Behar-Bechukotai
Leviticus 25:1-27:34
Jeremiah 16:19-17:14
Judaism is a particularly embodied form of religion. Judaism begins not as a belief system, but as the history of a distinct family, the family of Abraham and Sarah.
It concerns itself with mitzvahs, behaviors and actions, more so than with strictly defined beliefs or amorphous faith. It encourages the development of proper intention, but never divorced from action. It obligates continued physical effort to ensure a just and compassionate society.
Above all, it is a religious path focused and centered on land. The land promised to our ancestors, the land to which our people were brought after slavery, the land on which our history began — this is the land of our destiny, the land on which our history is meant to be played out.
Perhaps this is what Rashi meant when he famously asks on the opening verse of our parshah, “What is the connection between the laws of the sabbatical year and Mount Sinai?” His answer, that just as these laws were taught in detail, so all the laws of the Torah were taught in detail, can be interpreted to mean that the laws regarding land are at the very heart of Torah.
As if to underscore the point, Bechukotai makes absolutely clear that if we neglect to follow the commandments relating to the land, the land will vomit us out and we will be returned to a brutal state of slavery and exile.
The land is a gift, a place to dwell in satiation, well-being and expansiveness. Nevertheless, the gift freely given obligates those who receive it with tasks to be completed. Unlike our society, where the ones who control land (i.e. wealth) and governance are the ones who are often lackadaisical in following the rules, Israel learns that to be given land is to be a vigilant steward of the land and its people. Our parshah insists that not only must the land have its Sabbath every seven years, but that property be returned to its original owners, that debts be forgiven and that slaves be freed.
Has there ever been a more radical view of social justice? Rather than view the land as ours to use up at will, we are taught to see it as a gift. The Sabbath of the land reminds us that the land has its own rights, distinct from ours. “The earth is HaShem’s,” writes the Psalmist. A Sabbath from debt is a dramatic affirmation that society ultimately must not be defined by buying and selling, owing and collecting.
A consumer-driven marketplace, in which people are judged and treated by their buying potential, is the disastrous temptation of betraying stewardship over the land. Having land creates an opportunity to pervert justice. Will we be our brother’s keepers? And what of those who are strangers in our midst? How are they to be treated? As felons, or as fellows?
Reading the Torah through the lens of exile and land-stewardship, as these parshahs invite us to do, we can begin to understand how deeply felt is the human condition of homelessness.
The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “The central problem [in the Torah] is not emancipation but rootage, not meaning but belonging, not separation from community but location within it.” The Torah demands that we take the radical existential position against isolation and in favor of connections and relationship. A society in which the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider, a society in which resources are to be used up rather than sustained, a society which fosters a Sabbathless existence — that is a society on the brink of implosion.
These parshahs ask us to remember that we are an embodied people with deep roots in land and in history. If the “Promised Land” exists, it must certainly be a place where wealth and power cannot diminish the value of a human being and where justice is extended to all.
Rabbi Lavey Derby is spiritual leader of Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon.