TORAH SPARKS

 

Parshat Behar-Bechukotai

May 13, 2023 | 22 Iyyar 5783

Torah: Leviticus 25:1-27:34 Triennial: Leviticus 25:1-38

Haftarah: Jeremiah 16:19-17:14

Ayekha, Not Eicha

Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Parashah

There is a question of how to understand the blessings of our parashah. Do they reference something that happened, perhaps during the time of either of the Temples? Or are they a hope, a promise for a messianic future? It is much easier to understand the curses. They happened. We read, horrifically, in our parashah, You shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters you shall eat. And then we read of the fulfillment of this very curse during the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BCE as reported in Lamentations. The terrors that seem fanciful, beyond imagination, in our parashah become the realities we live through. Meanwhile, the blessings, the dream of a happy life and a strong relationship with God, remain, perhaps, nothing more than a dream.

 

The power of the dream is in its potential. We have been dreaming the same dream for more than 2000 years and we still believe in its potential to be fulfilled. This dream is articulated most clearly in Leviticus 26:11-13. We read, And I shall place My presence in your midst, and I shall not loathe you. And I shall go about in your midst, and I shall be God to you, and as for you, you will be My people. I am the LORD your God Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from your being slaves to them, and I broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk upright.

 

The first two verses here are clear. Our dream is a relationship with God. It is, in many ways, a return to the dream that was the Garden of Eden. There, too, God went about in our midst. There, too, God was present with us such that we could not hide from God. However, here God promises even more. God promises not to loathe us, which can also be translated as not to retch in disgust over you. The Eden story ends with our expulsion. Here, in the dream constructed, God promises an end to the possibility of expulsion. We are granted a perpetual relationship with God.

 

These verses are very similar to the promise that God makes to the Israelites in Egypt through Moses. There, God says, I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God. And you shall know that I, the LORD, am your God who freed you from under the labors of the Egyptians. There, God is clearly talking of a time yet to come. Here, God is referring back to the Exodus as proof of what God has already done for us. God is speaking to us as a people who are no longer slaves, who are able to walk upright. Because the freedom from slavery portion of the promise has been fulfilled, it becomes possible to imagine that the perpetual relationship portion of the promise might similarly be fulfilled. However, to this day it is possible that it hasn t.

 

The final word in the verse, kommimut, complicates matters. Translated here as upright, it is a word that only appears once in the Tanakh. The root is kuf-vav-mem, meaning to stand or rise up. It is also one of the words used when making covenants. One stands up or establishes a covenant. Using this understanding of the word, we would read the verse here as made you walk covenantally/in covenant. It puts us in a bind. The point at which we can reach the promise, can receive the blessings we get for following God s covenant, is when God decides to make us do so. The parashah opened with the verse, if you walk in my ways. Yet we end with it being God who will decide whether to make us walk in God s covenant or not.

 

When we look at the world today, it can seem clear that we are living with the curses. It can seem as if God has not yet chosen to make us walk in covenant. At this point, the words we recite as the ark is closed after the Torah reading, as God withdraws from our presence, come to mind. Taken from the final chapter of Lamentations, the book which details the fulfillment of our parashah s curses, these words call out to God to help us help ourselves. We say, return us, God, to you, so that we can return. Renew our days like the days of old.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good Endings

Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Haftarah

The penultimate chapter of the book of Vayikra turns our stomachs. It starts well enough with all the blessings (and benefits) that we will receive for following God s mitzvot. But then comes what will happen if we do not follow the mitzvot. These curses, as they are often referred to, are read in an undertone. Who wants to read out loud what sounds like a collection of the worst moments of Jewish history?

Then came the haftarah dilemma. What kind of haftarah do you attach to a parashah like this? There is no shortage of dire warnings by the prophets as to what will happen to the Jewish people if they do not follow the mitzvot, but after listening to the parashah, is this the most effective way of making sure that none of this will happen (again)?

It is Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, who offers a solution. He understood that warnings of penalty need a balance. Any cursed be must have a counter blessed be. If not, we will not listen. After all, who takes heed when there seems to be no hope of improving the situation? The haftarah from Jeremiah offers a balance of threats and rewards:

5 Thus says the Lord:
Cursed be the man who trusts in man and places in flesh his strength, whose heart departs from the Lord.
6 For he shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when good comes,
But shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land which is not inhabited.
7 Blessed be the man who trusts in the Lord, and the Lord becomes is his domain of trust.
8 For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river,
And will not fear when heat comes;
its leaf will be fresh, and will not be anxious in the year of drought,
Nor will cease from yielding fruit. (Jer. 17:5-8)

Just like the parashah, Jeremiah juxtaposes the two paths, that of the person too self-confident to make space for God, and the one who sees God as the source of success and hope. Whether one will follow the mitzvot often depends on the person s desire to have God in his life.

