Signs of Recovery

Yesterday I was in the market, choosing vegetables. This particular store offered two type of tomatoes - Heter Mechira and Hothouse. I suddenly was reminded of all the various possibilities and nuances, stringencies and leniencies of Shemitta observance, and I was at once elated and exasperated. Why, I wondered? Once every seven years, we come to Parashat Behar thoroughly immersed in its headline provision - Shemittah. Here in the Land of Israel, the Shemitta is not just a theoretical construct, as it had been for most of our people for almost two thousand years. Rather, it's a complex of mitzvot that impact many aspects of life on a daily basis - especially for those of us blessed to live outside the cities, with a dunam or two of holy land to try and wrest from the thorns and thistles that are happy to take over at the drop of a seed. But even here in Israel, the Shemitta as we presently observe it is but a shadow of the full-blown social/agricultural/spiritual structure presented to us in Parashat Behar. Most authorities hold that, as long as the majority of the Jewish people does not reside in the land, Shemitta is obligatory only on a derabbanan (rabbinic) level, and some even hold that it is to be observed as a pious custom. This fact has generated some of the intense disagreements between various sectors of the religious population as to what limitations are to be imposed on agricultural activity. But even the most stringent agree that Yovel, the Jubilee year, during which the land reverts to its (ab)original owners, has not been practiced since even before the destruction of the First Temple. This is because once the first of the tribes of the northern Kingdom of Israel, Gad and Reuven, were exiled by the Assyrian, the land was no longer intact, and the mitzvah didn't apply on a deoraita (Torah) level. The absence of Yovel has repercussions regarding the applicability of the rest of the provisions of the parashah. Nowadays, land IS in effect sold in perpetuity, as opposed to being leased for the remainder of the period of fifty years until the next Yovel. Land sold may NOT be redeemed by the seller for the value of the remaining crop years, even against the will of the purchaser. Houses in cities are NOT redeemable during he first year of there sale, which becomes a permanent sale subsequently. Free loans are NOT made in order to help one's brother right himself and regain his ancestral patrimony. The institution of Eved Ivri, effectively bonded servitude intended as a last resort for the desperately poor, is NOT available, or even allowed (the one who sells himself into such servitude would be released from his status and returned to his land as a free man by the Yovel). And finally, should a stranger in our midst become successful enough to buy one of our brethren as a servant, we are NOT compelled to purchase his freedom however we do so. In other world, an entire social/economic/spiritual structure - one which sees all members of the Jewish people as fundamentally equal and existentially free, as servants of Hashem, to devote those energies to bringing His Presence into this realm - has been put into mothballs by our exilic history. But WHY did it happen that we have spent the significant majority of our history as a people in exile? This we are told explicitly in NEXT week's parashah - it's because we did not observe the Sabbaths of the land. Indeed, the Shemitta year is called Shabbat L'Hashem - A Shabbat to/for/on behalf of the Eternal. What the Shabbat on the seventh day is to the individual Jew, the Shabbat of the seventh year is to the entire people. If you do not observe the Shabbat, the punishment is that you WILL not observe the Shabbat. If Shabbat for an individual is experienced as something which detaches one unbearably from the habits of his life which define him, then the punishment is that those routine habits will indeed define and delimit him, and he will never be able to find the deep, regenerative connection to the very sources of his being which is Shabbat in the deepest sense. What goes around, comes around... The same is true on the national level, for we are all - absolutely, indubitably - cells in the that Living Creature the Talmud calls Yisrael. If the people as a whole does not appreciate what it means to deeply reconnect to the meaning of land, life and liberated spirit, tp what a social organism can be when it goes beyond maximizing consumption, production, and competition, and invests in contemplation, speculation and celebration - then that people will condemn itself to breathlessly exerting itself merely to maintain a fragmented existence where dreams and their fulfillment remain beyond the horizon of the imaginable. The Shem MiShmuel compares the signs which mark the individual Jew - Brit Milah, Tefillin and Shabbat - with the signs which mark the people as a whole - Yovel and Shemitta. He teaches that we humans are like avedot, lost objects, precious lost objects, retrievable by their Master, Hashem, upon presentation of identifiable marks and signs. Without an identifiable mark, the owner of a lost object would despair of ever retrieving his property. Now, the parable goes only so far, since Hashem certainly doesn't despair of retrieving a single particle of His creation, but, as the halachah stipulates, a finder has a duty to guard an object and return it only to its true owner. Without presentation of signs, the finder may not rightfully relinquish an object to a claimant. Am Yisrael has strayed, in a profound way, for well over two thousand years. We remember our home in some embedded, preconscious way, but we've wandered through time and civilization, through land and language, never finding rest. As a people, we've clung fast to the signs which identify us as Jewish individuals - we've given our lives for Brit Milah, for Tefillin and for Shabbat. But, we failed to do the same, as already stated in the Talmud, for Yovel and Shemitta. Those individuals who do give their all to observe these demanding mitzvot are called "Giborei Koach Osei Devaro" - The mighty of strength, who do His bidding". It's hard to act in one's one individual life on the level and on the behalf of an entire organism, a people, whose composite conscious one might only have the faintest fleeting notion. And yet somehow, inexplicably, undeservedly, we have been given another chance, we have been challenged to come together, to understand that just as the pintele yid inside of every Jew is as indestructible as its Sinaitic origins, so is the pintenle am, that essential people-point that can take us beyond ourselves and launch us on a trajectory toward the Infinite. Our parashah begins with the words, "Hashem spoke Moshe at Mt. Sinai, saying: This is the matter of the Shemitta". The famous question is: What does Sinai have to do with Shemitta? The answer given by the Midrash, and brought by Rashi: Just as Shemitta was given as a mitzvah at Sinai, both in its general formulation and in its specifics, likewise all the mitzvot were given at Sinai, both in their general formulation and in their specifics. The consciousness of oneness of the particular and the general, the individual and the people, that Oneness-but-not-Sameness that prevailed at Sinai, that enabled Torah to come into this world, is very close to us, inside of us, available to us if we would only want it and act on it. Come together - physically and spiritually - and the various sorts of tomatoes on sale will all coalesce into one shining globe, plumped juicy by each little seed, and retrieved by presentations of indisputable signs by the Gentleman Farmer on high: "This one is Mine, for you can tell by looking at it: Like Me, they rested on the Seventh".