BEHAR & BECHUKOTAI
Behar (In the mountain) and Bechukotai (by my laws) is a combined parsha that takes us from Leviticus Chapter 25 through the end of Leviticus.
Behar (Leviticus Chapter 25-26:2)) is the parsha that contains the commandments of Shmita and Yovel. Shmita is the set of commandments to let the land have a Shabbat and rest every seven years. Yovel, which is usually translated as Jubilee, is the restoration of the status quo ante in terms of debts and land ownership, a great equalizing of society mitigating against the accumulation of riches and the kind of radical economic inequity we see everyday. The release involves the cancellation of all debts between Israelites and the return of land to its original owner. Note that this only applies to Israelites: non Israelite slaves can be passed on as an inheritance. Note also that houses in walled cities are exempt from the yovel requirement.
JPS actually translates yovel as release, because there’s no celebration as part of yovel and thinks that the translation as Jubilee is because one of those weird cross language sound alikes. Lastly, most scholars think that the yovel was never actually instituted (probably because it was too threatening to the monied classes). Shmita is a law on the books, though of course there are workarounds.
Bechukotai has two basically unconnected parts. Chapter 26 is a list of all the blessings we will receive if we observe divine commandments and then all the curses if we do not. Naturally, the curses capture the imagination of our authors, and the list is longer and much more colorful than the list of blessings. Chapter 27 is all about the details of appraising the value of different things—people, land, animals and having a surcharge of 10 or 20% for YHVH. This surcharge goes to the priesthood and helps support them because they do not have any land.
I want to discuss four themes, two from each part of the parsha.
Shmita
Land ownership
The promise of the elimination of wild animals
Paying religious specialists
Shmita is incredibly popular and important in the earth based Jewish movement, and many people have written about it far more eloquently than I can. Arthur Waskow wrote about it decades ago, Hazon has done a lot of work, as has Yigal Deutscher, Nati Passow, Justin Goldstein, just to mention a few. I think the great driver behind its popularity, as Waskow has emphasized, is that we are supposed to be human beings, not human doings, but we are so busy doing, doing, doing, in our modern world. Shabbat is a partial antidote, but then we resume our frenzy come Saturday night, if not before. So we need a rest, a real rest, and we need to give the earth a rest from our relentless human action upon it. Hence the importance of Shmita.
Shmita is patterned after the double portion of manna given to the Israelites in the desert. After all, the first question many of us reading this should ask is how we are going to feed ourselves if we don’t seed our fields, prune our vineyards, or do any kind of harvesting (25:3-4)—this is the same question the Israelites asked about manna which is why they tried to stash extra back in Exodus. The idea is that the harvest will be so good the year before the shmita that we will simply live off of it during shmita. But this idea is simply not dependable as a practical matter. There’s no way to count on a bumper crop in any given year and population expands to meet available food in any event. That’s why mast trees have some years where they mast a lot and then years where they don’t mast at all in order to control the populations of the mammals such as squirrels who depend upon acorns, hickory nuts, beech nuts.
The idea of shmita for the land rests upon a conception that farming is some kind of mining that uses up soil which thus needs to rest. That’s often enough true even in indigenous societies, many of which, for instance, practice slash and burn agriculture, farm the land for a few years and then abandon it to let it recover. This is a sustainable kind of agriculture, if we have few enough humans. I want to mention two other modern approaches to a sustainable agriculture.
The first approach is farming that enhances the natural fertility of the soil rather than mining it. The soils on the farm I had the privilege of stewarding in the 90’s were better when I left that when I started, measured by organic matter, hay yield, carrying capacity (how many livestock I could graze) and by old timers saying that they’d never seen the farm look so good. The soils of Joel Salatin’s place are both better than the soils of his neighbors because of his agricultural practices and better than they were when he took over the farm almost 40 years ago. If you have gardened some place for a long time and done it well, those soils should be better than when you started. A mutually beneficial relationship with the soil should be our goal, and that’s missing in our text and the idea of shmita.
A second approach is being championed by the Land Institute. The goal of the Land Institute is to breed perennial grain crops. All of the grain we eat globally are annual crops, which means they need to be planted every year and that involves a series of trade offs that make it difficult to be sustainable. But think of a native Midwest prairie, as existed in Salina Kansas, the home of the Land Institute. That was a sustainable agricultural system for thousands of years. Perennial grains planted in a polyculture setting (more than one crop) is the goal—"farming in nature’s image” as one of the books from the scientists the Land institute express it.
We make a radical mistake if we believe that the only possible relationship we can have with land is harmful to it. Further, if we have a harmful relationship to the land, we will certainly suffer as well, even if we take a year off every seven years—although we won’t because we still need to eat. Instead, like our ancestors, we will figure out fig leaf, legalistic work arounds such as “selling” the land for the year for a dollar to our non Jewish neighbors.
Do you believe that we can have a mutually beneficial relationship with agricultural land? With the more than human world? Under what circumstances can you stop doing and simply be?
