Parashat Behar-Bechukotai
May 14, 2020
Rabbi Harry Pell, Associate Head of School
One of the radical mitzvot that comes up in the first of this week’s two parashiot is the mitzvah of shmitah, also known as sheviit – the seventh or sabbatical year. As if it wasn’t radical enough to set aside one day a week on which we accomplish no productive work whatsoever, here we learn that we should set aside every seventh year to let the land lie fallow, planting nothing in our fields, and collecting only what our vineyards, orchards, and fields produce naturally, without our intervention. The Torah refers to this as a Shabbat Shabbaton, a Shabbat of complete rest. Earlier in Vayikra, the Torah called Yom Kippur a Shabbat Shabbaton, but that’s one day. . . . This Shabbat Shabbaton of complete rest is meant to last a year!
The Sfat Emet, a Polish Chasidic Rebbe who lived near Warsaw in the 1800s, focuses on the way the Torah introduces this mitzvah.
דַּבֵּ֞ר אֶל־בְּנֵ֤י יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ וְאָמַרְתָּ֣ אֲלֵהֶ֔ם כִּ֤י תָבֹ֙אוּ֙ אֶל־הָאָ֔רֶץ אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֲנִ֖י נֹתֵ֣ן לָכֶ֑ם וְשָׁבְתָ֣ה הָאָ֔רֶץ שַׁבָּ֖ת לַה’׃
Moshe is instructed to tell Bnai Yisrael that when they enter the promised land that God is giving them — v’shavta ha’aretz shabbat — they shall observe a Shabbat for God, and the pesukim that follow delineate this balance of six years of planting to a seventh year of shmitah.
But the Sfat Emet, whose name incidentally means the language of truth, points out that the language in this pasuk sounds like it might mean something else. The shorashim for “Shabbat” and for “return,” Shabbat and shuv, are very similar. “V’shavta ha’aretz shabbat,” sounds as if the Torah might be saying, “You shall give the land back to God for a Shabbat.”
According to the Sfat Emet, God created the world and gave the land to us, and every six years we are supposed to return the land to God . . . so that a year later, God can turn around and give the land back to us. Says the Sfat Emet, “The land is being given to Israel anew; each sabbatical renews the gift.”
The Sfat Emet goes on to make the case that this cycle of receiving, giving back, and receiving again, also applies to Shabbat every week. We remind ourselves every Friday in Kiddush that the Heavens and the Earth were completed in six days, vayechulu hashamayim vehaaretz, and then Shabbat came to give new life to creation. But apparently this transcends the first Shabbat! Every week, the Heavens and the Earth are completed anew, and we give the world back to God, and in turn, new life is given to creation; new life is given to us.
These past weeks have been difficult in many ways, but they also represent something of a shmitah, in which we have stepped back from the intensity of the work in our offices and in school, knowing that in time, we will return to that intensity. For the moment, though, we have something approaching the opportunity our agrarian ancestors had every seventh year to focus inwardly and feel a bit less tethered to our typical places of work. We can also take this message of the Sfat Emet to heart, not just now, but every Shabbat, that in letting go a little from the workaday world, we can allow Shabbat to renew creation, and we ourselves can be renewed in the process.
Shabbat Shalom.