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Bringing In The Sheaves |
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“Do not mate different kinds of animals. Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed. Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.”
There are some downright silly laws in the Jewish Torah. Of the above, I plead innocent to number one. I was forced by my parents to break number two sowing our family garden. According to my Chinese garment tags I violate the third one with some regularity, although I prefer 100% cotton. Obedience to some of these laws would get me thrown under the jail nowadays.
“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him…Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death.”
Or, the favorite among a narrow tribe of Christians; “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
However, there are some Torah laws that time has forgotten which are worthy of reinstatement.
“When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the alien, the fatherless and the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands…Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.”
I heard of a young man this week who lived in harmony with this law, likely without knowing it. That is part of the beauty here. A universal truth is implanted in the fabric of our being. A precept is timeless when it calls forth the deep compassion of our common humanity. Dan Millis is a volunteer with No More Deaths a humanitarian group founded in 2004, as a response to the growing number of deaths along the border. They operate along the Arizona-Mexico border providing water, food, and medical assistance to migrants walking through the desert.
In February of 2008, he found the body of a fourteen-year-old girl from El Salvador in the southern Arizona desert. Two days later, as he was leaving gallon-sized sealed jugs of water along the same migrant trails, he was ticketed for littering by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Dan Millis refused to pay the $175 fine and fought the littering ticket misdemeanor charge on the grounds that humanitarian aid is not a crime. A district court denied his appeal last month, stating, “the Court finds the water jugs, left in the refuge, constitute garbage.”
The interesting thing about this conviction was that Dan received no punishment whatsoever. He didn’t have to serve the six months’ jail time and didn’t have to pay the $5,000 maximum fine. He didn’t even have to pay the $175 ticket.
Makes me wonder if the court too supplanted the unjust modern law in favor of the ancient perennial principle.
With great fondness and sentiment I recall many Sundays singing the stalwart gospel standard, “Bringing In The Sheaves.” I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what a “sheave” was, or what the song meant. Now I do.
“Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.”
\”Bringing In The Sheaves\” Southern fried gospel by the Chuck Wagon Gang
