Behar: Property's Rights

Behar: Property's Rights

The first Rashi of the parsha quotes the Torath Cohanim:  בהר סיני. מָה עִנְיַן שְׁמִטָּה אֵצֶל הַר סִינַי?  What does the Sabbatical Year have to do with Mount Sinai?  This is the idiom , in modern Hebrew,   for declaring a non sequitur, irrelevance. 

The question arises from the oddity of a landless, nomadic population of dispossessed slaves getting detailed inheritance and land-use laws in the middle of the desert.  People who had no estates, no inheritance of goods or property for 210 years are dealing with the rules governing the sale and leasing of land.  It is a land that they have never seen. The claim to the land is based upon forgotten sales to Abraham and Jacob, vague treaties with Isaac, and the claim  that Gd has granted it to them 

This relationship to a land  of dreams  turns out to be very lasting, very important,  The fanciful relationship to the land, through the rules associated with it ( outlined in the parsha and expounded in volumes of talmud) kept the dream of return vivid for millenia.  Since this portion of the Bible is shared with the Christians, it formed part of the justification for alienating the Jews from the local , European, system of property, possession and legacy

The idea of the return to ancestral lands in the Jubilee year has not been implemented for millenia. But the promise of an ancestral homestead waiting for every Israelite ( when the Messiah comes)  is a dream that has never died.  In our day, 90% of the land in Israel is owned by the state.  Much of the Biblical Promised Land is expected to a Judenrein state on the West bank of the Jordan.  The dream is not close.  Somehow, we ended up an urban people.

The idea that the land itself has rights ( a right to rest on the Sabatical and Jubilee years) is very modern. In our time, we emphasize the the right of the earth to stay cool, we set aside land not to be settled.  The land has rights, and as we see in the next parsha, violation of those rights leads to exile.  If we do not respect the rights of the earth as a whole, that exile may mean death.  The idea of shmitah and yovel mean that we must consider the state of the earth, the estate we leave to our descendants