Netiya-Because the World Needs Gardens

What is a garden? Not many of us have thought of that question in some depth. Gardens are, for the most part, little plots of land where we can dig in the soil and plant some flowers or maybe a tomato. It’s a good place to spend a spring evening or summer morning. Gardens are much more than that. In the Torah, God is the first Gardener, making a home for the world in a garden. So here’s the big question. If God created the world, why did God need a garden for humanity and animals? The open expanse of the earth is there for God to toil, and yet a walled garden is the divine choice? Why?

One answer is that gardens are centers. They are places where collective energies are harnessed to produce food and beauty. God chose a garden to teach that the world needs gardens. In our everyday toiling, we hazard losing our collective spirit. Gardens are beautiful places where we can come together across lines of race and class to address our most fundamental needs as human beings—our need to eat and our need to live.

Several years ago, I founded Netiya (Hebrew for “planting”) with the idea that through gardens we can recreate town centers where conversations of importance about the meaning of community and the meaning of food in our lives could be had. With the work of our talented Executive Director, Devorah Brous, Netiya has grown. There are almost 40 institutions of all faiths. We’ve planted JUST GARDENS, public spaces that empower the surrounding community to grow fresh produce and donate it to the emergency food system. Last year, we planted our first orchard of more than 150 trees next to a food bank in order to supplement the non-perishable offerings with fresh fruits. This year, we are planting 15 new gardens in churches in East and South L.A. in partnership with the Episcopal Church.

Netiya also teaches through our JUST FOODS program. We work with our network partners to teach about ethical food choices about procuring food and distributing leftover or community-grown food. As part of the program, Netiya runs a “Good Food Sabbath” that highlights the environmental and social issues surrounding the food system. This year, we ran a national survey in partnership with the Rabbinical Assembly and United Synagogue to find out more about how kehillot are buying, using and teaching about food in their congregations.

So what is in a garden? Everything. From the garden, a food system is born. It is where we meet to learn, to tend and to hopefully fashion a world that is just and resilient, like the very first garden planted by the Gardener in Eden.

For more information, visit the Netiya website: www.netiya.org.
This article originally appeared online in the April 2014 edition of KEHILLA magazine, available online by visiting: http://pacsw.uscj.org/new/april-2014/netiya-because-the-world-needs-gardens