In hot climates, these crops are often harvested much earlier than they are in North America.] This period of time is very auspicious spiritually, but also very crucial practically because for the Jewish people, our central seed is wheat. We’re wheat people. When I talk about this with our farmers, I talk about how the inner sanctum of the Beit Hamikdash wasn’t filled with gold or piles of riches. There was a really elaborate table full of bread. I also think about the bitter greens that we’re eating. The greens that come up early in the season are often bitter. The maror that we eat today is a legacy from Ashkenazi diaspora in Eastern Europe because there are no greens there in March or April: horseradish is one of the only things that’s coming up green at that time.
Then we begin the period of counting the Omer between Passover and Shavuot. During this period, every day we are praying that it’s not going to rain, because we’re counting on our grain harvest, and when grain is harvested you want it to be dry. You need it to store up well; you need it to hold you through a whole year. So we enter into this very tricky time, holding our breath for 49 days, counting the days between Pesach and Shavuot, when we end the barley harvest, which was traditionally food for animals. We have finished our grain harvest, all of the wheat is in for the year, and we eat bread. People talk so much about Shavuot being a dairy holiday, but it’s a fruit and bread holiday as much as a dairy holiday.
I don’t believe in the dairy part, actually. I always say that if there’s ever a custom that has multiple reasons for it, none of them are true. They are after-the-fact projections onto existing customs.
Do you want to know my agricultural reason why? Think about livestock. What do we traditionally eat on Pesach? Lambs. This is when lambs are being born. Seven weeks later, those babies have been weaned and there’s dairy available.
That’s really cool. I never thought about that.
I love hosting Shavuot, having cheese and bread and cheesecakes. Everybody brings a different cheese; there’s lots of butter and lots of fruit.
And then we get to the fall. And for me, Sukkot is about so many things, but primarily taking a minute to appreciate the hard work of the season and all that we have grown, all that we have produced, and really inhabiting that abundance in the space of the Sukkah and living and sitting and eating amongst our harvest. Traditionally, they hung garlic and onions and peppers and all of these fruits from the sukkah, beautifying the space and being able to rest in gratitude. That time of year, you still have summer fruit along with the fall things. It is the most abundant time of the year.
You run this organization that connects Jewish farmers together, who are not necessarily working in a Jewish context, they’re just Jewish and also farmers. Tell me about these people and what it means to have a network of Jewish farmers across North America.
We’re connected to about 1,800 Jewish farmers, mostly in the United States, but definitely a lot in Canada, too. We have a bunch of British Columbia Jewish farmers, as well as the folks at Shoresh in Toronto, and others. We work to cultivate the social, cultural, and spiritual well-being of Jewish farmers, and we do that by helping Jewish farmers connect to each other. Most farmers are pretty rural, pretty isolated from Jewish community.
A lot of them are also pretty alienated from Jewish community in virtue of having a very different lifestyle than the rest of the Jewish community. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard from a Jewish farmer some version of this story where they say, When I started farming and I went back to my Jewish community, people asked me what I was up to and I told them I was farming and they said, Jews don’t do that. A lot of people feel really rejected from mainstream Jewish community. The story that most of us have been told about what it looks like to be Jewish in the world today is not one that includes the stories of Jewish farmers. The work that we do helps tie them back into the Jewish story. Being a Jewish farmer is the most Jewish job there is, because we are an agrarian people at our core. A third of the Talmud is about agricultural law, and our ancestors, our sages, had so much to say about how to do agriculture in a way that is regenerative of self and community and soil. We offer Jewish farmers opportunities to tap into the surprisingly relevant rhythms and technologies of Jewish agricultural thought.
Our expectation is not for people to become religious or start “farming Jewishly,” but just to shift the way they think about themselves in the context of the wider Jewish story, believe that they are an essential part of that story and not antithetical to it.
What are the options for people who live in cities to contribute in some way to the food system?
My recommendation would be to subscribe to a Community Supported Agriculture program, which supports your local farmers. CSA subscriptions are such an amazing way to support your local food economy because you are investing in your farmer at the beginning of the season. It allows them to buy the things that they need to buy to grow the food that they need to grow, and makes the year a lot less volatile for the farmer. And you are guaranteed to get amazing seasonal, well loved, well cared for, often organic produce. It keeps money in your local economy, and it’s relational. Some CSAs have a model where, if you are a member of the CSA, you are invited to come volunteer on the farm or you can come pick your own produce. Some even have community events where you get to have a party on the farm with other CSA subscribers. It’s an amazing way to support local food. Our country, our Western society, doesn’t value farmers.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
