For All Its Inhabitants

The parsha this Shabbat is Behar-Bechukotai — a combined reading, two portions joined together when the calendar needs to compress. Behar opens on Mount Sinai, which is unusual; the rest of Vayikra is set in the desert or the Tabernacle. Rashi notices the same thing and asks: why does the Torah specify Sinai here, for these particular agricultural laws? What does the mountain have to do with shemitah?

The question stays open. The rabbis never fully resolve it, which is itself something to sit with.

Behar is largely an economic code: what to plant and when, what to harvest and what to leave, how debts work, how labor works. And in the middle of chapter 25, the jubilee:

וְקִדַּשְׁתֶּ֗ם אֵ֣ת שְׁנַ֤ת הַחֲמִשִּׁים֙ שָׁנָ֔ה וּקְרָאתֶ֥ם דְּר֛וֹר בָּאָ֖רֶץ לְכָל־יֹשְׁבֶ֑יהָ יוֹבֵ֥ל הִוא֙ תִּהְיֶ֣ה לָכֶ֔ם וְשַׁבְתֶּ֗ם אִ֚ישׁ אֶל־אֲחֻזָּת֔וֹ וְאִ֥ישׁ אֶל־מִשְׁפַּחְתּ֖וֹ תָּשֻֽׁבוּ׃

You shall sanctify the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.

— Vayikra 25:10

Most Americans have already read this verse without knowing where it comes from. It is inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.

The Liberty Bell's rim reads: "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof." That is a 17th-century English rendering — "liberty" for deror, which the modern JPS translates as "release." The Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly commissioned the bell in 1751 to mark the 50th anniversary of William Penn's Charter of Privileges. Fifty years. A jubilee.

The bell rang for 25 years and then cracked. They kept it, put it on display, and forty million people have lined up to see it. Most of them read the verse on the rim while thinking about American independence, about 1776, about freedom as an American founding idea. They are standing in front of Vayikra without knowing it [a common enough thing in the West].

The jubilee mechanism is specific. Every fiftieth year — after seven cycles of seven — the following happens: land that was sold reverts to its original family. Debts cancel. People who sold their labor to service those debts go free. They return to their clans, their holdings, their families.

The Torah does not frame this in terms of fairness or justice for the poor. At least not directly. There is no verse in Behar that says "because concentrated wealth corrupts" or "because the gap between rich and poor is dangerous." What the Torah says instead is: the land is Mine. You are on it as strangers and residents. And every fiftieth year — you return.

The deror is not mercy extended to the unfortunate. It is structure built into the covenant. The permanent is not available for purchase. You can accumulate, you can hold, you can build — but the system was designed so that no situation could harden into forever. The reset is architectural.

Bechukotai, the second half of this week's combined reading, runs the conditional out in both directions. If you walk in the statutes, the land yields, the rains come, peace holds. If you abandon them — the tochecha, the passage of rebuke, is long and difficult, and synagogues traditionally read it quickly, in a low voice. The curses are detailed. But the tochecha does not end with the curses. It ends with this: even in the land of your enemies, I will not reject you or spurn you so as to destroy you. The covenant survives the breaking. The reset outlasts even the failure to observe it.

Yovel hi tihyeh lachem — it shall be a jubilee for you.

The word yovel appears in a few places in the Torah. Its root suggests a ram's horn, a shofar blast. The jubilee year begins on Yom Kippur with the blast of a shofar throughout the land. You hear it and you know: debts are released, slaves are freed, the land returns. The sound carries the announcement before any legal mechanism takes hold.

I've been thinking about what it means that someone in 1751 chose this verse. They had access to all of Scripture. They chose the one that said: no situation is permanent; every fifty years, everyone goes home.

The bell cracked. They kept it anyway — now in a glass pavilion off Market Street, where it hasn't rung since the 19th century. You can stand in front of it on basically any afternoon and read the verse on the rim. Most people who do are thinking about 1776.

That's still Vayikra.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham