B'hukkotai: The Power of Seven

by: Dr. Richard Lederman

Fri May 30, 2008 at 11:07:42 AM EDT

Parasht b'hukkotai maintains the power of seven. If the people of Israel continue to disobey and reject God's covenant, God will visit upon them a seven-fold punishment; the ultimate punishment is exile.

We know that the land can become tame', polluted, impure. We read about this quite clearly in the Haftarah for Shabbat Parah-a passage from Ezekiel, the prophet of the exile. What Ezekiel tells us is that the people, through their impure actions, alienate themselves from God, and this alienation transfers to the relationship between the people and the land. Indeed, there is a triadic alienation-the people from God, the people from the land, and God from the land. As punishment, the people are exiled from the land-alienation of people and land. This undermines God's holiness as the people of God are scattered and landless-alienation of people from God. The land becomes desolate, uninhibited-alienation of God from land.

The first step is to reconstitute the land, reclaim it.

But shemittah is about much more than reclaiming the land. As we read last week, shemittah, and its denouement in yovel, is more about people, about community, than it is about land. Built into these mitzvot regarding the land is a radical understanding of the need to restore a pristine, primordial social balance. Indeed, one might say that during the shemittah year, society returns to its original gathering culture as envisioned in the first chapters of bereshit. All land is hefker, unowned, part of the public domain. All are equal daring the shemittah year. All feed from the same trough, as it were. Even the wild animals are part of the community during that year.

And yovel, the "shemittah of shemittot," restores an even more radical social balance. Yovel, in fact, may be the Torah's nod toward an agrarian society in which land is owned. Or, one might say, yovel represents the Torah's way of allowing society to move from that pristine, primordial gathering culture, where there is no land ownership and all are equal, to an agrarian culture, where land is privately owned.  

If one can imagine that the land was equitably distributed to tribes and clans and families under the rule of Joshua, the yovel redistribution restores that original social balance. How interesting that this takes place on Yom Kippur, when the alienation between God and the people is also restored. Every fifty years the restoration of the people's relationship to God is accompanied by a restoration of the relationship between the people and the land, the restoration of the community itself, the tribes and clans and families living in balance with one another.

Alienation, sin, punishment, exile, restoration, renewal, atonement-these are all a piece of the Jew's search for harmony and balance, in our relationships with one another, with God and with the land that we inhabit. Tradition tells us that yovel cannot be observed until the entire house [community] of Israel is restored to the land of Israel. The opposite of exile-that is, the promise of longevity on the land as the reward for a proper relationship with God-is not about mere survival. It's about what it means to be a sacred community living in covenant with God on the land that God promised.