Was it two weeks ago that I was professing my love of Leviticus, despite the cringey looks I see you making? Just two weeks ago that I was observing how Leviticus – forget its specifics for a moment – is concerned with the balance of the spiritual ecosystem in which we live.
And here we are now at Parashat B’chukotai, the final bit. The farewell to Leviticus. Which is also a farewell to the laws given at Mt. Sinai. In the next book, the Book of Numbers, we go back to plot – the Children of Israel moving here and there, struggling with rebellions, deaths, foreign armies and the threat of other nations’ curses.
But we’re not there yet. Here, this week, we finish up the laws which – again, forget the dodgy specifics for a moment – seem to be about how to be right with the world, with God, and with each other.
A good code of conduct, you’d think, would be its own reward. But we all know human nature. So next comes the enforcement mechanisms – the carrot and the stick.
So first the carrot. Promises of reward if we live up to the code. Abundance! So much abundance we won’t know what to do with it all, cooking up the new crop on the stove while our cellars are still full of the preserves and pickles of previous years. Plenty and peace. All this is promised.
Then the stick. The consequences for not following the commandments are also laid out, and these are much more vivid and extensive than the previous idyllic vision of peace and prosperity.
The earth won’t yield. The rain won’t fall. There will be scarcity and food will be rationed. Starvation among people and failure of crops. So unyielding will nature be that the skies will seem like iron, and the earth like copper. Not a raindrop seeping through either of them.
For past generations, maybe these seemed like curses – punishments for disobedience. I think for many of us, these sound less like curses than accurate predictions. If there is some balance between human and nature, and between human and Divine, that’s represented in the Book of Leviticus, then these terrible consequences are not a doling out of punishment, but the natural outcome of letting the delicate balance fail.
We understand this now, in a new way, in this time we live in where every year we wonder if the sky will be like iron and the earth like copper.
The Book of Leviticus – in fact, last week’s portion – gives us Torah’s most detailed exposition of the laws of the shmitah year and the jubilee year. You will recall, because I’ve been talking about it and we’ve studying it steadily since Rosh Hashanah, that these are the laws that require that we let our fields go fallow every seven years. Whatever grows of its own accord belongs to everybody, whether they own the field or not.
The shmitah laws seem to be pointed beyond the realm of agriculture itself. Yes, the soil replenishes in that year and that’s a fine thing. But most significantly, shmitah interrupts the benefits of ownership. The land is still producing on its own in the seventh year. But no one is allowed to profit.
I think this shows Torah’s sophisticated understanding of the problems inherent in ownership of land, and profit as a driver of societal formation. Torah sees that as soon as some people own land and others don’t, there are inequalities that compound over time. Profit compounds and so does poverty. The profit motive stimulates invention, but it can also cause harm to other humans and it can cause irreparable harm to the earth itself – a truth that in our day and age goes without saying.
So shmitah and yovel are the checks and balances in the system. A reset button so that too much capital doesn’t concentrate in too few people. And so that the desire to become one of the super-rich does not pave the way for harmful business decisions.
So in light of our modern understanding of the perils of profit – the preference for profitability over habitability – we can read the warnings of Leviticus as the natural consequences of losing the balance, of abandoning right action with respect to each other and the planet. Famine, drought, war, forced migration.
I confess, though, that there was one verse, one consequence, that stopped me in my tracks this week. Among the predictions in the portion was this: “you will devour the flesh of your children.” I sat with this verse for a long time, as I thought of the schoolchildren in Uvalde, TX. I thought about how we have come to devour our children’s safety, and their sense of a future.
We – and by we I mean our culture as a whole – have served them up to a gun industry that buys our politicians and tries to hoodwink us into believing that guns are not the cause of the problem but somehow in fact the medicine for it.
But the gun industry is right in one sense: the problem doesn’t begin with guns, although getting rid of guns would be a fine, fine, interim solution.
The problem begins here, with the message of Leviticus. That there is a delicate balance to be had. A balance between Earth and God and Human needs, that needs to be struck, reinvented, respected. We don’t have to do it the way Leviticus instructs – we couldn’t even if we wanted to, which we certainly don’t. But how do we recreate and renew a system in which the Earth’s vote is more important than industry’s, in which happiness is the only profit we need? What is the sweet spot in which we can feed ourselves, house ourselves, care for each other’s bodies and psyches? What is the sweet spot in which we feel enough desire to create, and enough trembling to be humble.
That’s all I got this week. Just the question. The invitation for a shared vision. The wondering how we say “enough” to a culture that wants us to say “more please.” What are the limits we can all agree to? What is the mutual care that we all deserve? How do we plant the seeds of a world in which no one is so despondent that instead of asking for help it seems easier to pick up a gun?
We must obviously do the work to heal the harms of our unbalanced world. And we must also look to see who is doing the great work of rebalancing, either in small scale or large, and how can we be part of that vision and that work too.
And so we complete the Book of Leviticus, which in Hebrew is called Vayikra, the Book of Calling, with the awareness that we are called, even if we don’t yet know the answers. And we say chazak chazak v’nitchazek, may we find the strength, each one of us, to respond.