The Land Is Mine
Ownership, Gratitude, and the Limits of What We Call Ours
This is the fourth essay in a series exploring Judaism and composting.
There are three words in Leviticus that can unsettle an entire way of thinking about ownership: “The land is Mine.”
They appear in a chapter concerned with farming, property, debt, poverty, land sales, the sabbatical year, and the Jubilee. People cultivate fields. Families possess ancestral holdings. Land can be bought and sold. The Torah plainly recognizes human property. And then, in the middle of all of it, God says that the land does not ultimately belong to the people who own it.
“The land is Mine.”
That is a strange kind of ownership. It is real enough that a person can plant a field, harvest it, sell rights to it, inherit it, and depend upon it for a livelihood. But it is not absolute. The owner remains inside another, larger claim.
For a culture in which ownership so often seems to mean I bought it, therefore I can do whatever I want with it, that distinction is worth sitting with. And for anyone interested in food, soil, waste, and composting, it leads somewhere fascinating.
Property That Cannot Be Owned Forever
The setting of the verse matters. Leviticus 25 begins with Shmita, the sabbatical year. Every seventh year, the land itself receives a Sabbath. Fields are not planted and vineyards are not pruned in the ordinary way. Later in the chapter comes Yovel, the Jubilee: after a cycle of seven sabbatical periods, the fiftieth year brings another cessation from ordinary agriculture and, in the biblical system, the return of ancestral land holdings.
That means a land sale is unlike an ordinary permanent sale. The Torah instructs buyer and seller to calculate the price according to the number of harvest years remaining before the Jubilee. In effect, what is being purchased is not limitless ownership of the land but a finite number of years of productive use. Eventually the ancestral holding returns.
Then comes the explanation:
“The land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.”
The land therefore cannot be sold beyond reclaim.
This is not a generic environmental slogan placed into the Torah. In its immediate context, it explains a particular biblical system of land tenure in the Land of Israel. But the theology underneath that law is striking.
Rashi puts it with almost shocking bluntness. Why should someone accept that a piece of land he purchased eventually has to return? Because, Rashi explains, it is not yours. Ramban similarly understands the verse as explaining the logic of Jubilee: do not resent the fact that ownership is limited, because God has not granted the land to be permanently alienated.
Human beings possess, but God owns. The two ideas coexist.
Strangers and Residents
The Torah uses an especially strange phrase to describe us in relation to the land: gerim v’toshavim—strangers and residents, or sojourners and settlers.
The words seem to pull in opposite directions. A resident belongs somewhere. A stranger does not fully belong. Yet the Torah places both identities in the same person.
We live here. We build homes, cultivate land, raise families, bury our dead, plant trees whose fruit we may not live long enough to eat. Our relationship with place can be intimate and enduring. And still, we are not ultimate proprietors.
The Sifra, an early rabbinic interpretation of Leviticus, reads the verse as a warning not to make ourselves primary—to remember that our claim exists inside God's claim.
I find the tension in gerim v’toshavim more interesting than the familiar modern word stewardship. We are not simply managers standing above the natural world, benevolently taking care of somebody else's property. We are inhabitants inside it. We depend upon it physically. We belong to places and are shaped by them. We can love a piece of land deeply.
But we are also temporary. No matter how secure the deed, none of us possesses land forever. We arrive in the middle of its story, and we leave before the story is over.
The Earth and Everything in It
Leviticus 25 is specifically about the land and land laws of ancient Israel. But elsewhere Jewish scripture makes the theological claim much broader.
Psalm 24 begins:
“The earth is the LORD’s and all that it holds.”
Not merely one field. Not merely agricultural land. The earth and its fullness.
That creates an interesting problem, because another psalm says something that appears almost opposite: the heavens belong to God, while the earth has been given to humanity. The rabbis notice the contradiction.
In Berakhot 35a, Rabbi Levi offers a remarkable resolution. The verse declaring the earth God's describes the world before a blessing; the verse describing the earth as given to humanity describes it after a blessing. The same passage goes so far as to say that enjoying the world without first making a blessing resembles making unauthorized use of something consecrated.
I love this because it changes what a blessing before food can mean.
A bracha is short. We can say one so quickly that it becomes automatic. But underneath that tiny ritual is a radical proposition: before I consume something, I acknowledge that I am not its ultimate source.
The apple may belong to me in every ordinary legal sense. I bought it. It is in my kitchen. No one else has a claim on it. And still I make a blessing. I stop before taking. I acknowledge. Then I eat.
The Talmud does not abolish human enjoyment. Quite the opposite—it creates a pathway toward it. The world can be enjoyed, but enjoyment is preceded by recognition.
The blessing does not turn us into absolute owners. It teaches us how to receive.
Receiving Is Different From Taking
This distinction between receiving and simply taking appears elsewhere in Jewish tradition.
Pirkei Avot records Rabbi Elazar of Bartotha teaching that we should give to God from what is God's, because both we and what we possess ultimately belong to God. He grounds the teaching in David's words in I Chronicles: everything comes from God, and what human beings give ultimately came from God's hand in the first place.