Contrary to the Torah s lists, Jeremiah speaks at greater length about the reward of following God, of choosing God as the one to place one s trust in. The consequences for both beliefs are along the same spectrum, but which end one finds himself depends on the path one chooses.

Jeremiah offers not only a balance of curses and blessings, but also an alternate order. While in the parashah a list of all the good precedes the list of punishments for people who turn away from God, Jeremiah flips the order. He offers the negative before the positive, presenting the problem before shifting to the rewards. Thus, the listener is left with the lingering memory of the positive and encouraging image of the rewards. We are left with hope.

Playing Monopoly with My Oma
Joshua Kulp
The Halakhah in the Parashah

On Shabbat afternoon, I used to play Monopoly with my grandmother, my Oma. Now my grandmother was a terrible Monopoly player, and not just because I was her grandson and she wanted me to win. My Oma had a strong sense of what is right and wrong and thought that those rules should apply to Monopoly as well. If she had two yellow properties, and I landed on the third, it was foul play, in her mind, for me to buy the third. I, on the other hand, was a competitive young capitalist, and I wanted to win. I would buy the yellow, block her monopoly and since she wouldn t block mine, I would go on to win.

 

The Torah does not explicitly prohibit buying a yellow property when your grandmother already owns two (phew). But I believe the spirit of my grandmother resides in one of the mitzvot found in this week s parashah. The parashah opens with a discussion of the Jubilee year, which occurs every 50 years. At the arrival of the Jubilee, all land returns to its ancestral owners. The Torah warns us when selling or buying land, that both the buyer and the seller must take into account how many years of the Jubilee are left. In verse 25:17 the Torah offers a more general admonition, Do not wrong one another, but fear your God; for I am your God. The immediate context is concerning the sale of land do not defraud the buyer and sell the price for a high amount when the Jubilee is close, and do not defraud the seller and pay a low price when the Jubilee is far. But the rabbis read a much broader meaning into these verses, claiming that the verse refers to any defrauding of another, either through words or money.

 

But what exactly is the Torah warning us against? What counts as defrauding? This is the topic of the remarkable fourth chapter of Mishnah Bava Metzia. The third mishnah of that chapter offers a precise definition of what constitutes monetary fraud: The measure of fraud for which one can claim that he was exploited is four silver ma a from the twenty-four silver ma a in a sela, or one-sixth of the transaction. In other words, if one sells something for more than one sixth beyond its accepted value, or buys something for a discount of more than one sixth of its accepted value, and the other party did not realize that they were being overcharged or underpaid, the defrauded party has a right to ask for their money back. There are many details to these laws and they fill up hundreds of pages in traditional law codes. But the essential law is clear. People cannot take advantage of another while engaging in business. If an object, an idea or even an entire company is worth a certain amount, the seller cannot falsely claim it is worth more, nor can the buyer falsely claim it is worth less. A person can, of course, tell another that the object he owns is worth 100 dollars, but he will only sell it for 150. But he cannot say it is worth 150, when it is worth 100.

 

The Mishnah goes on to state that fraud applies not only to money and things, but also to the way we speak to one another. Mishnah Bava Metzia 4:10 states, Just as the laws of fraud apply to buying and selling, so too they apply to the spoken word. One may not say, How much is this object? , if he does not wish to buy it. If one had repented, another should not say to him, Remember your earlier deeds. If one descended from converts, another should not say to him, Remember the deeds of your ancestors. When one inquires about buying something, the buyer gives the impression that they are interested in buying the object.. If the buyer has no intent of doing so, then they are defrauding the other person. It is a form of harm to another person to remind them that the way they are now is not the way they were in the past, for it robs them of their current identity. The fact that the verse ends with for I am the Lord your God implies that fraud is an offense not only against the other person but also against God. Even if the other party does not realize they have been defrauded, God, the ultimate arbiter of honesty, does.

 

Now I do not think I actually defrauded my grandmother while playing Monopoly on Shabbat. She knew who I was, and that I played by different rules.. But she taught me a valuable moral lesson just because something is legal according to the rules of the game, does not make it moral in real life. Real life need not be Monopoly, with winners and losers. The Torah teaches us that in our business dealings we should be aiming for a higher goal, one in which our wins do not come at the expense of others’ losses.