Behar
Leviticus 25:1-26:2
Jeremiah 32:6-27
An American woman is walking in the shuk in East Jerusalem when a shopkeeper calls out to her invitingly, “I have what you need!”
Naturally, her pulse quickens. “He has what I need!” she thinks to herself excitedly. On instinct, her body turns in the direction of his shop before she can stop to consider: “How does he know what I need?” and “Really, I have everything I need.”
The person telling the story is Sharon Salzberg, a renowned meditation teacher, in her book “A Heart as Wide as the World.” This is a person who has spent many years in meditation, exploring the experience of attachment to things and thoughts and feelings. And even for her, that familiar consumerist call, “I have what you need!” drew a visceral response.
It takes great awareness to reject this call in our lives.
Parashat Behar teaches the practice of the sabbatical year, specifying that one year in seven becomes a yearlong Shabbat for the land. During this year, the land is to lie fallow, allowed to rest and rejuvenate, as every living thing must.
Sound like a utopian vision? Perhaps. Yet the Torah, insightfully, anticipates the difficulty of putting this law into practice.
“Should you ask, ‘What are we to eat in the seventh year, if we may neither sow nor gather in our crops?’ I will ordain My blessing for you in the sixth year, so that it shall yield a crop sufficient for three years” (Leviticus 25:20-1).
Of course, people will be frightened, wondering, “How will we have enough to eat if we cannot work the land?” God responds that a special blessing will be provided; the land will produce enough to carry them through the sabbatical year.
Reading this text closely, the ancient commentators are puzzled. Why are the people worried about having enough food to eat in the seventh year? The crops harvested late in the sixth year are enough to supply the need for the seventh year of the cycle. The problematic year, in this analysis, is the eighth — the year following the sabbatical year.
One commentator resolves the matter by rereading the syntax of the verse, suggesting that the people are asking the question, “What will we eat next year?” during the seventh year, but referring to the eighth year. In another interpretation, the people are inquiring, “What will we eat next year [meaning, the eighth year], since we cannot sow or gather in the seventh year?” For these analysts, the verse speaks of the seventh year, but points to the next as the year of scarcity.
One commentator finds the verse spiritually on target just as it is written, affirming that for the people, the seventh year is itself the problem, even though there is still physically enough food at that time.
“This is the way of the world. If one knows that tomorrow his [or her] source of sustenance will be taken away, the scarcity is felt today. If the people know there will be no sowing in the seventh year, such that there will be no harvest in the eighth, the sense of anxiety and despair begins already in the seventh year. The question, ‘What shall we eat?’ is spoken with great urgency in the seventh year” (Sha’arei Simcha, quoted in Itturei Torah vol. 4, p. 147-8).
We have anxieties about not having enough even when we live in the midst of great abundance. The storehouses may be overflowing, our homes may be bursting with items galore, even our finances may be in reasonably good shape. Yet we feel that we do not have enough because, in our society, endless voices cry out to us, “I have what you need!”
These voices reinforce our cultural anxiety that in fact, there is something that we lack, that we must reach for, that the things that we have may be taken away. Our society conditions us to believe that we need more and more, until we feel the sense of scarcity more and more acutely. Rarely do we have the clear-sightedness to stop and challenge the cycle.
Really, most of us have more than enough.
What we need most of all is to recognize the abundance that already exists in our lives. Most of us have enough food, enough possessions, enough time, even enough love to sustain us.
What we need is to be mindful of all that we have today.