Behar: Faith in the system

I have very little farming experience. I get food and clothing and shelter in exchange for money. I get the money  in exchange for advising people on their health. I am far removed from agriculture. I do not know the significance of cultivating and fallow.

The famous first Rahi in Behar that generates the Hebrew cliché

 

. מָה עִנְיַן שְׁמִטָּה אֵצֶל הַר סִינַי —  Mah inyan shmitah aytzel har Sinai

What has the matter of the Sabbatical year to do with Mount Sinai 

 works at a deeper, more granular level: Mah inyan shmita. What is this shmitah? Since cultivation of the land is so foreign to me, what are these commandments concerning the land’s Sabbatical year and why am I being informed. I am uncomfortable with forming an opinion about something that is so important to me and so removed from my understanding. How much do the Rabbis, the deciders of halacha, the representatives of Sinai, know about these matters? Won’t there be a famine if agricultural activity ceases for 2 years, at Yovel, the Jubilee year?  This is fear posing as rational thought. Microsoft Copilot ( ChatGPT) estimates that : “stored grains could potentially feed the entire US population for approximately 3 years and 3 months.” It could not have come out more perfect! (Israel has enough stored grain for 18 days!)

 

Most years, Behar and Bechukothai are read together. This leap year, they are not, they are read separately. When they are read together, a message emerges. A set of very difficult rules about Shmitah and Yovel are set out. These mitzvoth deal with fundamental economic activities: agriculture, shelter, possession; they deal with the necessities of food and shelter. They call for abstention from reaping or sowing the land; an enforced vacation that generates a fear of famine. Bechokothai then gives the Torah’s perspective: Human activity is not the determinant of plenty or famine, it is Gd who grants sustenance.

אִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַ֖י תֵּלֵ֑כוּ וְאֶת־מִצְוֺתַ֣י תִּשְׁמְר֔וּ וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם אֹתָֽם׃

If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments,

וְנָתַתִּ֥י גִשְׁמֵיכֶ֖ם בְּעִתָּ֑ם וְנָתְנָ֤ה הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ יְבוּלָ֔הּ וְעֵ֥ץ הַשָּׂדֶ֖ה יִתֵּ֥ן פִּרְיֽוֹ׃

I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit.

Violation of the commandments, even if the laws are counterintuitive, chukim, will not yield the desired result. Rather, as is detailed in this whispered parsha of chastisement that follows, you will be exiled and suffer beyond your imagined capacity. The rules are not what you think.

This year, the chapters are separated. Each chapter stands on its own.

We can make some sense of Shmitah and yovel. A model of social justice is presented to people who had been slaves a year ago. It is a system based upon an (almost) irrevocable ownership of land , all "sales" of  rural land  are  limited to  49 years. The land then reverts to the ancestral family. After the conquest of the land, the new owners could never transfer possession (short of their dispossession by a usurper and exile).  It is likely that  part of the  servile status  in Egypt was an  exclusion from owning land in certain areas.  The prohibition on owning land is an age old method of preventing a foreign group (like the Jews in Europe, or the Jews from Europe) from integrating into an area of settlement. When the promised land is won, the Hebrews will be the owners; no one else would be allowed to possess it. This principle seems to have preceded the original  Hebrew conquest and was perpetuated by subsequent occupants.

 

The new order would include the Sabbatical year: when the land is left fallow and whatever it produces (in the absence of cultivation) is left for the wanderer and the beast. The story of the Egyptian famine, that started the centuries of bondage, is connected to this plan. We recall that following the seven years of plenty, there is a severe famine through which Joseph comes to acquire all of the land of Egypt in the name of Pharaoh.  There is a recognition that interminable tilling of the soil leads to its exhaustion. Generalizing,  giving the hoarder unlimited opportunity to accumulate leads to a slave society ( it is a Markov process) .  Thus, every seventh year the land lies fallow and no one can use this produce to add to the silo.

Food insecurity is too frightening, greed is too powerful, to expect voluntary adherence to statutes that seem arbitrary in the context of local conditions: drought, flood, the conspicuous consumption of neighbors. Faced with the need to produce grain, to replace the manna from heaven, these restrictions look different.  It is difficult to use long-range thinking when you are a few days or hours from starvation

Behar lays out a socio-economic system. The actual implementation of socio-political economic theories has a very poor track record. What justice we have has come from providing the population enough to deter revolution; and when that appeasement has failed, and revolution has come, the new system (Feudalism, Communism, Fascism, Capitalism,etc.)  that developed in the optimism of powerless hope, has eventually  become oppressive. Discovery and technology have improved living conditions so that in many places, the distribution of wealth is not a matter of life or death, but  justice is in the eye of the beholder - minister or critic.

The system of Rabbinic decision, interpretation of the text in the context of changing needs, has allowed accommodation to new realities.  To me that is the most important meaning of

 

בהר סיני. מָה עִנְיַן שְׁמִטָּה אֵצֶל הַר סִינַי — What has the matter of the Sabbatical year to do with Mount Sinai