Is there a Brakhah for Composting?

"A Purification"

by Wendell Berry

At start of spring I open a trench
in the ground. I put into it
the winter’s accumulation of paper,
pages I do not want to read
again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the sun, growth of the ground,
finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins: that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened to too much noise;
have been inattentive to wonders;
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.

"The Majesty of Decay" from Martin Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace of Cuchumaquic p. 365

Variously identified by such unceremonious names a trash mounds, ash piles or refuse heaps, they have been traditionally treasured by modern archaeologists, who very diligently trench, scour and screen the varying strata of their depth of centuries for what people discarded to determine a million important legacy details of the lives of otherwise forgotten peoples. On the other hand, for the peoples who built them (and there are a number of tribal people who still live by this principle), these mounds are nothing less than temples dedicated to decay: they are sacred compost heaps.

No matter which culture or people explain it, if they still maintain the old vision and Agreement with the Holy in Nature, then these mounds are never viewed by them as dumps, landfills or locations to remove unwanted "trash" from sight. They are sacred homes that are well within sight, and in the village embrace where everything that has "run its race"--animal, vegetable, clay, metal and any broken thing--can dimensionally enter again the "heaven" of macro-awareness, in that journey through the molecular and organic reorganizaton that all things must travel at death to continue their participation in the bigger life as vital particles in the next regenerating form of beings sprouting back into view, that are fed by them and absorb them all. Many tribal people buried their dead in these mounds as well.

Luz (bone)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The word luz in Hebrew (Hebrew: 'לוז') means nut or almond.^[1] Because of this it became associated with the small bone at the top of the spinal column (the first cervical vertebra, C1 or the Atlas), underneath the brain, on the top of the spine, (the bone where the knot of the tefillin rests). It is about the size of a kernel of barley. The Zohar states that the luz is the bone in the spine that appears like the head of a snake^[2], implying that is the sacrum, because the sacrum is the only bone in the spine that looks like the head of a snake. The sacrum has similar significance to the luz as a source of resurrection in Egyptian and Greek cultures contemporary to the Zohar and Talmud.^[3][4] The sacrum has a pattern of dimples and shape that appear similar to those of the almond shell.

Jewish traditions teach that this is the bone from which the body will be rebuilt at the time of resurrection, and share the idea that this bone does not decay.^[5] There is an aggadah (legend) in the midrash that the Roman Emperor Hadrian asked how man would be revived in the world to come, and Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananiah replied that it would be "From Luz, in the back-bone." "Prove this to me," said Hadrian. Then the Rabbi took Luz, a small bone of the spine, and immersed it in water, but it was not softened; he put it into the fire, but it was not consumed; he put it into a mill, but it could not be pounded; he placed it upon an anvil and struck it with a hammer, but the anvil split and the hammer was broken. (Ecclesiastes Rabbah xii / Genesis Rabbah xviii).

The word "sacrum", meaning "sacred" in Latin, lives on in English anatomy as the name for the large heavy bone at the base of the spine. The Romans called the bone the "os sacrum," which literally meant the "holy bone" and the Greeks termed it the "hieron osteon," the same thing, the "holy bone".