Bahar-Bechukothei: Time and Money

Bahar-Bechukothei: Time and Money

These two parshioth begin with the laws of the sabbatical year (every seventh year, agriculture ceases)  and ends with the dire consequences of abrogating this command וְהָאָרֶץ֩ תֵּעָזֵ֨ב מֵהֶ֜ם וְתִ֣רֶץ אֶת־שַׁבְּתֹתֶ֗יהָ בָּהְשַׁמָּה֙  For the land shall be forsaken of them, making up for its sabbath years by being desolate of them.  The land has a right to its Sabbatical years.  Payment will be extracted, even if means eviction. The Sabbatical year is a hidden law of nature.  The land requires it. 

Is that what is happening now? Is this period of economic rest a payment for the ceaseless whirring of business that preceded it? Is the coronovirus shutdown  paying back the missed Sabbaths of the last several hundred years? I hope that we are, at least, gaining that.

Time is money. Is this an equation? The intent of the phrase is that wasting time is costly, that any period of time can/should be spent in the pursuit of money. Much of these parshioth deals with time  valuation: the redemption price of a person depends upon age, the redemption price of a field depends upon the time to Jubilee. Money is temporal ( a word that carries both an anti spiritual meaning and a relationship to time).  These parshioth are transactional, dealing with monetary worth. 

The idea of the temporal, that our world of money and possessions, is tied to time, is seen in the talmud
אמר רב קטינא שית אלפי שני הוו עלמא וחד חרוב Rav Ketina says: Six thousand years is the duration of the world,

תניא כותיה דרב קטינא כשם שהשביעית משמטת שנה אחת לז' שנים כך העולם משמט אלף שנים לשבעת אלפים שנה
It is taught in a baraita in accordance with the opinion of Rav Ketina: Just as the Sabbatical Year abrogates debts once in seven years, so too, the world abrogates its typical existence for one thousand years in every seven thousand years,

This world is temporary, it will be cancelled. The significance of possessions is called into question by the ephemeral nature of everything we (think we) understand.

The coronatine (corona quarantine) is an irony. For the moment, many  have  a surfeit of time, In Bunshke Schvieg, Y. Peretz's  parable about silence in the face of suffering, the title character comes for his reward, but he has lost the drive to advocate for himself, he cannot find the wherewithal to formulate his invoice. I have all this time.  Why can't I use it better?