A Taste of Home Through Diasporic Seedkeeping

By Jesse Bryant

My relationship with Judaism took root when I started farming.  It is within the context of shifting seasons, the cultivation and harvest of food for community, and the conversations with other Jewish farmers that I came to ground myself in the cyclical (& deeply agricultural) nature of the Jewish year. Since joining the Jewish Seed Project, new connections have blossomed.

I grew up in Florida, where seasons were disconnected from cycles that planted seeds in spring, harvested in autumn, and celebrated light in the darkness of winter.  When I moved to Western Massachusetts and worked for a 30-acre organic vegetable farm, I fell in love with the local culture that celebrated seasonality.  

One of my co-workers, who I enjoyed many philosophical and food conversations with, asked if I’d be interested in accompanying her as she studied & reclaimed her Jewish heritage.  We both fell into a rhythm of daily study and sharing what came up for us, an organic chevruta, while packing salad into bags or weeding carrots.  The following spring we decided to put together our own haggadah for Pesach, bringing together stories of ancestors and of seeds, serving many foods we grew together at the farm. 

Through farming I came to feel the deep embodiment of each season - the joys of liberation in spring, the oppressive heat of summer, reaping what you’ve sown in the fall, and circling up close with beloved community in the winter.  It was a spiritual experience.  I’ve never been so deeply joyful as when I’ve soaked up the first warm and sunny day of spring after working outside through an icy winter, never more grateful for the first tomato of summer than when I watched and waited for it to ripen on the vine.

I didn’t set out to be a farmer, nor did I set out to observe Jewish holidays year after year - but the part of me that is compelled by community connection through food, land, and storytelling had finally found a home.

Nearly a decade later, my partner & I were invited to be growers for the Jewish Seed Project.  The Jewish Seed Project - as a collaborative of Jewish growers, seed keepers, researchers, and storytellers seeking and building relationships with culturally relevant seeds - resonates with my yearnings and situates my sense of “home” in a broader context.

Jesse's partner, Erin, holding a qishut :)

 As we navigate interwoven histories of Jewish diaspora, exile, assimilation, and landlessness, JSP asks: “What is a Jewish Seed?” There’s already many articles exploring this question, so I’m just going to jump right in to say what came up for me this growing season.

At the beginning of each new month in the Hebrew calendar, I gather with a Rosh Chodesh group to reflect on what each month holds - in the parashiyot, in the connection to agricultural rhythms, and in each of our lives.  The qishut came along with us for each passing month, with folks coming to visit the garden before settling in for songs and sharing.  The collective excitement we felt when it was time to harvest the first fruit and sing shehecheyanu before tasting it together was so much more joyful than if I had done it alone.  You can only go so far in Judaism without connection to community - you can spend a lifetime studying the texts & saying the prayers, but you can’t really be practicing Judaism without other people.  That moment when we gathered to harvest and taste the qishut was a moment of revelation through embodiment, when we made the leap from our mind’s conception to lived experience, and felt more deeply the importance of honoring an ancestral crop.  Food has always struck me as the most basic and essential mechanism for gathering people together and building connections between even the most seemingly different people.  In this context, the connective power of food also spanned generations.

While growing the qishuim this year, I felt many of my more abstract philosophical ponderings embodied in the seed, the plant, the fruit, and the connections with community that gathered around this ancestral food. I felt nourished by the inspiration of seeds’ germination, the miracle of new life. I felt parental appreciation for the first true leaves catching the morning dew, by guiding the first tendrils onto their trellis, and at the gentle caress of the first fuzzy fruits. They’re such cute babies! And I also felt a sense of mourning as many of the qishuim failed to thrive.  

I felt more deeply in touch with the story of our ancestors’ passage through the desert as our cold spring rains bowed out to another summer drought. Hearing other JSP growers’ stories of crop failure and flourishing across different bioregions felt like essential real-time company as the qishuim in my care experienced the rollercoaster of seasonal variance typical of New England.  I couldn’t help but see a metaphor for the struggles of diasporic peoples adjusting to life after displacement to unfamiliar lands.  The diasporic nature of this seed’s story felt so fully on display and at the heart of what a Jewish seed is to me.  We are a people of diaspora, then and now, which means we look many different ways and have many different flavors of Judaism depending on the conditions in which we were planted.  And in our modern context, it also feels more important than ever to acknowledge the experience of so many other groups that are living in diaspora. 

There is no simple answer to “what is a qishut?” or “what is a Jewish seed?” or “what is you relationship to Judaism?” But wrestling with questions is one of the most essential aspects of Judaism that I can imagine, and part of what helps me to feel at home with my Jewishness.  Holding complexity - both in social systems and ecosystems - feels like the most important growing edge we can all be engaging as we honor our collective ancestors by bringing their seeds with us into a thriving future.