Rabbi Jon's Website and Blog

Parashat Behar: Redeeming Coupons, Redeeming the World

My rav at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, once said in class that Parashat Behar is the most profound biblical text about redemption.  (Rabbi Tucker, who was the dean at the time, is something of a genius.  In his seminar, he would take the chit-chat of the group as we entered class about that week's "Saturday Night Live", and almost two hours later weave it into his wrap-up of whatever discussion we had on Jewish theology.)

Leviticus 25 is about redemption.  But rather than talking, say, about the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, the Torah here talks about the technicalities of land and home ownership once the Jews enter Eretz Yisrael.

In Parashat Behar, we learn about yovel, the jubilee (same word in English) that occurs every fifty years.  Every fifty years, all land returns to the possession of the family to which it had been assigned when the people first entered the land.  If during the fifty years, a person had to liquidate his land and sell it in order to have money to survive, there was an opportunity for a family member to redeem the land on his behalf.  That family "redeemer" would pay the new order the value of the remaining harvests until the upcoming jubilee.  Then the land would revert to its original family possessor. 

Notice that I'm not using the word "owner."  More on that.

Why is this called redemption?  Why does the buying back of property use the same word as the liberation from slavery?

Think about what "redeem" really means.  In commerce, you can redeem an offer or a coupon.  The coupon represents a possibility, a potential.  In a sense, when you "redeem" it the merchant pays you back for something you are willing to pay to have.

In Judaism, we have pidyon haben, the redemption of the first-born male.  The parents go on the thirtieth day to a kohen, a descendent of Aharon (Aaron), and give five coins to "buy back" the son.  The son is already theirs, but the Torah says that the first-born is also potentially God's, in appreciation for God's saving the first-born boys in Egypt.

We also have, more seriously, the command of pidyon shvuyim, the redemption of captives and hostages.  Here again, the Jews are required (under most circumstances) to pay for someone's freedom, which the capitve is already entitled to.  That freedom is there, even though it's being submerged or hidden, to say the least.

Redemption, in all these examples, is a process where something potential becomes real.  When something that exists beyond view is brought to the fore.  Redemption is a "transaction" that completes, not an exchange created on the spot.

In Parashat Behar, redemption is linked with the idea that everyone has an equal place, an equal stake, and an equal possibility to prosper in the Land of Israel.  Between he jubilees, that becomes submerged.  As we know it does all the time, as some people prosper and others suffer.  The real diverges from the ideal.  But redemption exists; the ideal will become real again, either through a family "redeemer" or universally at the jubilee.

In the Torah's vision, there is no ownership of land by people in the sense of a permanent, individual right.  (There is, actually -- houses in cities can be owned in perpetuity.)  Land is owned by God, and that means that each individual Israelite or family is leasing or using what it currently holds.  (Even today, large swaths of Eretz Yisrael are not actually owned by individuals, but held by the Jewish National Fund or the government and leased out to "owners.")

And the Torah builds the jubilee into the Land of Israel from the very first moment of Jewish settlment there.  In that way, entering the land to build a society based on Torah is itself a completion of the creation of the earth.  It is the way that the ideals that are potential in any society become real through Torah, the Jews, and the Land of Israel.

Redeem means "re-deem" -- to reaffirm a declaration, a reality, in the event it had become obscured from view.  And this all is the secret of God's redemption of the Jews from Egypt as well.  In addition to ending our oppression, God re-deemed us:  returned to us and the world our name, and our essential purpose.

 

Behar/B'chuoktai: That You May Live on the Land

At first reading, the two parashiyot that are combined this week seem like a divine split personality.  Behar ("At the mountain [of Sinai]") is the most utopian parasha in all of Torah after Genesis 1, in which "God saw and, look, it was very good" -- all of Creation!  Behar imagines a land in which every seven years, people lose the basic privilege of land ownership.  They are forbidden from working the land to cultivate produce and sell what they grow.  Instead, everyone eats from whatever grows.  And every fifty years, people and families return to the property that belonged to them when the Israelites first came into the land.  All transactions are, to use the language of today's papers, "unwound."  If your family became wealthy by accumulating land, when the jubilee year arrives everything goes back where it started.

Imagine how highly God must think of us, to imagine that we could realize this vision.

 

B'chukotai ("by my laws"), in contrast, is mostly taken up with divine reward and punishment.  If the Israelite community obeys the covenant in Eretz Yisrael, God will prosper them.  If they don't, and continue to slide away, God will make the land infertile, bring hunger, and eventually banish the people from the land.

 

This is a more graphic version of the second paragraph of the Shma, the so-called "standard theology" of the Bible.  Utopian it isn't!  It is almost as if in these sections, God views the Israelites as always children, presumed to respond primarily to incentives and punishments.

 

For a long time I found it very difficult to pray my way through the second paragraph of the Shma.  Or to find any divine inspiration in the theology of reward and punishment.  Behar, in contrast, spoke to me and prodded my dreamiest dreams.

