BeHar, we are still standing at
Sinai. This Shabbat, as we conclude the
reading of the Book of Leviticus, we review the last pieces of the legislation
given to Moses by God on the top of this mountain. The legislation contained within these last
two portions of Vayikra, Behar & Bechukotai, are confounding
at first glance. In a moment, Carly will
address the challenges of the system of divine retribution laid out in the
latter of these readings, in Parashat Bechukotai. Allow me to take a moment to reflect on Parashat
Behar.
Parashat Behar opens with laws
regarding land ownership: first, the command to give the land a Sabbath year of
fallow every seventh year, what is called the shemitah; and second, the
commandment regarding the yuval, the Jubilee marked every 50 years. After counting off seven weeks of years –
seven times seven years, or in simpler terms after counting 49 years, the
Israelites were to sound the shofar on Yom Kippur to announce the start of the yuval. The first instruction after the call of the
shofar:
וְקִדַּשְׁתֶּם אֵת שְׁנַת הַחֲמִשִּׁים שָׁנָה וּקְרָאתֶם
דְּרוֹר בָּאָרֶץ לְכָל-יֹשְׁבֶיהָ
You shall sanctify the fiftieth year, and you shall
proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all its inhabitants. Sound familiar,
“You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land & to all of its
inhabitants!” This Levitical verse found
its way onto the Liberty Bell that sits proudly as a national symbol on
Independence Mall in Philadelphia. The Torah
portion continues from this now famous verse to detail the instructions for the
yuval, in short the specifics for the release of one’s material holdings
(in the biblical period this amounted to land, loans, and people).
Liberty. The Hebrew original: dror, translated on our nation’s bell
as “liberty,” is of interest. The
translation comes from the Church of England’s King James bible whose 1769
edition became the gold standard of bible translations in the non-Jewish
English speaking world. Ironically, of
course, though it was crafted in London, the Liberty Bell was commissioned to
celebrate political independence from Britain.
Our bell, however, became a popular national symbol for freedom only decades
later when “freedom” took on the added connation of personal freedom from
slavery and bondage. These modern
notions of liberty are lovely, and the Church of England’s translation fits
with our American values; yet, it behooves us to consider what the biblical
writer intended for us to understand as dror, as liberty or freedom. Given the context of the narrative in
Leviticus, which was inked long before any idea of America, let alone American
Revolution or Civil War entered human consciousness, the word choice warrants
attention.
Most often when
referring to freedom (such as the setting free of a slave or servant), the bible
uses an entirely different word, חופש (chofesh), a term that in modern Hebrew today still
retains the notion of freedom as it is used for vacation. In Israel, when school lets out, chofesh begins.
So, why dror? Why not chofesh
like elsewhere in the Torah where freedom and liberty are referenced? Rashi, the
well-known and beloved eleventh-century French commentator, views dror
as specifically the freedom from living under someone else’s rule - under someone else's thumb, an
understandable understanding given the reality of Jewish life in medieval
France and Germany. A thirteenth-century
grammarian, R. Avraham Bedersi, argued similarly that chofesh implies
solely a reduction of servitude or serf-labor, whereas “dror signifies
its total abolition.” Certainly the
abolition of serfdom was an ideal of liberty for many (especially Jews, who
were as a people barred from owning land) during this period. Later scholars too add that while chofesh
marks the absence of labor perhaps even for a length of time, dror
denotes the polar opposite of subservience.
Dror demands that each person become his or her own master.
Contemporary scholars Tamara Cohen
Ezkenazi and Rabbi Andrea Weiss, the editors of the 2008 Women’s Torah
Commentary published by The Women of Reform Judaism, remind us that the laws
regarding the land in Parashat Behar, including our venerated
proclamation of liberty, “aim to protect economically disadvantaged members of
their community from losing their freedom and means of livelihood.” The
yuval, the 50th Jubilee year, was instituted, was legislated,
into the biblical calendar as a vehicle for economic adjustment as an, albeit theologically-based,
system for the balancing of power and ownership in society.
For all of our American valuing of
liberty, I wonder how well we are doing at maintaining dror in our
society? I am no economist or wealth
manager, but it seems to me that our society reflects anything but the balance
of power, wealth, and ownership across the citizens of our nation. Proclaiming a liberty that extends beyond chofesh,
simply an extended vacation from labor for some demands that we take very
seriously the positive mandate of dror and the responsibility liberty
entails. Becoming master of our selves,
of being released from being subordinate to another, is not a mandate to
accumulate excessive wealth with the intent of holding onto it in such a way as to keep others
subordinate.
America’s founders understood this as
well. The responsibility and
determination required to establish a new country free of familiar monarchy and
based entirely on new and democratic ideals, required dror. It required the liberty to release and allow
others to claim. Those who commissioned
our nation’s bell, I believe, fully understood the context of this proclamation
of liberty. Proclaiming dror
ba’aretz, proclaiming a release that allows for the experience of true
liberty, is a mandate to take care of the world – and all that we claim from it
as material possession – for the time that it is ours to do so. The privilege of that liberty demands also that we
do so in a manner that promotes liberty and justice for all.
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