By Paul Gross
This week's joint parsha is Behar-Bechukotai. Behar deals mostly with rules and regulations surrounding land, commerce, sabbatical, and jubilee. The sabbatical and jubilee system is a really interesting one. Every seven years the land in the land of Israel can not be worked. Every seventh sabbatical is the jubilee, kicked off by the blast of a shofar on yom kippur, which includes not only resting the land but also setting slaves free and returning land to its original owners. Next it goes on to tell us to be ethical. God also makes special mention that the land is always his and we just rent it from him. Like a fist bump to the environmental movement. The end of Behar is a detailed description of various issues that may come up and how to handle them. Slaves, especially Jewish slaves, are to be treated well. That last sentence strikes me as an odd statement, but anyway.
Bechukotai lays out an argument for why we should follow all these laws that have been handed down to us through Moses on Mt. Sinai. Bechukotai is a perfect example of that entertaining relic of a parsha that reminds us that Judaism around the time of the writing and coalescing of the Torah was a hardcore religion with a Temple equipped with animal sacrifice and the whole shebang. Today? Different. Here are some reasons, according to Hashem, to follow the laws of the Torah: If you study Torah, you will grow awesome alternating cycles of grapes and wheat. If you don't, you will have bad harvests. Womp womp. Also the wild beasts will be chased out of the land and we will have military successes. Great! What if people don't follow the laws of the Torah? No problem as long as you're ok with famine, starvation, enslavement, exile, enemy occupation, and desolation of the land. Then it rolls into a lot of detail about how to make sacrifices and tithings at the temple and some stuff about the land the actual temple is on and how we all share it.
There's a lot to unpack here. The Torah is a very old book laying out a philosophy for how a group of people hope to govern their behavior, lives, and activities. It is obviously much more than just that, but the nitty gritty detail of how we are supposed to organize our lives and interact with each other is a major part of it. I always hope that our values as a movement reflect the best of this philosophical foundation for a society. The kibbutz movement was an active participation in that kind of striving for a more fair and equal society. The laws may be specific but the message is clear: we as Jews need to treat the land well, treat each other well, and treat everyone well. Be good. Be fair. Be cool.
Bechukotai, though, is a more difficult one to connect to. I would hope that we should follow laws because they reflect the right thing to do. The idea that we should tie events such as the harvest, war, and the general success of our lives and our people to whether or not we are following laws seems childish to me. Our laws (for the most part) are pretty good. They do (for the most part) reflect a foundational philosophy that values good things like tikkun olam and the equality of human value. We should want to do right for right's sake, not because we are worried about a famine.
By interacting with Judaism the way that we do in this movement, we tease out what is best in our stories, traditions, and laws. Obviously I believe that's how it's meant to be. Any time we work the land at machaneh, thats a positive expression of