 

About fifteen years ago, I was given an article by Rabbi Arthur Waskow that changed my outlook about these passages in the Torah.  And I began to understand that Behar and B'chukotai are not two poles, but two sides of the same coin.

 

Rabbi Waskow reads sections like B'chukotai with an ecological lens.  When our way of life becomes unmoored from Torah, we cause the land we live on to become unforgiving, inhospitable to our life.  When we don't live by the laws that restrain the power that one person might exert over another, we spin ever faster in a materialistic frenzy.  When we ignore the Sabbath and draw out of the earth unrelentingly each week and each year, we abuse the Life that is God's presence in the soil, the waters, and the sky.  We cause God to leave our land, our earth.  And as a result, we well know from environmental scientists, human beings are having to leave lands that are becoming progressively less habitable.

So in the end, Behar and B'chukotai flow from the same divine vision.  The laws of the covenant are, among other things, limits on our use of the earth.  Respecting those limits from day to day creates the habits that might one day lead us to the mountaintop, where we might contemplate Shabbat on the wider scale.  The scale of pausing our economic machine, or sharing its rewards more equitably, or making sure each family has a chance each generation to start fresh if they need to.

The utopia of Behar is far beyond us.  There are first steps and next steps.  This Shabbat and next week we call attention at Temple Beth Abraham to the New England Carbon Challenge.  It is a simple and fast on-line tool that enables a household to model different changes in the way we use energy.  You sit down with your bills, and explore different options.  The website tells you how much that choice will reduce your bills and your carbon emissions into the atmosphere.  On Monday at 8:00, we are welcoming Arden Cala, outreach director for the mayor of Nashua's citywide Green Team to talk about it.

It takes maybe 15 minutes, and the average participant comes up with ideas that could save more than $700 each year.  Most of the ideas are far short of installing solar panels on your roof or wind generators in the yard.  Try it!  I hope for 50 households to log in this month and see what's possible.  You can do it at home, or come in during religious school next week on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and someone with a laptop can walk you through it.

These changes are a win all the way around -- for the bank account, the atmosphere, and the swaths of our planet that we are ruining in our quest for more fuel.  And they are very much in the spirit of the teachings at the end of Leviticus and the second paragraph of the Shma.  Try some, that we may continue to live well on the good land that God has given us.

Parashat Behar -- Jack Kemp, Housing, and Torah

Jack Kemp died just a couple weeks ago, on May 2.  I thought of the long-time conservative political leader as I studied Parashat Behar last week.

I've always considered Jack Kemp to be one of my influences, as someone who came of age in the 1980s, because of the particular kind of free-market conservatism he espoused.  He was fanatical for low taxes and economic freedom, but he never used those principles to say that society should turn its back on the poor.  Instead, he championed market-based strategies, whether school choice or support for home ownership, as the most effective tools for fight poverty.  He served as Secretary of Housing in the administration of George Bush.

His interest in helping individual own homes -- that's what I thought about when he died, and what kept him in mind during the week of Parashat Behar.  Leviticus chapter 25 says two things.  There is the law of the sabbatical year, when essentially no one in Israel owns any property, but all eat equally off the land.  Then there is the law of the jubilee, which returns everyone to the property and home that belonged to their families originally, when the Land of Israel was divided among tribes, clans, and families.  Much of the chapter elaborates procedures for helping someone "redeem" or buy back a home that he had to sell because of financial difficulties.

There is an idea here, that combating poverty for the Torah is not just about feeding people, making sure that people do not suffer.  A person is entitled to a place, and to a sense of place.  Being planted somewhere matters.  We deserve not just to survive, but to be able to go home.  It's an interesting angle, especially for people as mobile as Jews.  Once we were forced into exile, but today even by choice we move around at least as much as any other subgroup in American society.

The idea of redeeming a home shows up in later Jewish law.  To support a person who has become poor, the laws of tzedakah state that we must provide the utensils typical for a home.  The law reminds us that there is a certain dignity that comes with having a home -- a place to go to, a place to make Shabbat, to invite guests.  I asked in shul last Shabbat how our social policies in America would have to shift in order to be more in line with the Torah.  The most effort in our social welfare system goes to feeding people and helping them find jobs.  Having a home -- Jack Kemp's preoccupation -- is something we do less well.  Housing policy -- subsidies, public housing, etc -- is a very complicated topic.  But so much flows from it in terms of real dignity, a sense of having one of the homes in a community.

Which gives me one more opportunity to plug a Jewish project called TZEDEC, organized by the Jewish FundS for Justice (that's not a typo).  TZEDEC pools capital from individual Jews and institutions to invest in low-income community development, including affordable housing.  It's a terrific example of how Judaism is neither liberal nor conservative in its social philosophy, or perhaps both at the same time.  TZEDEC is one of the most innovative Jewish tzedakah initiatives in the country, a way of bringing the values of tzedakah and the Leviticus 25 to investment and the market.