Our usual conception of land ownership is that we (and the bank) own a certain piece of property. But that’s not the conception of land ownership in our parsha. “But the land shall not be sold permanently because the land is mine, because you are aliens and visitors with me.” (25:23). So we are just guests on the land which belongs to YHVH.
Traditional face to face societies “owned” land communally. That is, a certain area of land from which they farmed or gathered food and hunted belonged to the tribe as a whole. They could and did lose it in war to other tribes—and they lost it as a collective. “Owned” might well not be the right word at all here, because it wasn’t viewed the same way as a cooking pot or a spear—more like the tribe had the use of the land. Agriculture, a relatively recent innovation in human history, made being settled in the same place and ownership possible, but many traditional societies farmed without private land ownership.
Our text is working out the issues of land ownership; it’s important to remember that the question of individual vs communal ownership of land was an issue in the developed world as recently as the 19nth Century in England where there were lots of conflicts over the “enclosure” of commons. The enclosure laws basically meant taking land that was used by a village and actually selling it to someone.
There’s a saying in the alternative agricultural community that land doesn’t belong to us, but we belong to the land. This saying shifts the orientation from an anthropocentric perspective to one that centers the land and the more than human world. Most of us gather/produce/hunt little to none of our own food, and the lack of an economic connection to land makes it easy to be distant from the more than human world, a point Wendell Berry has focused on in many essays (see his book Home Economics, for instance.)
What in your life do you feel like you own, and what in your life do you feel like you’ve borrowed the use of it for a while? What belongs to humans and what belongs to the divine? How does this relate to your relationships with the more than human world?
“I will give you peace in the land, and you will lie down with no one making you afraid and I shall make wild animals cease from the land and a sword will not pass through your land.” (26:6). So this vision, which is echoed and elaborated by Ezekiel, a priest and a prophet who prophesied during the Babylonian exile (Ezekiel Chapter 34) is that rightly ordered worlds don’t have any wild animals. We all want security and this is precisely the promise being extended. As YHVH says in the preceding part of the parsha talking about shmita “And you shall do my laws and observe my judgments and do them, so you will live on the land in security. And the land shall give its fruit, and you will eat to the full, and you will live in security on it.” (Leviticus 25:18-19).
That’s the promise, but it is a wrong promise for both spiritual and anthropocentric practical reasons. Practically, wilderness serves a great variety of beneficial functions for humans that we don’t recognize and therefore, in our hubris, mistakenly assume don’t exist. Think of the destruction of forests for palm plantations in Asia or the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest to provide grazing land as simple examples. These forests provide a hugely important resource of being a carbon sink and they are also a treasure trove of healing plants. Think of the destruction of coastal wetlands providing protection for places like New Orleans from hurricanes. The examples are literally countless.
Further, a functioning ecosystem has wild animals (by which we almost always mean predators) who do the necessary work of culling herds of herbivores. Left to its own devices, the more than human world finds balance, and that balance absolutely includes “wild animals”.
On a spiritual level, we need wilderness. We need a counterweight against our tendency to be human centric so we need places to go where we are not the center. We also need to incorporate wilderness within us because it is the source of so much our creativity. If we were completely civilized, if there were no wild animals outside or inside of us, we would be spiritually and eventually literally dead.
What wild animals live inside of you? How might you bring them into balance with the rest of your personal ecosystem? How does wilderness feed your spirituality?
Financial support of religious specialists is a tricky issue. The entire burden of Chapter 27 is how to support the Levites who are busy maintaining the divine order. In our world where we are oriented towards me, we don’t want to pay for religious specialists such as Rabbis—and guess what, neither did our ancestors, judging from this chapter. In traditional societies, religious specialists were often part timers who participated in the rest of normal economic life. That only works if most folks participate in maintaining the sacred order.
In our society we tend to want to delegate the maintenance of the sacred order to religious specialists—but not support them. It’s unsustainable. Taking care of our spiritual teachers is part of how we are oriented towards community. The Baal Shem Tov, as an example, eventually made his living as a community supported mystic, in a time when communities actually tended to support a few such people.
That we are begrudgingly at best taking care of our religious specialists testifies to the weakness of our communities and/or a sense that our religious specialists aren’t actually sustaining the sacred order. Do you think your Rabbi (or priest or minister) is necessary for the maintenance of the sacred? I personally don’t belong to a synagogue because I can’t see how any of them are worth supporting compared to what else I could do with my money and time. That’s bad. Community weakness is a spiritual weakness that will bite us in the behind. Promise.
Should we have religious specialists who need to be supported? Do you know religious specialists who are supporting sacred order? How can you align your actions and your beliefs here?
QUESTIONS
Do you believe that we can have a mutually beneficial relationship with agricultural land? With the more than human world? Under what circumstances can you stop doing and simply be?
What in your life do you feel like you own, and what in your life do you feel like you’ve borrowed the use of it for a while? What belongs to humans and what belongs to the divine? How does this relate to your relationships with the more than human world?
What wild animals live inside of you? How might you bring them into balance with the rest of your personal ecosystem? How does wilderness feed your spirituality?
Should we have religious specialists who need to be supported? Do you know religious specialists who are supporting sacred order? How can you align your actions and your beliefs here?
