From Chabad.org: Behar in a Nutshell. Leviticus 25:1–26:2
The name of the Parshah, “Behar,” means “on Mount [Sinai]” and it is found in Leviticus 25:1.
On the mountain of Sinai, G‑d communicates to Moses the laws of the Sabbatical year: every seventh year, all work on the land should cease, and its produce becomes free for the taking for all, man and beast.
Seven Sabbatical cycles are followed by a fiftieth year—the Jubilee year, on which work on the land ceases, all indentured servants are set free, and all ancestral estates in the Holy Land that have been sold revert to their original owners.
Behar also contains additional laws governing the sale of lands, and the prohibitions against fraud and usury.
Commentary
The concept here is about having a year off. Or, if we are talking about a jubilee year, it’s the time when we are supposed to free the slaves. We are talking about slaves who the professional has gathered around himself to work for him. Certainly in the modern world we pay these people so we don’t have to call them slaves. But they are slaves. If they have no choice but to work, they are slaves
The way the Torah says it, at least in English, it’s that you return each person to their property. This implies that all people should have their own property even if they are obligated to go elsewhere for work. In Belarus, it has been the tradition since the end of communism that people leave in order to support their families. I say people but the genuine thought is that the man helps produce a few children and then has to head off to Russia to earn enough money to pay for them. It’s all well and good jumping on the wife but when you have children as a result of it, that is an economic problem that cannot be solved by staying at home. This is true in the cities and this is true in the country as well.
As the reading continues there is some talk about being fair with other Jews. We can look at this many different ways. But if we take the concept of being a Jew as being less a sociopolitical or historical fact, if we say it’s really not about blood lines, we might be able to wrestle the concept back to people. The idea is treating others fairly. This does imply but Jews get bought and sold just like everyone else so I’m not really straying so far afield. The point is that you should be at least fair with your slaves. That level of fairness is not completely explained. I personally feel that complete parity of pay for everyone who works for a company from top to bottom is a good way to play. I also think profit sharing for a wealthy company means that everybody becomes wealthy. If you find you can’t get a day’s work out of a secretary who now has 3 million in the bank, well, maybe you should have expanded the business and invited more people in.
But then we get back to the concept of ecology. It seems that the law of God says that man does not own the land. Mankind is at best a renter and is obligated to give the land back. I think this is what it means to take a year off from working the land. It seems to be the same for how we treat people. Maybe it’s just about being moral in our use of resources or our understanding of exactly whose resources we are playing with.
I just can’t stop from believing that God is nature and nature is God. If we are all made in God’s image, this means we are all natural people. We are all from the earth. Darwin was right. If God is nature, you’re welcome to enjoy the children’s stories but basically, God just said go about 4 billion years ago and after thinking about it for 3.999 billion years, we created Moscow and New York. Or in other words, after quietly evolving for 99.9% of the history of the rock we fly on through the cosmos, we are hell-bent on destroying everything only in the last 200 years or so. I think the world forgot to rest every now and again and let everything heal.
There are rich and there are poor and if someone thinks you are rich, you get rich person’s privilege. If people think you are poor, you get the privilege of the poor which is to say not a whole hell of a lot. There are beggars and there are those who must be begged. So many bended knees and so few people at the top of the pyramid. And believe me, it’s an uphill climb over a lot of other climbers trying to get to the top of a pyramid. 99.9999% of everyone fails in the quest. Keep that in mind as a baseball number. You can even ask yourself how many people would actually be happy for you if you went ahead and got to the top. I don’t see too much genuine love for that guy especially once they start making decisions that cause grief for everyone else.
But then the Torah seems to get us into real estate. This is city real estate and not land from which you can have food. This is strictly city properties that also have remarkable value based upon view, accessibility, security or even the opulence of the interiors. And if we are talking about the United States, oh boy, how much does it cost to have a place to go to work from? I’m not even talking about Japanese micro apartments. I’m not even talking about creative situations for that loft that you get for such a few precious pennies. How much of what you make just goes to have walls around you and a roof over your head? How much are you paying for a breakfast nook and a private shower?
And then we start talking about all of that physical labor that needs to be done. Apparently there is nepotism in the Torah. If it’s your brother, and this would be a reprobate brother I guess, isn’t capable of making enough money to feed himself, surprisingly you’re not supposed to put them right back on the field. Even if that is the work that needs to be done, I just managers are managers by blood. This is kind of a shame really. Perhaps there are families that are well connected units and have family businesses that everyone participates in. I think that idea got wiped out when they changed the laws to allow MegaMarkets and superstores and international chains to wipe out the possibility of local ownership of businesses. You follow you get is a world full of managers who are incapable of physically doing the job that needs to get done, we have corruption. We have inequality. We have a mess waiting to happen.
I’m allowing the seven parts of the Torah reading to guide me if it’s not obvious. The seventh part has to do with some people making it and other people not making it. The genuine sentiment is you’re not supposed to let people fall so far. If you have someone who becomes rich but your sibling works for them and they have simply been exploited and thrown away, we’re not supposed to do that. I think inevitably it means understanding our interconnectivity. I think that we are all essentially brothers and sisters should be a given. Just as it’s hard to figure out what animals you can kill and not kill, figuring out who we like and don’t like based upon some presupposed idea other than character, making sense of the levels is not possible. There is no accounting that justifies anything other than trying to keep parity. I’m not the first you there ever was and I’m not the first Jew ever to come up with the idea that socialism beats the hell out of all of this noise from the Torah. Slavery is just too complicated and if you are an environmentalist, the negative effects have created all of the misery that we see everyday. Like I said, I don’t read the Torah as historical fact as much as the complete understanding of what not to do in order to get along well. And like the great rabbi Hillel told us, all you need is the ten commandments which says be good and respectful to everybody and everything. Or you can simplify it further and go with the Beatles and say all you need is love.
The tail end of the part are the first few sentences of Leviticus 26. It says don’t pray to idols. I think it means clearly that we’re not supposed to live with these levels because there’s not supposed to be people above us or below us. The moment you supplicate yourself to anything but nature, things get sketchy. And if you cannot see how sketchy this world is that we live in, it’s not just that you’re not Jewish, it’s that you’re not vegan. Put that on your plate for your jubilee dinner and tell me how wrong I am.
And take a day off already. Take a year off. Take a couple of years off. How about 7 years off? About a government guaranteed check for 7 years as a stimulus for 8 billion individual businesses hell-bent on living sustainably on the planet Earth? I understand that this would mean the end of groupthink on the planet Earth. I have never been a fan of groupthink so I for one would not miss it one bit. I have no problem with my responsibilities. I just like reciprocation.
