Behar

VaYiqra 25:1-26:2

Shmita and Yovel-God's Ideal and God's Corrective

Jenny R. Labendz, 5763

Parashat Behar opens with the laws of the Shmita year and the Yovel year (Jubilee, in English). During the Shmita year, which occurs every 7th year, we let our land rest and relinquish our personal ownership of its fruit. During the Yovel, occurring in the 50th year (after 7 cycles of Shmita), all Hebrew slaves are freed and all land that has been sold during the 49 preceding years returns to its original owners. Read through the first 10 verses of VaYiqra 25, beginning with the half about Shmita and then the half about Yovel:

What is the Shmita just like? How many times does its relationship or similarity to that parallel law show up in these verses? What message do you think the Torah is trying to convey by making that connection?

Let's move on now to the verses about Yovel, and read also verse 23:

Does the same parallel exist? What is our role in instituting the Yovel? What is the Torah's reason for the Yovel? What message is being conveyed? Think about these questions for a few moments before continuing.

As you probably saw, Shmita is strongly connected to Shabbat. First, the very idea that there is a rest every seven units of time is parallel to Shabbat. Moreover, it is called "Shabbat for Hashem" twice, "Shabbat Shabbaton", "a year of Shabbat", and "Shabbat of the land". Compare verses 3, 4, and 6 here to the description of Shabbat in the Decalogue ("10 Commandments") in Shemot 20:9-10:

It's almost over the top how closely the Shmita is linked to Shabbat.

But it's actually not this link that I'd like to discuss. It's the lack of that link when it comes to the Yovel. Not only is Shabbat not mentioned or evoked once, it bears a very significant difference. For Shabbat and Shmita we are told that they simply happen, and we will act accordingly; the seventh day is Shabbat, and the seventh year is Shabbat Shabbaton for the land. We don't do anything to bring it about or to prevent it from coming. It is out of our hands; this is the realm of God's reality and we simply have to tune into it. Not so with the Yovel. Look closely at verses 8-10; how many things do we have to do to bring the Yovel about? We must count the seven cycles (plus, "the period of seven weeks of years will be for you a total of forty-nine years), blow a shofar, sanctify it, proclaim a release/liberty, and only then will it be a Yovel. How can we make sense of the difference between Shabbat and Shmita, which are in God hands and come so naturally, and the Yovel, which seems so much to be in our hands, requiring a number of efforts on our part to bring it about?

What are the two rationales the Torah gives for Shabbat? "זֵכֶר לֽמַעֲשֵׂה בֽרֵאשִׁית"-- a remembrance of the creation of the world--and "זֵכֶר לִיצִיאַת מִצְרָיִם"-- a remembrance of the exodus from Egypt. In terms of the creation of the world, keeping Shabbat reminds us that we didn't create this world, God did; that we need God much more than God needs us; that our work is not the thing that really makes the world go `round, God is. In terms of the exodus from Egypt, along similar lines, Shabbat reminds us that it was God who enabled us to have a free and autonomous place in this world, not our own efforts; we didn't free ourselves, God did, and again, it is God that makes our situation in the world possible. Similarly, Shmita is a rest for the land. It reminds us that God doesn't need the land; the land needs God. God is in charge of the land and makes it produce, not we nor our hard work.

God set up the world such that we would be free, we would work most of the time, and the land would produce sustenance. That was God's intention for how things would ideally work. But internal to that system God inserts a check on it for us. "Don't get carried away!" the Torah says, as it were. "Just don't forget that you're not the one who created the system, and you need to have some humility and perspective." That is Shmita.

What is different about the Yovel? Yovel interrupts not our work lives or our agricultural lives; it interrupts our entire social structure of hierarchy and trade; slaves are freed and sales of land are canceled. But who set up that social structure? Was it really God's ideal plan for the world? Perhaps not; perhaps God's ideal world was egalitarian and free of hierarchy, free even of a need for trade law, since all people would see to it that each had what he or she needed. The social structure that is being checked and stopped every 50 years by the Yovel is a human creation, so it must be a human project to see that the stopping is instituted.

There is nothing inherent about the Yovel to the way the world works. It doesn't even come at a natural time; it's not the 49th year (the 7th Shabbat), but the 50th. For the Torah to describe the Yovel as it did the Shabbat and the Shmita would have been to obscure or even deny the most crucial piece of information-that this economy is a social structure that we, the human community, set up. God is outside of this, telling us that if we're going to run things this way, then at least we must create a Yovel to keep it in check. It's similar to the way God deals with the laws for having a king; ideally we shouldn't have one, but since we insist, we are given laws for how that king must act (Devarim 17:14-20). We are the ones that must take responsibility for it though.

With Shabbat and Shmita, God creates a system with a natural break in it. The ideal is not constant Shabbat nor constant Shmita. The ideal is actually Shabbat each week and Shmita each 7 years. But with the Yovel, maybe the ideal was constant Yovel: no slaves, no vulnerability of losing your land and dealing with the trade market. The Yovel is God's reaction to the less than ideal reality we have constructed.

What's the point? We will need to innovate in this world and create structures that are less than ideal. We will need to take part in aspects of life and the modern world about which the Torah did not instruct us explicitly. However, just because God has not established all the checks and balances does not mean that we are free from the responsibility to do so and to keep sight of the ideal. The psalmist says, "שִׁוִּיתִי יְהֹוָה לְנֶגְדִּי תָמִיד"-"I have put Hashem before me always" (Tehillim 16:8: I translated it word-for-word; JPS's more contextual translation reads, "I am ever mindful of the presence of the Lord"). A fundamental component of keeping Hashem in sight is keeping Hashem's ideal world in sight and striving towards it always, even as we function in a less-than-ideal reality of our creation.

Afterword:

There is one part of this idea that I have not fully worked out, so I will put it to you to see if you can answer. Above, I omitted the last few verses about Yovel.

Part of the Yovel is that it is also an extra Shmita year. Why? I would love to hear your answers. jennylabendz@alum.barnard.edu