Two Minute Torah Podcast

Behar 5771 by Rabbi Leonard Gordon

Shalom. My name is Leonard Gordon and I am the senior rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Chesnut Hill, MA.

Out of the hurly burly — in biblical Hebrew "tohu vavohu" — God creates order by separating this from that: light from dark, land from sea, humanity from beast. To order the chaos of life, the Torah tells stories that impose the order of story, and the Torah makes rules that emerge from its stories. Parallel to the six days of ordering and the seventh day of rest, we are to work for six days and rest on the seventh. As the torah proceeds, its classifications, stories, and rules become more detailed and complex; the ordering of chaos comes to dominate Jewish religious life and awareness.

This week's torah reading, parshat Behar, reminds us of the revelation at Sinai and of the Divine command that when the Israelites begin to cultivate the land belonging to God, the land must observe its Sabbath in the seventh year. Every seventh year the land does not work, and it thereby gains independence from humanity. This parsing reminds us how modern an idea it is to have humanity — the self, the individual — at the center of life. The idea that the land needs to rest on its Sabbath, belongs to a time when the land of Israel had a life, sanctity, and responsibility to Creation, all its own.

As Judaism developed over the centuries, surviving destruction and exile, the individual, humanity, moved to the center; human consciousness was invented. The land, with its need for rest, no longer mattered in the same way. The early rabbis worried, rightly, that no one would grant loans in the years just preceding the Sabbatical year. Fearing the upcoming moratorium on debts, banks would close before the sixth year. We also recognized that slavery in any form is intolerable. The interests of justice, of humanity, of decency, the changes in our self-understanding as subjects of the Torah's commands forced us into reinterpretations (and ways around some) of these laws. And so by early modern times we legislated against slavery altogether, and much earlier we developed a mechanism (the prosbul) to subvert the absolute relinquishing of loans during the Sabbatical year. Today, loans can be collected beyond seven years and land may be sold in perpetuity. And so Judaism changed.

Today our concern about preserving our earth causes us, once again, to pause at parshat Behar and ask how its laws can inform our response to the crisis of global warming. By once again returning to the biblical view and denying the absoluteness of human claims to the land, can we develop a renewed respect for the sanctity inherent in the natural world? This week we remember with affection a different culture in which the land observed shabbat in its own right. We remember too the triumph of human renewal when the trumpet sounded declaring the Jubilee Year. And we honor Leviticus' command to impose order and control the chaos. Witnessing the consequences of global climate change, we observe the renewed imperative to respect the land, and its shabbat, with a sense of growing urgency.