Releasing What Does Not Serve Us
by Rabbi Lauren Tuchman
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In parashat Behar, we are introduced to the agricultural and spiritual practices of Shmita and Yovel. Shmita is the practice of allowing the land to rest every seventh year and to refrain from actively cultivating it. The fiftieth year is a time of great release, when everyone returns home to their family and ancestral holding. On Yom Kippur of the Yovel year, the shofar is sounded, initiating this release. These cycles, as the Torah imagines them are safeguards against the all-too-common human tendency to assume that what we have now is permanently ours, that our resources are scarce and that we cannot share them lest we be left with nothing. For the land is mine, you are but resident strangers with me (Lev 25:23). We are invited to remember that we are a part of something much larger than ourselves and that our time is precious and finite. Lest we mistakenly begin to understand our “ownership” of land or holdings within it is somehow immutable, we are explicitly told otherwise. Ultimately, we are just passing through.
Our tradition contains many reminders that land ultimately never can be owned or claimed in perpetuity by one person. The earth is the Divine’s, all of the fullness therein (Psalms 24:1). Though the Shmita and Yovel years are times of rest, humans and animals alike may partake of the land’s yield in these years (Lev 25:6-7).
Importantly, the Torah includes all humans and animals living within Israelite society, disallowing artificial social distinctions that too often create systemic and structural resource disparity.
In a human-made system in which resources are unequally distributed and oligarchs assume their positionality to be immutable, in a world in which too many are complacent with that self-aggrandizing, even when it is not in their interest, parashat Behar, with its reminder of ultimate impermanence is a corrective. When the Torah lists precisely who amongst one’s household or land holding may partake of what is naturally produced in the Shmita year, it is perhaps because it was precisely those folks who were commonly excluded. After all, this is why the Torah speaks so often of the need to protect the orphans and the widows, those most marginalized in society and why the Torah repeatedly insists that we must never oppress the stranger, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Experience of social marginalization and oppression, sadly, does not automatically make a person or group more attuned to the needs of others so marginalized. I find some measure of solace in the Torah’s repeated reminders because it shows me that the oppressive systems we live under aren’t new—they’ve been here for generations and it is our sacred responsibility to dream a different world into being. We can take this beautifully abstract and lofty imagining and bring it home to make it concrete.
As a disabled rabbi, I am painfully aware, both through my lived experience and that of my students of the countless ways Jewish institutions historically and ongoingly marginalize our own, treating us as outsiders and perpetual strangers. Too often, either because we’re simply worn out or because the cultural soundtrack we are immersed in tells us unceasingly how much we don’t belong, we internalize that falsehood. We are made strange to ourselves. We forget who we are. We lose track of our inherent dignity and worth as human beings created b’tzelem Elokim. And the Torah gets that impulse. It understands the crushing weight of despair that can threaten to pull us under, causing our self-esteem to crater and our souls to bear a heavy weight that doesn’t ever seem to lift. As I earlier wrote for my piece on parashat Va’era, when the Israelites became somatically constricted because of the unceasing hardness of their labors, they could not receive Moses’ words about their redemption.
My work in this moment is centrally about helping us all live out, however imperfectly the teaching that is at the very heart of our tradition—all of us have inherent dignity, a soul within that is breathed into us and guarded by the divine. That soul is pure, ever a part of us, regardless of social constraints and human-created structures of separation. We matter inherently. We are a part of an interwoven and interdependent web of non-separate mutuality. Disabled people know this in our bones. Many of us are joyfully free of the illusion of independence and are keenly aware of all of the ways in which we routinely give and receive. Reciprocity isn’t an abstract idea. It’s lived out every day, in small ways and in large ones.
The Torah is not in the heavens, as the Torah and rabbis teach and in our hearts to do it. The Torah, with its manifold strands and layers upon layers of meaning is ours, too. And this week, the Torah invites us to dream a radically different world into being. A world where care is centrally a part of how we relate. A world of reciprocity. A world of kindness, where the social contract means something. The question before us is this: in what ways might we receive the Torah’s call to us to deeply rest, to joyfully receive what is given and to refrain from taking what is not? What might open up for us when we recognize the preciousness and finite nature of our time? When we honor the truth of our impermanence, that we are just passing through, might we find more nourishing ways to live out our days?
May Shmita and Yovel give us strength to keep dreaming and working for a world as yet unimagined but deeply possible. She is on her way, though we do not yet know her.
Rabbi Lauren Tuchman is based in the DC area and works at the intersection of Judaism and disability inclusion. She writes the Contemplative Torah Substack and is the co-founder and program director of Disability Wisdom As Soul Care (DWASC) in partnership with Kirva.
