Parshat Kedoshim: Making orlah relevant to contemporary corporate culture

כג  וְכִי-תָבֹאוּ אֶל-הָאָרֶץ, וּנְטַעְתֶּם כָּל-עֵץ מַאֲכָל–וַעֲרַלְתֶּם עָרְלָתוֹ, אֶת-פִּרְיוֹ; שָׁלֹשׁ שָׁנִים, יִהְיֶה לָכֶם עֲרֵלִים–לֹא יֵאָכֵל  כד  וּבַשָּׁנָה, הָרְבִיעִת, יִהְיֶה, כָּל-פִּרְיוֹ–קֹדֶשׁ הִלּוּלִים, לַיהוָה  כה  וּבַשָּׁנָה הַחֲמִישִׁת, תֹּאכְלוּ אֶת-פִּרְיוֹ, לְהוֹסִיף לָכֶם, תְּבוּאָתוֹ:  אֲנִי, יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם

23 When you come to the Land and you plant any food tree, you shall surely block its fruit [from use]; it shall be blocked from you [from use] for three years, not to be eaten. 24 And in the fourth year, all its fruit shall be holy, a praise to the Lord. 25And in the fifth year, you may eat its fruit; [do this, in order] to increase its produce for you. I am the Lord, your God.

Vayikra/Leviticus 19:23-25

Parshat Kedoshim is a fascinating, even comprehensive, cornucopia of laws and regulations that can serve as the perfect guide for a religiously ethical life and lifestyle. Kedoshim covers virtually every aspect of a Jew’s life, interweaving the laws of the Decalogue (עשרת הדברות) with rules governing finance, agriculture, interpersonal relations and sexual behavior.

I am tempted to say that we could easily dispense with the entire mountain of opaque tomes that comprise the Talmud and two millenia of halakhic debate by simply designating Parshat Kedoshim as the Jewish legal canon; one that can be understood and followed by everyone from layman to sage.

Unfortunately, the bibliographic tsunami that defines the Orthodox diaspora,] has succeeded in churning the obvious and understandable into the arcane and inaccessible. It has turned Torah law into a rabbinic industry, often hereditary.

The roiling factories of hairsplitting and argumentation, the power plants of caveat and fiat, are too often a means of controlling people; paralyzing our ability to conduct our lives with honor and fidelity. Indeed, we have an entire industry dedicated to the manufacture of shackles and trusses imposed by a rabbinic oligarchy in order to render their CEOs and boards of directors (i.e. roshei yeshiva and Moetzet Gedolei HaTorah)  indispensable to everyday life.

And now, as I wait for my windows to be smashed by an angry mob helmeted in black Borsalinos, let us turn to the above verses from this week’s parsha.

The laws of orlah prohibit the enjoyment of fruit during the first three years after a tree’s planting. The fourth year’s yield is dedicated to God. Only in the fifth year and onward can the fruits be enjoyed for consumption and profit.

Now there’s got to be a lesson planted in there somewhere.

The laws of orlah are not arbitrary regulations that hamstring the farmer without purpose. If we understand the rationale, surely it must have implications for contemporary life as well, a time when the overwhelming majority are not engaged in fruit farming.

By nature, farmers are patient people. Even the most rapidly growing grains, fruits and vegetable mature very slowly by industrial standards. The period between sowing and reaping is fraught with unpredictable variables of weather and infestations. A successful harvest is cause for jubilation.  A poor yield can result in ruination.

Yet the seasonal perseverance of the typical farmer is insignificant compared to that of the planter of fruit trees. Regardless of the Torah’s regulations as brought to us in Vayikra 19:23-25, the planting of fruit trees is the very opposite of instant gratification. Growing such trees is like raising a human child. The period of gestation and nurturing is long. The tree must be braced and protected, coddled and pruned before it is ready to prove its worth.

An older farmer is often aware that the tree he plants today will be of value only after his own demise.  And we are prohibited from destroying a fruit tree. Understanding this is the key to a gentle, organic wisdom which is utterly absent in contemporary urban society. It is certainly the diametric opposite of how modern business is conducted.

