בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה' אֱלהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעולָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְותָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסוק בְּדִבְרֵי תורָה:
Blessing for Torah Study
Barukh Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh Ha'Olam Asher Kideshanu Bemitzvotav Vetzivanu La'asok Bedivrei Torah
Blessed are you Adonai, our God, Sovereign of Eternity, who has made us holy through Your mitzvot (sacred calls) and called upon us to immerse ourselves in the words of Torah.
(35) If your kin, being in straits (or "are reduced"), come under your authority (or "and lost their means in dealing with you"), and are held by you as though resident aliens, let them live by your side: (36) do not exact advance or accrued interest, but fear your God. Let your kin live by your side as such. (37) Do not lend your money at advance interest, nor give your food at accrued interest. (38) I יהוה am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, to be your God.
- What are the aspirations for a society subject to these laws?
- What are the implications of carrying this out in practice?
- What are the religious ideals behind these laws? What work is the reference to God doing here?
- What is being asked of the lender under these laws? Of the borrower?
At the heart of this parashah is the visionary concept of returning land to its original owner at the end of a 50-year cycle. This prevents the polarization of society into two classes: wealthy, powerful landowners on the one hand and permanently impoverished people on the other. In an agrarian society, a farmer who sold all the land to pay debts had no prospect of ever being anything other than a servant. Nor would a servant’s son ever rise above that level. Anticipating the human misery and social instability this would lead to, the Torah provides a plan. In the 50th year, families would reclaim the land they had held originally and later sold. Behind this plan are two religious assumptions. Because all the earth and all of its inhabitants belong to God, human beings cannot posses either the land or the people in perpetuity. And no human being should be condemned to permanent servitude. Some critics have seen this as a utopian plan that ever was put into practice, but archaeologists have found records of deeds from the late biblical period containing references to the number of years remaining till the jubilee year.
Rav Kook taught that the purpose of the jubilee was primarily spiritual, not economic. It came to restore the sense of unity that once prevailed in Israel and to restore self-respect to the person who had sunk into poverty and a sense of failure. Even as the weekly Shabbat enables people to define themselves in noneconomic terms, the sabbatical year and the jubilee enable an entire society to put aside economic competition and the practice of defining a person’s value in economic terms alone.