Weekly D'var Torah

In this week’s Torah portion, the final portion of the Book of Leviticus, we are told to be sure to allow the Land to lie fallow every seven years in celebration of the Sabbatical Year.   Not only that, but during the same sabbatical year, shemitta in Hebrew, we are to free all indentured servants and to cancel all debts.  In an agrarian economy, this is more practical and doable than in our industrial age and ensures that debt and poverty do not become multi-generational.

More than that, every seven cycles of seven, we are to observe the Yovel, the Jubilee year- a grand reset of the economic and social life of the nation, when “each shall return to their ancestral holding and a great Shofar shall sound proclaiming liberty throughout the land to all of the inhabitants thereof.” (Leviticus 25:10).  For Mine is the Land and you are but sojourners with Me. (ibid 23)

Non-observance of this fifty-year cycle of sabbaticals will result, says the Torah, in our exile from the land and removal to captivity while the land observes the sabbatical years that we failed to provide. 

And so it was according to biblical history.  The seventy-year Babylonian Exile (586-516 BCE) precisely compensated for the failure of the nation to regularly observe the Sabbatical and Jubilee years.  As the Torah warns: “When you are strangers in a land not yours, then your land will enjoy its Sabbaticals and Jubilees.  But if you return to Me there, I will remember My Covenant…” (ibid 24).

What is the message to us?

Every Seven Days we are invited to have our own “Sabbatical”- except we call it Shabbat!  And every year, we have our own “Jubilee” on the Sabbath of Sabbaths: on Yom Kippur.  Devoting a day to our spiritual lives, letting our preoccupation with worldly matters lie fallow and working on our relationship with our loved ones, with ourselves, with the world and with the Divine.. It’s not just a matter of spiritual and psychological hygiene.  It’s essential to our survival as spiritual beings and as members of a sacred community.  Just as our physical selves must be nourished by activity, labor and purpose, so too must our spiritual selves be nourished. 

But in these days of sorrow, horror and grief- and desperate hope- after October 7th, the theme of each returning to their ancestral holding is particularly poignant and painful as the days of the captivity of the over one hundred hostages (eight of whom are American citizens) drag on.  How can we truly rest?  We mourn, we pray for peace, for co-existence, for all the death and destruction that has resulted on both sides of the border from Hamas’ brutal rampage. 

Last week, on Lag BaOmer, I took part in the unveiling of an installation trying to put the worry and terror into concrete form.  Take a look at this link to the Channel 11 news story covering the event. 

There is no easy way to foster inner peace nor perhaps should there be.  Complacency is not appropriate in these days, but neither is obsessing, being glued to the news to the point of horrible stress and anxiety.  We must be able, even now, to disengage, to give ourselves a short Shabbat moment for the very sake of our own survival. 

During the Sabbatical year, when sustenance depended on what was saved in the granaries from past year and the crops that grew wild and were available to all, there must have been anxiety as well.  Would supplies hold out?  Would famine ensue?  The other side of the Sabbatical is the necessity of faith in the One who promised to ensure that the land itself, even as it rested, would be able to nourish and sustain us from its natural growth.  Perhaps in the same way, we must now place our faith in that same One and that same promise.  Every night has its dawn and every storm finally passes. 

 In the words of Rabbi Nachman that we say each Shabbat, we have not come into this world to hate or destroy: we have come to praise, to labor and to love.  The work of Shabbat is not physical work but fostering an inner world of vision, hope, advocacy and openness to miracles- even the possibility of the miracle of return and of Shalom.

Kein Yehi Ratzaon- May it be G-d’s Will… Shabbat Shalom-

Rabbi Rudin