An intro to your Jewish CSA – Hazon’s Tuv Ha’Aretz

Welcome to the Hazon CSA network! Our Hazon CSAs follow the traditional Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project structure with regards to weekly vegetable delivery and a strong commitment to supporting local agriculture. And like some other CSAs, Tuv Ha'Aretz works to build community and educate its members about food, nourishment, and small-scale organic agriculture. What makes Tuv Ha'Aretz different is that in 2009 it is a network of 32 Jewishly-rooted CSAs in North America and Israel.

Through Tuv Ha'Aretz members can expand their understanding of what it means for food to be kosher – food that is not only “fit” for to eat according to Jewish tradition, but “fit” for the Earth, for the health and sustainability of our own bodies and our broader communities.

Tuv Ha'Aretz suggests a double meaning: Tuv Ha'Aretz is both good for the land and the best of the land: good for the land because it encourages and supports small organic farmers who grow their crops using sustainable methods on agricultural land near the city that would otherwise be threatened with development, and best of the land because the produce -- often picked the morning of delivery! -- is fresh, sustainable, sweet, pesticide and chemical free, healthy, beautiful and delicious.

Recent Hazon CSA programs have included:

• Fifty people learning about bikkurim, first fruits, while on the farm for Shavuot in Portland, OR


• Hundreds of people across the country attended Tu Bishvat Seders in California’s Bay Area; Boulder, CO; Rockville, MD; Seattle, WA; St. Louis, MO; St. Paul, MN; Washington, DC; New York, NY; and Long Island, NY (which was maple syrup themed!)


• A Gleaning Day Sukkot farm trip that sites in the New York area have done for years


• A beet haiku competition in Scottsdale, AZ though the day school that hosts the CSA


• Brunches, movie screenings, strawberry picking farm-trips, and potlucks that sites around the country have been organizing.

And the list of events goes on and on!

Shehecheyanu – we celebrate this special occasion -- for your new CSA season with Hazon and TuvHa’Aretz, for all of the first fruits and veggies you will eat as a part of your share and for the new communities you will be a part of this season.

You are invited to take a moment, as you begin your CSA journey, to offer words of thanks, either the traditional ones below or the ones you feel moved to say.

Shehechiyanu



Blessed are You, O Lord, our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who has caused us to live, and has sustained us, and has enabled us to come to this time.

Barukh ata Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha-olam, she-hecheyanu, ve-kiyemanu ve-higiyanu la-zeman ha-zeh.