Its immediate concern is generosity and giving, not compost. But the underlying understanding of possession is important. What we call mine is real, but qualified.
This doesn't mean a person may walk into my house and take my dinner because “everything belongs to God.” Jewish law takes property rights very seriously. Theft remains theft. Contracts matter. Boundaries matter. Ownership creates legitimate authority and responsibility.
But property is not the same as metaphysical independence. The things I possess existed before I possessed them. They came from somewhere. Other lives and systems made them possible. And sooner or later, whether through giving, consumption, decay, inheritance, sale, loss, or death, they will leave my possession again.
That is particularly obvious with food. The illusion of absolute ownership becomes difficult to sustain when you look closely at an apple.
You Can Own the Apple. You Did Not Make the Apple.
You can buy an apple. You can own the tree. You can own the orchard. But ownership is not creation.
Long before the apple reaches your hand, roots have drawn water and minerals through soil. Leaves have captured sunlight. Carbon has entered the plant from the atmosphere. Insects or other forces may have participated in pollination. Soil organisms have lived, consumed, died, decomposed, and altered the conditions around the roots. A farmer has pruned, irrigated, monitored, harvested, and cared for the tree.
Human beings can participate brilliantly in agriculture. We breed varieties, build irrigation systems, understand soils, manage pests, prune trees, save seed, graft plants, and learn to manipulate biological processes in astonishing ways. But we still do not manufacture an apple out of nothing.
We receive the world before we transform it.
That is one reason food blessings make so much sense to me. Food may be the most ordinary place where the limits of ownership are visible. What I am about to put in my mouth is mine, and somehow it is not merely mine. It represents relationships extending far beyond me.
The question becomes more interesting after I have eaten it.
What Happens to What Is Left?
Suppose I eat the apple. Now there is a core.
My legal ownership has not changed. If anything, the core is even more obviously “mine,” because no one else wants it. I can throw it in the trash.
But what exactly gives me the right to declare that its story is over?
The question is not whether I am legally permitted to discard an apple core. Of course I am. Nor am I suggesting that Leviticus 25 establishes a law requiring Jews to compost. It does not.
The question is what kind of relationship to material things follows from a tradition that repeatedly tells us that human possession is real but not ultimate.
The apple core is no longer useful to me as food. But it still contains organic matter, moisture, carbon, minerals, and compounds that decomposer organisms can use. Under appropriate conditions it can become part of compost, and that compost can eventually return organic matter and nutrients to soil.
I explored this more deeply in “There Is No Waste in Creation.” The central insight is simple: the end of usefulness to us is not necessarily the end of usefulness.
Leviticus adds another layer. If the earth is not ultimately ours, perhaps we should be cautious about behaving as though our momentary use of something gives us the final word on its value.
From Soil, and Back Toward Soil
This is where composting becomes, for me, a physical expression of a much older Jewish posture. Not a commandment explicitly given at Sinai. Not a replacement for Shmita. Not a clever claim that the rabbis secretly understood modern soil microbiology.
Something more modest: a posture.
Food comes to us through living systems. We receive nourishment from it. We waste as little as possible. What remains after every appropriate use has been exhausted does not automatically have to become garbage.
It can be returned.
A vegetable grows through a relationship with soil, water, atmosphere, sunlight, microorganisms, farmers, and time. We eat the vegetable. The peel or stem remains. Composting allows that organic material to enter another living process rather than simply being removed from sight.
What emerges is not the original vegetable returned intact to the place it came from. Biological cycles are far more complex than that. Carbon moves. Energy dissipates. Nutrients change forms. Organisms consume one another. Compost itself is not soil. But the direction matters.
Instead of treating organic matter as the useless end of consumption, we can help return it to productive biological life. In that sense, composting is not primarily about getting rid of something. It is about acknowledging that we were never the endpoint.
The Trouble With “Mine”
There is something psychologically powerful about the word mine: my house, my land, my money, my food, my time, my things. The word helps us organize life. It establishes boundaries and responsibilities. Children learn it very early, sometimes with impressive enthusiasm.
But “mine” can quietly mutate from a statement about possession into a statement about entitlement.
If it is mine, I can waste it. If I bought the food, I can throw it away. If I own the land, I can exhaust it. If I paid for the object, what happens to it afterward is nobody's concern but mine.
Jewish tradition repeatedly complicates that conclusion.
Bal tashchit limits needless destruction even of things we legitimately possess. The agricultural laws require portions of a harvest to remain available to people other than the landowner. Shmita interrupts the owner's ordinary control over agricultural land. Jubilee prevents ancestral land from becoming permanently alienated. Blessings require acknowledgment before enjoyment.
And underneath the entire structure sits the sentence that explains why absolute ownership cannot be the final principle: “The land is Mine.”
This does not eliminate the word mine. It puts another word behind it: God's.
Ownership Creates Responsibility
There is another consequence to this. If ownership is understood only as power, then possessing more gives us more freedom. If ownership includes responsibility, possessing more gives us more obligation.
