"Oh come take my hand / We're riding out tonight / To case the Promised Land."
- Bruce Springsteen
It’s hard to believe, but this is the last sermon I’m giving after ten years at Temple Beth-El. We have two more weeks together after this, including Shavuot, and I hope you’ll join me for a formal opportunity to bid each other farewell at the Teach-In being held in my honor on Erev Shavuot, Tuesday evening, June 11th, right here, beginning at 6pm. But with fellow congregants and a Bar Mitzvah sharing words of Torah over these next two weeks, today is, in a sense, already an ending.
And insofar as this is something of a valedictory, I have to tell you that I kind of wish the timing had worked out to provide me with a different parashah. This week’s Torah portion, Parashat B’hukkotai, the last portion of sefer Va-yikra, the book of Leviticus, is in many ways dominated by a passage known as tokhekhah, literally, rebuke – a long list of calamities that could befall us if certain conditions are not met.
The litany of potential punishments is unsettling, to say the least. As a matter of fact, our tradition finds these threats so disturbing that when we chant this passage in synagogue, we do so quickly and quietly, to avoid having to dwell in the discomfort. There’s no need to go into the tokhekhah in any detail now, but as I was studying the parashah, it struck me that the context in which it appears is somewhat surprising. I had typically read the tokhekhah, as well as the brief passage that precedes it, a shorter list of blessings we could receive, as rewards and punishments, or perhaps positive and negative consequences, for observing the covenant as a whole. If we follow all the Torah’s commandments, we’ll be blessed; and if not, we’ll be cursed.
But upon closer inspection, that’s not technically what our parashah is saying. Rather than referring to all the Torah’s commandments, our parashah actually connects the blessings and curses to specific ones — namely, the mitzvot of shmita and yovel, which are detailed in the preceding section, in Parashat Behar.
To refresh our memories, shmita is otherwise known as the Sabbatical year, a year in which the land of Israel must be left to lie fallow and all debts must be forgiven. Yovel, or Jubilee, is a sort of super-duper shmita, a year in which not only the agriculture must cease and debts must be forgiven, but also in which all slaves must be set free and in which all private property is relinquished, with possession reverting back to the equal apportionments the Torah allots to each tribe and family at the time of the conquest.
Parashat B’hukkotai explicitly connects the rebuke and blessing to the observance of these commandments, specifically. In chapter 26 verses 31-35, God warns, “I will lay your cities to ruin and make your sanctuaries desolate…I will make the land desolate…And you I will scatter among the nations…Your land shall become a spoliation and your cities a ruin. Then shall the land make up for its sabbath years throughout the time that it is desolate and you are in the land of your enemies; then shall the land rest and make up for its sabbath years. Throughout the time that it is desolate, it shall observe the rest that it did not observe in your sabbath years while you were dwelling upon it.” God repeats this warning a few verses later, saying, “For the land shall be forsaken of them, making up for its sabbath years by being desolate of them.” The text makes it abundantly clear that the curses are a punishment for, or perhaps a consequence of, the people’s chronic failure to observe the mitzvot of shmita and yovel.
The question, however, is why? What is so significant about these commandments in particular that our parashah frames them, essentially, as the be-all-end-all of the covenant, the commandments about which God is clearly most passionately concerned?
To answer that question, we have to understand a little more about the meaning of shmita and yovel. The basic principle underlying these commandments is that “the land,” specifically the Promised Land of Canaan, but also ultimately the whole of the earth, “belongs to God…” God merely rents the land to the Israelites – to dwell upon, as well as till and tend, but not to own outright; there are only long term leases, no final sales. Hence during the yovel all private property must be relinquished, with possession reverting back to the original tribal allotments. As a matter of fact, the term shmita literally means “to relinquish,” since its about forcing us to periodically relinquish control over the land’s productivity and permit anyone and everyone to enjoy its bounty, even that which technically grows on our property.
And the laws of shmita and yovel apply this same principle to other forms of property ownership as well. That we are obligated to forgive all debts in the shmita and yovel years, as well as to provide requested loans despite the fact that they might never be repaid; that we must “proclaim liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof” (25:10) and allow all slaves to go free, means that, according to the Torah, we don’t truly own our human or even material possessions; they belong to God.