By delaying the rewards of tree-planting, the Torah makes the farmer and his tree grow in tandem, organically, in real time. It turns the planting and nurturing of a tree into a contemplative act that impels the farmer to recognize the greatness of God’s universe through the minute observance of glacially unfolding stages of development.

This protracted period of delayed gratification is a character-builder like no other. It empowers the grower to see God in the grandeur of minutiae.  By the fourth year, having been daily witness to this incremental miracle of growth and maturation, it is – like one’s child’s bar mitzvah – truly a time to celebrate and offer thanks to the Almighty, thanks which require no prompting.

Perhaps our turbocharged commercial world should pay attention to the laws of orlah, as it should to the ideas of Shabbat and shemittah.

Publicly traded companies allow for no breathing time. Their vision is shortsighted. The furthest they can see is the end of the current quarter.  If quarterly profits are insufficient, management doesn’t pause to recalibrate for a more successful future through better R&D and wiser allocation of human resources.  Instead, it cavalierly chops ten percent off the headcount in order to bring the resulting savings to the bottom line for an artificially rosier picture for Wall Street.

How foolish, how shortsighted. Surely the Torah did not envision the wholesale slaughter of ten percent of employees as a modern version of maaser, tithing.

Indeed, the casting off of dedicated workers is not the contemporary version of orlah either. It is the very opposite.  It yields bitter fruit, disloyal employees, career-jumping, economic devastation on a micro and macro level, and augurs poorly for the development of better products and services down the road.

Now imagine if businesses would take some lessons from the Torah, starting with orlah. Imagine if every new business were required to dedicate its first three years to research and development in order to achieve a perfect product.  Imagine if the profits from its fourth year –the first year of actual production – were to be distributed to the poor. The impact on the corporate culture would be definitive, and the impact on society would be enormous.

The same could be said for a global imposition of sabbaticals. Imagine a world in which every seventh year would be a shemittah on the development of new products and new models – from cars to cellphones, from toys to fashion. What a boon this would be to the creative minds responsible for conceiving and designing – a time to reflect and refresh. The creative burst that would come after the sabbatical year is unimaginable.

And, of course, the imposition of a day of rest.  If every business were required to shut down for one 24hour period each week, the benefits to our collective mental and physical health would be astounding.

Anyone old enough to remember, for example, New York City before the Sunday blue laws were canceled will understand. There was a quality of life that was destroyed when Sunday became just another day. Family life ended. Quiet time ended. Infrastructure such as roads and subways were affected with widespread breakdowns. Because even mechanical things and highways need a breather.  And, yes, the 9 to 5 workday became an a 9 to 7 or 8 or 9 nightmare,

The Torah may have been written in an era when agriculture and shepherding were pretty much the only “industries”.  Under the dominance of a 2,000 year halakha industry we have, on the one hand, been forced to live as halakhic authorities imagine we lived 2500 years ago. On the other hand, through this fossilization of Torah, very little has been done to recognize just how relevant real Torah values – such as orlah, Shabbat, shmittah – could be to making actual contemporary life better and healthier.

Instead of understanding orlah we allow it to become an anachronism since none of us are farmers.  Instead of understanding Shabbat, we have artificial loopholes like heter iska to allow big modern businesses to operate on Shabbat. Instead of understanding the message of shmittah, rabbinic halakha creates a legal go-around called pruzbul in order to accommodate itself to contemporary times – benefitting, of course, the rich.

For neither heter iskah, nor pruzbul, nor the selling of hametz before Passover were ever promulgated to benefit the little guy. A beer baron like Rav Papa would want to warehouse his huge supply of beer until the highly profitable summer season. This would require a loophole of mehirat hametz. It wasn’t for the poor man to hold on to his half box of cornflakes that mehirat hametz was invented.

Maybe it’s time – long overdue perhaps – to unpack a parsha like Kedoshim and focus on the basics. Rather than publish a thousand volumes of hairsplitting minutiae on agricultural orlah (which is of no relevance to most of us) how about stepping back and appreciating the beauty of orlah in a way that would be relevant to real people?

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(If you would like to read my earlier essay on Parshat Kedoshim, “Molech Worship and Haredi Education”, please click here http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/parshat-kedoshim-molech-worship-and-haredi-education/