Feeling the Ignorance....
The kitniyot issue in this country was weird to get used to. In the States the norm is not to eat kitniyot on Pesach - in Israel there are many more people who do eat it, and you find yourself surrounded by products in kosher for pesach stores that you can not eat. But you generally accept the customs of your family and community and watch as others eat corn chips knowing that their doing nothing wrong - but you can't have any.
The kitniyot issue in no way prepared me for the Shmita issues though. Shmita has started. I'm not sure why I feel caught off guard... I've known that it was starting for quite some time.... I know I was planning on attending some classes on the laws of Shmita.. but I never got around to finding out about them... and I definitely did not get around to actually going to them. Suddenly I am realizing how ignorant of the laws I really am. Why didn't we spend any time studying this in school? Shmita was sorta glossed over... after the basic "every 7 years, we don't work the land in Israel" we never really went into details of... so then what do we really do. Sure we discussed the nissim that could happen if we worked the land for 6 years and not 7... but the practical what to do during that 7th year was never discussed. Now, I know what you're thinking... I went to school in the States.. where this is not an issue... My schooling did includ memorizing the steps of bringing karbanot, all the materials and measurements of the mishkan, and how to write progams in BASIC... none of which I'm ever going to really have to deal with... so why not the laws of shmita? And now i'm faced with all these ideas of laws I've never heard of before, and everyone has a different story about what they do.
Some of the laws are intertwined with ones personal political tendencies, and some to are attached to various loopholes.
Tangling laws with politics.... i'll save that for another post :) Right now i'm just trying not to feel overwhelmed by all the new laws I find myself treading through to stay afloat...
The kitniyot issue in no way prepared me for the Shmita issues though. Shmita has started. I'm not sure why I feel caught off guard... I've known that it was starting for quite some time.... I know I was planning on attending some classes on the laws of Shmita.. but I never got around to finding out about them... and I definitely did not get around to actually going to them. Suddenly I am realizing how ignorant of the laws I really am. Why didn't we spend any time studying this in school? Shmita was sorta glossed over... after the basic "every 7 years, we don't work the land in Israel" we never really went into details of... so then what do we really do. Sure we discussed the nissim that could happen if we worked the land for 6 years and not 7... but the practical what to do during that 7th year was never discussed. Now, I know what you're thinking... I went to school in the States.. where this is not an issue... My schooling did includ memorizing the steps of bringing karbanot, all the materials and measurements of the mishkan, and how to write progams in BASIC... none of which I'm ever going to really have to deal with... so why not the laws of shmita? And now i'm faced with all these ideas of laws I've never heard of before, and everyone has a different story about what they do.
Some of the laws are intertwined with ones personal political tendencies, and some to are attached to various loopholes.
Tangling laws with politics.... i'll save that for another post :) Right now i'm just trying not to feel overwhelmed by all the new laws I find myself treading through to stay afloat...
posted by 2R at 12:07 AM
2 Comments:
I feel your pain- but just know that a hamberger and a coke are not at issue here so you wont starve
love DAD
I was gonna ask you what you doing for shmita, It's so complicated.
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