Parashat Behar-Behukotai Leviticus 25:1-27:34

Haftarah Jeremiah 16:19-17:14

May is Jewish American Heritage Month, and this week, the book of Leviticus ends with the double parasha Behar-Behukotai. One theme prevalent in both parashiot is heritage and inheritance; God’s and Israel’s – i.e. the Israelites, the Jewish people’s – relationship to the land.

Who owns the land? God or Israel? God is clear in Leviticus 25:23:

But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.

Torah insists that everything coming from the land is holy to God and belongs to God. But then again, Torah is also quite clear throughout that the land is Israel’s heritage: God’s legacy, God’s gift to Israel, the place God decides to show Abraham. Israel, the Jewish people, are stewards of the land.

And with that stewardship comes responsibility, expressed in the next verse, Leviticus 25:24:

Throughout the land that you hold, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

Here’s my favorite theme again: Redemption! But what does it mean, to provide for the “redemption” of the land? Isn’t God the one who redeems Israel? Isn’t God the one who liberates Israel by bringing them to the land? Isn’t that our “redemption story”?

Of course, this is the core narrative of the Haggadah. But as I have mentioned before, the redemption story begins already in Gan Eden, or with the expulsion from it. The longing to return to the garden, to the land, is the motor of our narrative, expressed in our liturgy.

Once the Israelites enter the land, after they cross the Jordan, they are responsible for it. They must till it and keep it, tithe from it, and make sure that it does not go barren and dry. To this end, the laws of the sabbatical year state that the fields must not be cultivated every seventh year: By giving the land a Shabbat, humans must let go, must remember that they are but resident aliens upon the land. In fact, all the laws regarding possessions and release in these chapters repeat that same teaching: Redeeming means setting free: Setting possessions, fields and houses, free. Setting debt free – releasing debt, forgiving loans. Setting servants free. Enabling the beginning of a new cycle. Providing for the continuation of arable soil.

Talking about continuation —isn’t the land promised as an eternal inheritance to the Israelites? As an ahuza, a nahala, a morasha: a river from generation to generation, a hereditary holding, a portion, a hand grasping a piece of land, holding on to it, staking a claim—precisely not letting it go, not setting free?

You have come to know me a bit over the ten-plus months we have been sharing this House of God so far, and I hope you know that I am firmly rooted in this world. In our learning, we have often spoken about the duality of this world and the world-to-come, and about how the promise of a world-to-come cannot fully, if at all, comfort us in the face of our losses and our finality in this world.

And yet, as a poet, I am drawn to matters of utopian longing and yearning for complete comfort; and as a rabbi, I am interested in how Jewish theology interweaves the redemption story, the journey toward the land flowing with milk and honey, with the perspective that ultimately, the only inheritance is God:

The land is God’s; God is the land.

One of the things I love to do is trace, for myself and for you, how certain words, images, and terms have found their way through Torah and Tanakh into our prayers, into our liturgy; how they are the pillars of traditional theology.

In this case, and without wanting to make this too morbid, let’s recall the last verses of El Male Rahamim, the prayer said at funerals and during Yizkor.

…let their rest be in the Garden of Eden. Hence, the Merciful One will shelter them forever under the divine wings and will bind them in the bundle of life. Adonai is their inheritance…

The phrase Adonai hu nachalato (Adonai is his inheritance) echoes Psalm 16, of which I am quoting here verses 5-11.

Adonai is my allotted share and portion;

You control my fate.

Delightful country has fallen to my lot;

lovely indeed is my estate.

I bless Adonai who has guided me;

my conscience admonishes me at night.

I am ever mindful of Adonai’s presence—

who is at my right hand; I shall never be shaken.

So my heart rejoices,

my whole being exults,

and my body rests secure.

For You will not abandon me to Sheol,

or let Your faithful one see the Pit.

You will teach me the path of life.

In Your presence is perfect joy;

delights are ever in Your right hand.

Judaism is a religion that praises life; so much so that our mourning prayers refuse even to mention death. They only praise life, albeit for some of us eternal life might just be a euphemism for death.

What we call inheritance, what we own, what we wish to pass on—all this matters of course. Lucky are those who have people that will (and want to) inherit, receive what they leave behind, to safeguard it and thus keep their memory alive. Just as the ethereal idea of a tangible place was passed on through the generations of almost 2000 years: Until 1948, Jews held on to the conviction that even without a physical grasp, without a stronghold, without an ahuza, the possession of the Land of Israel was our inheritance and heritage, our portion and share in this world.

And yet there will come a time, traditional Judaism insists poetically, liturgically, and theologically, when all claims and possessions will be set free. A time when notions of inheritance and heritage merge, when land and people fall back into God in the world-to-come.

And so the book of Leviticus closes, and the Israelites are left wandering through the book of the desert, near Mount Sinai, for the next forty years, toward that place where milk and honey flow.

Hazak, hazak, veNithazek.

Strong, strong, and let us be strengthened.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Julia Knobloch