Parshat Behar - Bechukotai
PARSHA OVERVIEW
Behar
The Torah prohibits normal farming of the Land of Israel every seven years. This "Shabbat for the land” is called "Shemita." After every seventh Shemita, the fiftieth year, Yovel (“Jubilee”) is announced with the sound of the shofar on Yom Kippur. This was also a year for the land to lie fallow.
Bechukotai
The Torah promises prosperity for the Jewish People if they follow G-d's commandments. However, if they fail to live up to the responsibility of being the Chosen People, then chilling punishments will result. The Torah details the harsh historical process that will fall upon them when Divine protection is removed. These punishments, whose purpose is to bring the Jewish People to repent, will be in seven stages, each more severe than the last. Sefer Vayikra, the book of Leviticus, concludes with the details of erachin — the process by which someone vows to give the Beit Hamikdash the equivalent monetary value of a person, an animal or a property.
PARSHA INSIGHTS
Holy Crop Rotation!
"For six years you may sow your field" (25:3)
I still remember learning at school about crop rotation. One year the field would be planted with wheat, the next year with barley or some other crop, and the third it would be left to lie fallow. And then the cycle would begin again.
When reading this week’s Torah portion, one could think that the mitzvah of Shemitta, the prohibition of working the fields in the seventh year, is some kind of holy crop rotation. The difference being that in the Torah it says you should work the field for six years and leave it for a seventh.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
First, there is evidence that working a field for six straight years and then leaving it for one year does nothing to improve its yield and may even have a negative effect. Second, the Torah prescribes dire punishments for the non-observance of Shemitta. The seventy years of the Babylonian exile were a punishment for seventy non-observed Shemitta years during the 430 years that the Jewish People dwelled in the Land of Israel. We know that
To answer these questions we must examine what causes a person to violate Shemitta in the first place.
A great malaise of our own era is the compulsion to overwork. The workaholic defines himself by his job. When you meet someone socially, the question of "What are you?" is usually answered by "I’m a doctor," or "I’m an accountant" or "I’m a rabbi."
There is a fundamental mistake here. What we do is not what we are.
In our society we have confused what we do with who we are. The underlying belief revealed here is that the more I work the more I become myself. Violation of the laws of Shemitta comes from a belief that the more I work, the more money will I make, and the more I make, the more I am the master of my own world.
When a person is sent into exile, all the familiar comforting symbols of his success are taken away from him. He realizes that what he does is not who he is. Both his survival and his identity are
It is from the perspective of exile that a person can rebuild his worldview so that he can see that what he does is not who he is.