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.
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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.
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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
