Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom! Let us count the omer with the blessing on page 570. Tonight is night 41, which is five weeks and six days of the Omer. Hayom echad ve’arba’im yom sheheim chamisha shavuot veshisha yamim laomer. The kabbalistic realm for this night night is yesod shebeyesod, which Rabbi Jill Hammer translates as “Connection within Intimacy”, and she assigns Shulamit, the young maiden lover from Song of Songs, as the Biblical woman for these Divine attributes. Shulamit teaches the power of deep intimacy between humans and with nature. This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Behar-Bechukotai, which gives us many laws regarding how we treat our fellow humans and the earth. The presence of Shulamit, the foundational connection among all God’s creation, can be found in these verses of Torah, as we understand how to more deeply appreciate all that God has given us. 

Specifically, Parashat Behar-Bechukotai gives us the laws of Shemittah and Jubilee, the 7th and 49th years of agricultural and financial cycles, in which land must rest, generational wealth reset, and all slaves liberated. The latter half of the double parasha also tells us that if we do all these things, God will reward us with abundance, freedom, and national might, but if we ignore God’s law of the land, our crops will shrivel, our families will starve, and our community will be overtaken by enemies. You will hear more about that second half tomorrow from our wise Bar Mitzvah celebrant. 

One might think that for a nation who has just been freed from slavery, the idea of enslaving others ought to be abhorrent. The Torah tells us that Israelite servants are to be treated gently, and may only be subjected to servitude for a specific period of time, yet Canaanite slaves or those capture from other nations as bounty of war may be enslaved for the rest of their lives, any children born to them while enslaved are also the property of the same Israelite master, and there are no specified restrictions on how harshly their treatment or work may be. Maimonides addresses this, not totally satisfactorily for our modern sensibilities, but at least somewhat better, by saying that while the ancient Israelites were allowed to “work a Canaanite slave with vigor” does not mean that they should or did or that God approved of such behavior. He insists that the sages of old were kind and respectful to all their servants, never abusive in their treatment or unreasonable in their expectations. 

Earlier in the same chapter, the parasha repeats the commandment not to defraud fellow Israelites twice, though the second time the commandment repeats the verse ends with “But you shall fear your God, for I HaShem am your God.” Similar to Rambam’s take with the slaves, Rashi says here that repetition of the commandment comes to warn us against different kinds of fraud. The first is explicitly in the text about buying or selling property and not cheating one another in the deal. The second, Rashi says, is about verbal fraud—speaking hurtful words or giving bad advice. That is why the second verse adds “but you shall fear your God,” lest a person say: Who will know that my intention was to do him evil? Again, we are learning that just because we can maybe get away with an unjust choice doesn’t mean we should behave in such ways. It is still always preferable to choose justice, honesty, and equality. 

Our Shavuot celebration is coming up, and we will be talking about Labor Rights as our tikkun this year. Too often we see big businesses (and sometimes small ones too!) cutting corners on worker safety or compensation, just because they think they can get away with it to make a little extra money for the top leadership or the shareholders. Sometimes these actions are illegal, and the workers suffering the consequences just are not in a position to advocate for themselves to rectify the situation. Sometimes, and I think more increasingly as certain legal protections are stripped away from higher offices, the actions are perfectly within the letter of the law, and that still doesn’t make them right. Just as the harsh and permanent enslavement of the non-Israelite slaves was legally allowed by the Torah and the norms of the ancient Near East, and it is still horrible to think that our people might have engaged in such practices, even so immediately after experiencing the opposite side of that oppression themselves. 

Yesod, the Divine attribute for both this week and this day of the week for the Omer, can be translated as “foundation”. How do we want to build our foundations, and upon which previous foundations of our manifold tradition? Do we want it to be one of connectivity and shared abundance? Or to choose self-service with only meeting the bare minimum requirements of care for others? Let us choose wisely, and may we bring about an age of equity and justice for all. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.