Goodbye Fligls! / Kislev 5783

Dearest Fligls,

For the first time, our entire team is living far from the land that was, until recently, Linke Fligl. The creek is once again flowing after months of drought, the marsh is glistening with the glow of snowfall on the phragmites as the days are getting shorter and colder. The cedar posts of our octagonal sukkah and minimalist shul have come down, and the land is quiet and awaiting new projects from our friends at WILDSEED who now tend this land.

We write to you with tender hearts as this is our final mailer to this beloved community. Linke Fligl began as a seed of an idea for building vibrant, queer Jewish community on land. Over the past seven years, we’ve gotten to live into and beyond that dream. Together, we’ve davened hallel joyously on the bridge, water rushing under our feet, swallows flying overhead; we’ve shlepped water, chicken poop, humanure, crates, coolers, veggies & more; we’ve imagined a Judaism beyond borders and binaries; we’ve ached with deep belly laughs during Sukkot Night Live; we’ve cared for each other through sharing herbs, songs, and prayers during dark times; we’ve escorted the Torah under her chuppah through a field of goldenrod; we’ve grieved and chanted Eicha under the stars; we’ve made protective golems out of clay from our local quarry; we’ve marked many new moons with prayer, land work and learning; we’ve prayed three times a day in a shul whose walls are made of wind, sky and song;  we’ve collectively moved  tens of thousands of dollars to BIPOC-led land projects; we’ve gathered virtually across the diaspora during Lev from the Land.  And perhaps most importantly, we’ve found one another and unlocked a deep and ancient longing to be together on land.

While this project is coming to an end, we know that this longing is still alive within us.  During the last 7 years, we’ve been in a living exploration of what it can mean to be queer Jews striving for right and sacred relationship with land.  We’ve learned so much and also barely scratched the surface of understanding in our bones how to heal our severed relationship to land and tradition.  We see this project as one link in a long lineage that both precedes us and will continue to evolve for generations to come.  As we sunset, we’re wondering: what dormant longings has this project awoken in you? What dreams are you releasing into this new shmita cycle? We can’t wait to see what comes of the seeds we’ve planted together. 

Thank you to each and everyone of you for being with us on this journey. From our local friends who have been in it with us day in and day out through the years to our far flung community who may have never touched the land in Millerton and everyone in between - this project wouldn’t exist without you.

Sending our deep love,
Margot, Chana & Ollie

Shmita Announcement / Elul 5781

Dear friends, 

With humility and gratitude, we are writing to share that shmita year will be Linke Fligl’s final year. The project will close a year from now in the fall of 2022 / early 5783 (December 2022). 

LF from its beginning has truly been a diasporist project to its core. We have revelled in the impermanence of place, of community, of life and celebrated the resilience we build as a diasporic people who adapt to new contexts over and over.

We will continue to celebrate these things as we move into closing this chapter. We hope you will celebrate the ways we have grown and what we have built together by joining us on the land or by sharing your stories with us in the year to come!

Read below to learn more about our plans for this upcoming shmita/release year and how we came to this decision to close.

  • As a community agricultural project we have an opportunity to not only learn about shmita, but to practice shmita’s values of anti-capitalism and decolonial relationship to land. As part of our shmita practice, we will lean into our tradition’s cycles of healing, closure, and repair with a communal process for release:

    Observe Shmita through Release, Celebration & Redistribution: Inspired by biblical shmita law, LF will cease food production starting this fall and offer a series of rituals and work days. We will close out our last farm season with a Sukkot celebration and an educational ritual chicken shechita (slaughter), followed by our Join the Flock fundraiser with an expanded campaign to move resources to BIPOC land projects in alignment with shmita's values of redistribution.

    Harvest the Learnings: We will engage in a communal storytelling project to harvest the learnings of the past 7 years. We gather these learnings in the hopes that they can serve others building liberatory diasporic land-based Jewish communities now and in the years to come!

    Continue to Build Queer Diasporic Judaism: We hope to have several other moments to be together on the land and continue to live into LF’s vision of Olam Haba (the world to come) through ritual, learning and co-created community.

  • As many of you know, Linke Fligl started at the beginning of this current shmita cycle after a land reparations gift was given to our hosts, WILDSEED. At that time we were invited to share this space to build toward our dream of a queer diasporist Jewish land project. From the beginning, our intention was to re-evaluate our relationship with this land at the end of the shmita cycle. 

    In preparation for shmita, we have spent the past year discerning our future with this place that has been a generous and beautiful home to us. Through this process we found that our small, off-grid farm didn’t have the infrastructure to accommodate our larger community vision. Realizing these limitations, combined with our struggle to find affordable secure housing for our staff, led us to the decision to leave the land. At the same time, our current leadership team was shifting. Without the same land or leadership, it became clear that this next year of release would be the last year of the project.

    We have always looked to shmita as a Jewish idea of society in harmony with the earth: a just economic system for an agricultural society with structural mechanisms to prevent accumulation of wealth and exploitation of land and labor. For six years we sow, till, harvest, build, borrow, collect, accumulate. In the seventh year, we release.

    Under capitalism we learn that instead of allowing and trusting, we must force, effort, accumulate, push and hoard in order to be safe. While there is huge loss for us in ending this chapter, we know that allowing things to run their course is part of building a just society in harmony with the earth. 

    The vision of Linke Fligl is one of interdependent queer community caring for each other, praying together, remembering and relearning our traditions in collaboration with our more than human relatives, healing colonial legacies through reciprocal and reparative relationships with the earth. It is a vision so much wider and broader than this project!  Linke Fligl has been one small drop in the ocean of our movement, and we know that it has created so many new possibilities in the hearts and minds of hundreds of people who believe in what we can build, accomplish and heal together. 

 We are grateful and humbled to have gotten to serve our movements and our community through our work at LF, and are honored by each of you being a part of it. We look forward to seeing threads that began here continue to weave for years to come in ways that we can’t yet imagine. 

With love,
Sol, Margot, Chana & Ollie

Prophecy from the Socialist Shtetl of California

Prophecy from the Socialist Shtetl of California
by Shelby Handler

Written by a dear friend of LF just as the project was getting off the ground. Inspired by direct quotes from Petaluma Jewish chicken farmers of the 1920s-30s, from the book Comrades and Chicken Ranchers (1993).

Here, a chorus of the dead will sing:

in the Jewish corner of the Petaluma cemetery, 
where stones are stacked on graves—

as if to hold down the departed, keep them here
a little longer— but now, a wind begins. Soft at first: 

a single thread of sound unwinding the spool 
of time, whistling against death, stitching together 

a flock of murmurs and cackles, mutters and coos. 
The Jewish chicken farmers speak from inside their soil:

There’s a war in Europe and the chicken prices 
is good here. Some bicker, We were an agricultural people 

in ancient times, what’s so different about now? 
Others grumble like broody hens, The hell with the city. 

I’m going to raise chickens. And they did. 
Their happy birds scratched at the earth all day long, 

scrawling illegible messages blown away at dusk.
In the end, it will be acceptance that destroys us,

the ghosts cluck, We are being swallowed up in America. 
The voices grow softer, feathering into fragments, 

This is a wound: to get mixed up, assimilated,
to disappear. But others like us will be born 

from this home. They will come, with new seeds
in their pockets. They will find us.

(Somewhere, far beyond the graveyard, a small hand 
breaks open an eggshell, freeing its gleaming yolk, 
balancing the glowing orb in their palm.)

They will come, from this egg cracked
for survival. They will be fed

by a broken thing. They will be split open 
for that better world to come. Why not? This is our history.