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As any bar mitzvah to be will tell you, one of the hardest parts of writing about Torah is making it applicable to us in the present day. This holds even truer when writing about Leviticus, a book consisting almost entirely of laws you have probably never heard of and certainly never followed. It’s as if your English teacher asked you to do a literary analysis of Hammurabi’s code.
Is it an important work of legal scripture that has had far reaching effects on our culture and societal subconscious?
Well, yeah.
Is it literature?
At the risk of offending my Hebrew school teachers, I will have to say the answer is no.
What, then, can we say about this important piece of text that will find deeper meaning and make it relatable and interesting for a modern, largely secular, audience?
I’m stuck.
But I guess the best way to start is by looking at the text.
“And the Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying,”
It sounds cool, but I'm pretty sure they all start with that sentence.
“Speak to the children of Israel and you shall say to them: When you come to the land that I am giving you, the land shall rest a Sabbath to the Lord. You may sow your field for six years, and for six years you may prune your vineyard, and gather in its produce, But in the seventh year, the land shall have a complete rest a Sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field, nor shall you prune your vineyard.”
That’s sound agricultural advice; don’t want to overwork our fields, after all. It’s nice to know that the Torah wants us to look after our environment.
“And you shall count for yourself seven sabbatical years, seven years seven times. And the days of these seven sabbatical years shall amount to forty nine years for you.”
This seems interesting. A festival that happens once every 49 years has to be neat.
What do we do on these years?
“You shall proclaim [with] the shofar blasts, in the seventh month, on the tenth of the month; on the Day of Atonement, you shall sound the shofar throughout your land.”
Shofar? You’ve got me interested.
“And you shall sanctify the fiftieth year, and proclaim freedom [for slaves] throughout the land for all who live on it. It shall be a Jubilee for you, and you shall return, each man to his property, and you shall return, each man to his family.”
Hold on – did that law just order the emancipation of slaves every 49 years?
Viewed in the context of its time that’s pretty cool. What else you got, increasingly interesting parsha?
“The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land belongs to Me, for you are strangers and [temporary] residents with Me.”
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