Put simply, shmita and yovel are radical, perhaps revolutionary, commandments. Shmita serves to periodically mitigate socioeconomic inequities, while yovel basically eradicates them, at least for a period of time each generation. They are powerful and forcefully enact core principles of biblical faith: that all belongs to God, and not to us; and that God created human beings equally in the Divine image. To claim as ours that which doesn’t truly belong to us, and to permit inequality, strike at the very heart of what the Torah is striving to teach us about who God is, and what God wants from us. We must therefore see these commandments for what they are: the very essence of Torah itself. As one of the oldest midrashim notes, the Torah, in last week’s parsha, even goes out of its way to specify that the laws of shmita and yovel are given at Mt. Sinai, underscoring their centrality to the covenant forged there.
Rabbinic tradition points out another dimension of the relationship between Sinai and the mitzvot of shmita and yovel. According to Rabbi Harold Kushner, the Torah emphasizes that these “laws were promulgated at Mount Sinai…because at Sinai no one owned any land yet, and no one could object that the law deprived people of what they had worked to acquire. It is easier to propose a visionary system of equality when all start out equal.” During Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness, no one possessed property of their own. Every tribe, and every family, had their own equal place, first as they were encamped around the mountain, and later as they pitched their tents surrounding the Tabernacle on their trek to Canaan. Sinai, in other words, represents a utopian vision of total socioeconomic parity, in which everyone, regardless of tribal affiliation or family background, enjoyed full and equal inclusion in the community. No one was left out, no one was left behind, no one was less than.
Yet while the Torah holds the society of Sinai out as the ideal, it recognizes that remaining encamped around a remote mountain in the wilderness is neither sustainable nor desirable. If the Torah is to mean anything, it must be given concrete expression in the real world, not apart from it; within history, not outside of it – with a real people striving to live out its ideals in a real time and place. So instead of simply remaining at Sinai, the Israelites are provided a place to settle, but with an crucial caveat: they must strive to recreate the utopian Sinai Society once they are settled in the Promised Land – with every tribe, and every family, receiving an equal territorial allotment in Canaan. Intrinsic to the concept of shmita and yovel is both a recognition of reality – that real people and societies, rooted in a land, in possession of property, tend toward inequality and stratification, where some benefit more than others – and also a refusal to accept that reality as unchangeable or inevitable, that the vision of total equality reflected at Sinai is possible; that the Community of Canaan, which naturally tends toward inequality, can yet become the utopian Society of Sinai.
Transforming Canaan into Sinai is not easy. To accomplish it, we are pushing against the extraordinary weight of human nature, our innate desires for power and possession. The Torah recognizes this tendency, and in some cases permits or even encourages it. Yet it never loses sight of the cost and consequences of giving our predilections free reign. Challenged to explain the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in a few short words, modern historian Michael Parenti responded, "because fewer had more." Societies in which property and power are concentrated in the hands of a few always collapse under the weight of their own injustice. Seen from this perspective, the curses – framed as a result of not upholding the mitzvot of shmita and yovel – are less punishments than the inevitable consequences of failing to equally share the benefits and blessings of community. The function of shmita and yovel is to remind us that the blessings of community belong to all of us equally, not just some of us exclusively, and therefore that we must strive to transcend our natural inclinations, at least periodically, to let go of what we have and open up to make space for others, so that all of God’s people, and not just the privileged few, can truly flourish.
The same principle, it seems to me, applies not just to our ancient ancestors as they sought to establish themselves in the Promised Land, but to all communities. The choice is perpetually offered to us all, individually and collectively: who are we, and who will we be? Sinai, or Canaan?
A Canaan Community hoards the benefits and blessings of community among a select few. Yet our parashah warns us that Canaan Communities cannot thrive; the preponderance of closed doors and unopened hands causes them to choke up and break apart. Instead, we are called to create Sinai Societies: inclusive and equitable communities, where all seekers are welcomed and embraced; where every individual – regardless of age, stage, religious/ethnic background, place of origin, relationship status, political ideology, financial means, gender identity, or sexual orientation – has equal space, an equal portion, an equal voice in the community’s direction.
Our ancestors were called to take their idealized society from Sinai and reconstitute it in Canaan specifically because the transition from one context to the other created the conditions for transforming the real into the ideal.
Our community is similarly entering a time of transition. And it seems to me that we face a similar challenge: will we be a Canaan Community – or a Sinai Society? Striving to possess, or creating avenues for participation and access? Claiming space for ourselves, or making space for others? A community that belongs to a select few, or a society that belongs at once to no one and to everyone? A community divided against itself, suffocated by endless strife, or a society that flourishes by sharing its blessings?
My dear friends, as we embark on this next stage of our journeys, together as well as apart, I pray that we resist the impulse to control Canaan, and instead strive – again and again and again – to stand at Sinai, until this place, and indeed our whole world, is transformed into a true Promised Land.
So may it be God’s will. Amen.
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