Behar-Behukotai
Leviticus 25:1-27:34
Jeremiah 16:19-17:14
I find myself praying a lot these days. More than usual. Sometimes in a desperate sort of way, as I prepare to turn on the news at the top of the hour or as I receive the latest set of painful e-mail messages. Sometimes I’m not sure what to ask for. I just know that, in addition to the other things that I can and must do, I must pray, a lot. As the Psalmist says, “Sha’alu shelom Yerushalyim,” “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Psalm 122).
At the end of a monthly phone meeting with two rabbi friends this week, one of the other rabbis suggested that we pray together before we parted. He asked that Israel and her neighbors might soon know bitahon. We all understood the double meaning of his prayer, for the Hebrew word means both security (in the military sense, as in “Misrad Habitahon,” the Israeli Ministry of Defense) and faith or trust.
I was reminded of Arthur Green’s exquisite comments on bitahon in his book “These are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life.” “Bitahon means ‘trust.’ In a religious context it means trust in God and placing our fate in God’s hands…[It means that] we mortals, never able to see the world with God’s eyes, accept our fate as part of that transcendent divine plan.”
Green speaks of how difficult it is for us to sustain such trust after the Holocaust, and what a subtle challenge it is for contemporary Jews to cultivate an attitude of faithfulness in our lives. We cannot believe, as our forebears might have, that God will provide for our every need. Yet how can we nurture our awareness that a Source of Mercy is at work in the world, in ways that often go unseen? In the difficult times in which we find ourselves, how can we work for bitahon/security and defense, while also praying for bitahon/ trust that the world is, after all, guided toward the good?
Our parashah contains a poignant lesson about sustaining faith in the dark times. After giving the laws of sh’mita, the sabbatical year, and yovel, the jubilee year, God anticipates that people may ask, “What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?” (Leviticus 25:20).
One must read this verse with care to recognize the desperate cry of doubt voiced here, right in the middle of a legal text. Having received the law that in the seventh year of the cycle “the land shall have a Sabbath of complete rest,” with sowing, pruning and planting forbidden, the question is unavoidable. The people will surely cry out in fear, “How shall we eat in the seventh year (and more so, in the eighth year, since the land is not cultivated in the seventh!)?”
I recognize this cry of anxiety. It is the cry of every person who finds him or herself in a time of scarcity, fear or danger. How will we manage? How will we sustain ourselves? How will we survive?
In the text, God responds immediately with reassurance. God promises, “I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufficient for three years. When you sow in the eighth year, you will still be eating old grain of that crop; you will be eating the old until the ninth year, until its crops come in” (Lev. 25:21-2). In short, God promises a miracle: the crops of the sixth year will be so plentiful that they will be sufficient to feed the people until the ninth year.
Would that we had such a promise that life would be good to us, that our people would be safe from harm, that we would find our way, once again, through times of great risk and fear. Surely, we cannot and will not sit passively, naively trusting that “God will provide” for our needs hour by hour.
Yet perhaps we can — in these times, perhaps we must — choose to draw on our people’s rich treasury of faith and trust. Living so much of the time in our own fear, outrage and determination, we must take moments to go deeper, to see whether seeds of hope also live within us. We must pray and study our people’s ancient literature of faith. We must cultivate our own capacity to recognize what is still good, safe and bountiful in our world.
We have no guarantee that a miracle will come and transform what we see before our eyes. Yet we must remind ourselves of all the ways in which we have received divine blessing. In this we must place our trust.