Our Duty to Help Those Who Can No Longer Help Themselves

D’var Torah 5/7/18

שבת שלום

We are reading another double parasha today, the last two parashot of Leviticus. This is בְּהַ֥ר - בְּחֻקֹּתַ֖י which is Leviticus 25:1 – 27:34. It contains rules for the Sabbath, the Sabbatical years, and the Jubilee years. The Sabbatical years are every seventh year, when the land lies fallow and people eat from what they have stored and what it produces unfarmed, and the Jubilee is the 50th year, after seven sevens of years. Our portion further talks about indentured servitude and real estate sales and leases necessitated by poverty, and it lists curses and punishments for not following God’s commandments and some blessings if you do. It also happens to be the only surviving place in the entire Torah where the ancient law of land ownership is preserved, according to Etz Hayim.

As always, there is a lot of content in today’s reading, but I want to focus on the commandments relating to helping a fellow citizen who becomes no longer able to support himself or his family. Leviticus 25:25-28 says that if a person is forced to sell part of his land holdings because of poverty, his nearest relative must come and buy it back for him, or if he eventually is able to save enough, he can buy it back for himself. In any event, in the Jubilee year, it will be returned to him.

This raises other issues of fairness. Suppose somebody (Chaim Yonkel) approaches me and asks me to buy part of his land, and we agree that it is worth 10,000 shekels. No redeemer comes along to buy it back for him and Yonkel never saves up enough to buy it back for himself, and then along comes the Jubilee year, and the land reverts to him anyway. And I am out 10,000 shekels because nobody in the intervening years paid me back that money to restore the land to Yonkel! How is this fair to me? But consider what is actually being bought and sold here: The land all belongs to God. Even now in Israel, the state owns 93% of the land and people can only lease it for long terms but not buy it outright. In an agrarian society, all that is really being bought and sold are the rights to what grows on the land – grazing and farming rights. When I agree on a price with Chaim Yonkel, what we’re really agreeing on is the value of X years of crops and grazing rights, X being the number of years that remain until the next Jubilee. So I pay full value for what I am to receive, and if Yonkel saves up enough to buy it back from me before that time, he only pays me a prorated amount, not the entire 10,000 shekels we started with. I am made whole and have no grievance with this law. (This proration formula is set forth earlier in this chapter.)

If instead Chaim Yonkel owns a house that he has to sell out in the towns and villages scattered in the countryside, the agreed-upon price is really a leasehold interest. A redeemer can come along, or Yonkel can save up funds himself, and we do the same calculation of how many years remain on the lease until the next Jubilee and I pay him that proportion of the total original price, because at that next Jubilee, the house would go back to Yonkel.

However, if Chaim Yonkel’s home is in a walled city, the sale is indefinite - A redeemer has one year to come along and buy it back for him. After that, the house remains mine, and it won’t go back to him with the coming Jubilee. The Levites have their own cities, and they are given perpetual right of redemption of their houses within those cities, while any land surrounding those cities cannot be sold. All of these laws relating to housing are set forth in Leviticus 25:29-34.

What is the message for us today? The Women’s Torah Commentary notes that it must mean that everything belongs to God – the land, its produce, and the people who live on it. Nothing (and nobody, for people who offer themselves as indentured servants because of their poverty are also freed with the Jubilee) can be owned permanently by anybody else. Etz Hayim helps us to understand the underlying message in our portion: Nobody can sell his land and remain in poverty, himself and his descendants, forever; the land will come back to him at the Jubilee. And nobody can buy up land from everybody around him who is less fortunate than he, thus accumulating great wealth. What it seems to me we are getting here is a description of a utopian society. A kibbutz. A place where everything is owned communally (or by God) and nobody gets wealthy at the expense of anybody else. Everybody is treated equitably, even the man who can afford to buy the land of somebody who has fallen on hard times – he will be treated fairly, he will not lose his investment. Jubilee puts all of the chess pieces back in their starting position as at Creation and puts the board back into the hands of God.

כן ׳ה׳ רצון