Shemittah, the sabbatical year, is one of those practices that is barely noticed, let alone observed by many Jews, something considered a relic of a bygone agragrian age. But three years ago a group of some 30 people on a Jewish retreat in Snowdonia started to look in depth at the ideas behind it and what relevance it might hold today.

Out of that gathering has sprung a new organisation, Miknaf Ha’aretz, whose mission is to build an “earth-based, radical, diasporist Jewish community in the UK”.

Its name, meaning “the ends of the earth’, comes from a verse in Isaiah, “From the ends of the earth we hear songs of praise…” The Bretslov Chasidic glossed this as referring to the melodies that the land emits, part of a universal chorus in celebration of Creation. 

The choice of name is a clue to the character of the group. A century ago radical Jewish alternatives tended to be secular in nature. Think of the East End anarchists who staged Yom Kippur balls. But for Miknaf Ha’aretz the spiritual side of Judaism is an important source of inspiration.

Learning to tend the land at a farm camp

Its founders Sara Moon and Samson Hart, who are in their 30s, both grew up in the same Jewish synagogue, Hale in South Manchester, and have since relocated to Devon. She enjoyed a strong Jewish education, preferring to go to King David High School in the north of Manchester rather than the local grammar school and spent time on kibbutz during a gap year in Israel with Habonim. She felt “very passionate” about what was going there and a sense of responsibility for “Judaism, Jewish people and those lands”.

But it was at university in Sheffield that she began to experience a deeper bond with nature. “It was a very outdoorsy place, close to the Peak District. I had lots of outdoorsy friends. I thought ‘I love this place. I didn’t know England was so beautiful. I’d been on these amazing hikes in Israel but I didn’t know you could hike in the Peak District.”

At the same time she also met Palestinians and set up a Windows for Peace dialogue group on campus. At the end of her studies she cycled from Sheffield to the West Bank, where she worked on Palestinian farms and supported farmers during the olive harvest and saw “how powerful it is to connect with the land and grow food”.

Her connection with the land grew deeper when in 2016 she went to Connecticut on a farming fellowship with Adamah, the biggest ecological Jewish organisation. It was “totally transformational,|” she said. “That got me so excited about Judaism, learning about all the agricultural laws. Shabbat got me - Shabbat is the best - and celebrating all the chagim at this amazing retreat centre.”

In the years since, she also pursued further Jewish studies at the Pardes Institute in Judaism and the Paideia Institute in Stockholm, had a spell as a youth worker at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue and even considered going to Leo Baeck College to study for the rabbinate but felt “I can’t move to London for five years”. But she has qualified as a Kohenet, Hebrew Priestess through a US-based programme.

Discussions round dinner

It was travelling to Devon for a programme called Call of the Wild at the weekends that eventually led her to settle three years ago in Dartington, outside Totnes (where a small Jewish community is based).

Hart explained that while he gained “a lot of richness” from his Jewish upbringing, at some point he felt a lack of spiritual connection. He came to Devon to study at Schumacher College, which runs courses based on ecological principles, learning about “earth-based spirituality and practices through growing and living in community”.

He too has been on the Adamah fellowship where “you are immersed in what an earth-based Jewish farming life might look like on the land in the diaspora. It was very powerful and transformative… When I came back to the UK, I wanted to bring something that would offer something similar to what I’d experienced there.”

Radical farming with Miknaf Ha'aretz

Having begun to question the Zionism of his youth, six years ago he went to the West Bank where he met Palestinians for the first time and saw “how they grow food there and tend the land in the face of very difficult circumstances”.

Over the past seven years, he has been working on regenerative market gardens and now lives in a cottage in Moorhaven, an old asylum that was converted into a village.

It was at the start of the pandemic that they began having conversations with “kindred spirits”. “We wanted to do something to bring community together around earth-based Judaism,” he said.

They produced the first of number of zines - self-published booklets of creative writing and reflections - around the theme of revelation for Shavuot. And when Covid allowed, they organised the first retreat. “It was the shemittah year and we got really inspired by shemittah,” Moon said. “It is a really powerful and radical manifesto for a Jewish land-based idea of justice.”

As word spread, so interest grew. “I think there were a lot of people who had given up on Judaism, who didn’t think it relevant or there was anything in it for them and this has been the way back for them,” she said.

In 2022, they secured seed funding for their new venture. At the end of the month they will be running a family camp in Gloucester with activities for their youth movement Beenu (a nod to a Yiddish youth organisation Bin, pronounced “Been”, a hundred years ago). They offer an online series on the “Wild Jewish Year”. A Yom Kippur retreat is due to take place in Wiltshire.

Challah baking at Miknaf Ha'aretz farm camp

For Samson, Miknaf Ha’aretz is part of a wider shift within the Jewish community that has seen the emergence of initiatives like the Queer Yeshiva and Sadeh (the Jewish farm and retreat centre in Kent). “We want to create a positive Jewish identity,” he said - at a time when many people are wrestling with their identity in the wake of events in the Middle East..

“Of course a we would love our own land project at some point,” Moon said, “where we can bring people in and have a farm and really put these ideas into practice as well as having a hearth that we can welcome people to.”