Parashat Behar: Release [Me]

Plaut p. 850

Source Sheet by Yair Robinson

I read something powerful this week in the drash of my teacher R’ Tali Adler. In her commentary on Bechukotai, which we will hear various members of the Eng family chant tomorrow, she wrote that God has basically two imperatives for the Jewish people: One is to be as much like God as we can muster. But if we cannot, R’ Adler goes on, at least do not be like an Egyptian.

We see something of her idea in tonight’s reading from parashat behar. Just like we are to observe the Sabbath weekly, and count ‘a week of weeks’–49 days–in order to commemorate Shavuot, so too does the Land enjoy a sabbatical once every seven years, and a jubilee once every fifty years, where we are to sound the horn at Yom Kippur and ‘proclaim dror throughout the land’. Dror is translated as release in our text, or liberty by the fathers of the Revolution, as the Liberty Bell declares on its cracked visage.

What is dror? The text explains that it is more than just letting the land go fallow, though from an ecological perspective, freeing the land of our manipulation is no small thing! But more than that, debts are to be cancelled, slaves are to be free, and land that was sold off was to return to their original owners. To proclaim release is an act of restoration and of justice. Liberty, in the Torah, is not an abstract idea, and it certainly is not abstract to the Israelites, who themselves not so long before this mitzvah is given to them, were oppressed and in bondage themselves.

So the proclamation of dror is much like the act of redemption that God performed for Israel from Egypt: release and redeem all those who are oppressed and held back, lift them up. The medieval commentator Sforno goes even further: the Jubilee is when all will also be free of subservience to other nations. Think about that for a moment: no paying of tribute or bribes to avoid conflict, no warfare, no burning of crops and pillaging of land, no children stolen into servitude or fed into the war machine. Proclaim dror is freedom not only for those redeemed, but freedom for the entire people from having to engage in all those necessary evils we use to protect ourselves, all the different actions we do and justify in the name of our comfort or ideology. Egypt, that archetype of empire and rapacious growth for its own sake, justified injustices large and small in their oppression of Israel. With the Jubilee, it is as if God is warning us from following down the same path.

It seems as if we are a long way from sounding the horn and proclaiming dror throughout the land. Quite the contrary, we find ourselves increasingly in a society that values capriciousness over compassion, that declares liberty to mean a kind of totalitarianism, where any individual might impose his own will and desires on others, so long as he’s willing to bully them, and terror and oppression of the weak is an acceptable byproduct for cheap goods and services. Coach Popovich worried that we in America had become Rome some eight years ago; I worry that Michael Walzer’s poetic line has become reality: that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt.

While we cannot fulfill the literal text of these verses, we must use it as a source of inspiration for our actions. We must choose, wherever we can, to sound the shofar within ourselves and proclaim a release from poverty and dehumanization of the Other in any way we can, through actions large and small. And do not think for a moment that even a small action of kindness does not bring a kind of release. To feel helpless, voiceless, powerless in this moment only serves those who wish to be modern day pharaohs. We may not be able to fully emulate God, but at least we can work to keep ourselves from becoming Egypt.