A person with a garden has responsibilities someone without land does not have. A farmer managing a thousand acres makes decisions whose ecological consequences exceed those of someone tending a window box. A school feeding hundreds of students generates a material stream unlike that of a single household. A synagogue hosting meals and celebrations makes choices about food and waste at a communal scale.
The more material that passes through our hands, the more consequential our decisions about that material become. This is one reason I am so interested in composting at institutions.
A Jewish school may produce hundreds or thousands of pounds of food scraps. A synagogue may generate substantial organic material through communal meals, holidays, preschool programs, staff kitchens, events, and landscaping. That material does not cease to matter when it enters a bin.
An institution can ask the same question an individual can ask: What part of this was truly ours to waste?
First, prevent edible food from being wasted. Save it, share it, recover it, use it appropriately. Composting food that people could have eaten is not the goal. Then look at what genuinely remains. Where does it go? Could it be recovered? Could it be composted? Could the resulting compost nourish soil nearby? Could the community remain connected to the material from consumption through return?
Those questions do not turn a waste-management program into a religious ritual. They do something more interesting: they allow a community's physical systems to reflect its understanding of possession and responsibility.
At Home, but Not Forever
I keep coming back to the strange phrase gerim v’toshavim.
Strangers and residents.
It contains a tension I think modern environmental language sometimes misses. We are not outsiders to the earth. We belong here.
Human beings are animals. We eat, breathe, excrete, build, cultivate, die and decompose. We are dependent upon water, atmosphere, soil, plants, microorganisms and other living beings whether or not we notice them. We are residents.
But we are temporary residents. Every piece of land we possess belonged to someone—or to no human owner—before us. If the earth survives us, it will remain after us. The soil beneath our feet contains material from lives unimaginably older than our own.
We are also strangers.
Perhaps Jewish tradition asks us to hold both truths simultaneously: to belong deeply without mistaking belonging for absolute possession.
That is harder than either domination or detachment. It means planting trees whose shade may fall on someone else. It means caring about soil we will not live long enough to see a century from now. It means receiving the world's abundance with gratitude while remembering that other people and other generations also have claims upon what sustains life.
And perhaps it means thinking differently about what we call waste.
The Land Is Mine
There is a danger in turning “the land is Mine” into a simple environmental slogan.
Leviticus 25 is doing something much more specific. It is explaining why land in the biblical Israelite system cannot be alienated permanently. Shmita and Jubilee belong to a particular legal, agricultural, social, and theological world. We should not erase that context in order to make the verse sound modern.
But we also should not miss what the Torah itself says.
The limit on human ownership is grounded in divine ownership. Psalm 24 extends the claim beyond one field or one nation: the earth and everything in it belong to God. The rabbis take that proposition so seriously that they imagine a blessing as the threshold through which human enjoyment becomes permitted.
Taken together, these sources describe a world in which possession never entirely frees us from relationship.
We can own things. We can enjoy them. We can cultivate land, harvest crops, cook meals, build houses, create businesses, buy objects, and benefit from the material world. Judaism does not ask us to apologize for being alive.
It asks us to remember that receiving something is not the same as having created it, and possessing something is not the same as possessing it absolutely.
That distinction changes the way I think about compost.
The food reaches us from a world we did not create. We receive what can nourish us. We waste as little as we can. When unavoidable organic material remains, we need not treat our own finished use as the end of the story.
We can return something.
Not because the apple core has a deed attached to it. Not because composting fulfills the laws of Jubilee. But because returning organic matter to living systems is compatible with a Jewish way of inhabiting a world that is ours to use, ours to enjoy, ours to care for—and never entirely ours.
Perhaps that is what it means to be both resident and stranger: to live fully in a place, to love it enough to call it home, and still remember that we are passing through.
The land is not ours forever. The Torah's reason is even simpler:
“The land is Mine.”
Sources
Leviticus 25:1–24 — Shmita, Jubilee, the calculation of land sales according to remaining crop years, and the declaration: “The land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.”
Rashi on Leviticus 25:23 — the land cannot be held permanently because, ultimately, “it is not yours.”
Sifra, Behar, Chapter 4:8 — interpretation of “the land is Mine” and “strangers and settlers are you with Me,” including the warning not to make ourselves primary.
Ramban on Leviticus 25:23 — Jubilee and the theological limitation on permanent ownership of the land.
Psalm 24:1 — “The earth is the LORD’s and all that it holds.”
Psalm 115:16 and Berakhot 35a–b — the rabbinic tension between the earth as God's possession and the earth as given to humanity, resolved through the act of blessing before enjoyment.
Pirkei Avot 3:7 / I Chronicles 29:14 — giving from what ultimately comes from God and the qualified nature of human possession.
Previous essay: Bal Tashchit: Do Not Destroy — What an Ancient Law of War Can Teach Us About Waste, Consumption, and Responsibility.
Related essay: There Is No Waste in Creation: What Decomposition Reveals About Waste, Transformation, and Return.
Next essay: To Work It and Guard It.
