Behar-Bechukkotai

1. Behar - Bechukkotai
I. A. Read 25:1-7.What’s the meaning and purpose of the sabbatical year? And,
given the fact that it appears to have been only fairly fully implemented in the
land for a relatively short period of time, how seriously can we take this text as
important for either those in Biblical or later times, including us?
1. We talked in Kedoshim about a sort of limiting of self as an element of
holiness, the aim of living in covenant with God and our fellows. We walked
through several mitzvoth before and after our encounter of the Golden Rule
where we learned the importance of boundaries, hedges, avoiding “expropriating
ground” that is not ours. This denial of the bloated self is not a vow of poverty nor
a disavowal of God’s rich blessings. Rather it’s an awareness of, and living true
to, a respect for what’s God’s, what’s our neighbor’s, and what’s ours, as well as
a commitment to care for the needs of our fellows that comes from a love of
them.
We learned we must fight the illusions of the world that lead us to venerate, even
worship, those material things or selfish interests that go far beyond our earning
the rightful benefits of our work. This excess can be due to a sort of obsession
with our acquisitions and dominions and accretions, with our acting as if we’re

2. lords of the earth, forgetting our covenant with, and allegiance to, the Provider
whose land and property it is and whose blessing of it is its true source.
2. Finding ways to “keep” the sabbatical year in some fashion manifests these
values. More specifically, it reflects an understanding that we are mere stewards
of the land, not ultimate owners, and an acknowledgment that our God is truly the
owner. This creates an altogether different sense of how we live life. We serve
God. It’s not all about us or for us. Further, we tend to treat others more lovingly,
more fairly, more justly, more mercifully when we see ourselves as servants of
God rather than master unto ourselves. As evidence of this, all of us, including
the poor, are entitled to sustenance out of the surplus in the seventh year.
3. We remember also that it was God Who created the earth. We celebrate a
sabbath of years, as well as days within the week. By separating this time, we
cherish the same principles of the weekly sabbath - respect for and honor of
God, rest for ourselves and the animals and the land in the seventh unit of time,
dedication of time for sacred purpose, setting aside moments given over to
holiness, and an honoring of God’s hope for us to emulate the Divine attributes,
especially in holiness (You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.)
4. We show faith in God that we will be provided for through the extra growth in
the fifth year, the availability of resources for all in the seventh year, and the
restoration in the eighth year. This is not a mindless or careless abandonment of

3. our duty to work and to create and to be productive, all of which God expects, but
rather a faith in God’s loving kindness and care for our well-being.
5. We show a respect to the land, to avoid exploiting it and overworking it. While
people in the time of the Bible didn’t follow these rules precisely, and nor would
we, there are basic principles in them that should draw our support and a
response.
6. Fundamentally, these values lift us out of an over-reliance on materialism and
elevate our commitment to spiritual matters, deepening our living out God’s
values and spreading them. As with all other notions of sacred time in the Bible,
God expects us to spread patterns of living in sacred time more and more out to
secular time and make all time more sacred over time.
There seems to be a Divine interest in our paying greater heed to loving
kindness, compassion, modesty, truth as against the instinct to domination,
greed, over-interest in, and undue pressure for, material gain. One approach
brings on Divine light; the other diminishes it. There is a sense that sanctity and
holiness are not compatible with, or possible, in the midst of constant and ever-
present devotion to private acquisitiveness and/or covetousness. Rather, again,
while God blesses us richly, there seems to be a Divine preference for
equilibrium with balance and limits.

4. B. Could we live out these ideas today? How?
1. While it’s unlikely that many of us could or would literally take a sabbatical year
of the sort described in the Bible, we could create a sabbatical period each seven
years. While it might not be the length and exact nature suggested in the
agricultural context of the Biblical words, we could slow down our commercial or
other acquisitive activity, rest ourselves and “the land,” and puncture any budding
mania we may feel to overdo our commitment to growing material assets.
In its place, we could devote time to study, service, spiritual orientation, teaching
and learning, re-acclimating ourselves to the values we hold dearest, the truths
and virtues God has taught and expects of us. Perhaps refreshed and re-
dedicated to service of God and our fellows, we would come back to more
normal time out of these weeks or months ready to live more fully in the Way
God has given us.

5. 2. Or, even if we can’t take an extended time off every seventh year, we could
take time off or use vacations or other shorter and regularly dedicated periods of
time to turn off the relentless machine, to slow it down, to cease constant
production in order to replace that way of living, even if for awhile, as well as the
ethic associated with it, with rest, and a return to Godly ways, and a certain
restoration of the use of time more in sync with what we know God expects of us.
II. Read 26:3-17. Blessings and Curses. If we follow God’s prescriptions and
keep God’s ways, we get rains in their season, so that earth yields produce and
fruit; threshing overtakes vintage (so plentiful that reaping exceeds sowing); we
eat our fill; and dwell securely in land; we live in peace, untroubled. But if we do
not and break the covenant; God wreaks misery, consumption and fever, pain
and pining, and we sow seed to no purpose, for enemies will eat it. God will set
the Divine Face against us, and we are routed by enemies, etc., etc.
A. This text falls hard on the modern eye and ear. Indeed for many of us who
pick up the Bible looking for inspiration and help from a first read (which many
parts of the Bible do beautifully provide), this language often provokes
consternation and upset. After all, don’t bad things happen to good people, and
good things often happen to bad people? Plus can our God apparently be this
cruel or vengeful?

6. OR is there an underlying message that God delivers a bit below the surface
here? Can we look beneath the ancient “clothes and bodies” of these words to
find their deeper soul that speaks to, and is extremely valuable to, people
throughout time, including us?
1. First, let’s recognize that the original intent here was likely oriented to a
community that broadly and generally rejects the way of life that God expects of
us. In other words, this is about a society that rather pervasively makes decisions
to ignore and disavow God’s expectations. So, the society is fundamentally out of
sync with God and off the Divine path, having walked away. Surely, too, for the
ancients of this and most cultures, it would have been natural for there to be
consequences in a covenant, for following or rejecting its terms.
2. Second, let’s acknowledge that blessings, for example as taught in Proverbs,
are thought by some in the tradition to come from living in, and being obedient to,
God’s ways. Further, we do have a sense that a community that truly follows in
God’s ways will be healthier, more peaceful, more secure, more blessed. Yet, the
text of Job certainly shows us not to be too cocky or confident that we know and
can be assured of fully understanding the mysteries of God’s ways. Our
experience of the horrors of, say, the Holocaust or, in our own lives, of death and
downturns that seem unrelated to living true or untrue to God’s ways certainly,
also, makes us modest in all this.

7. Perhaps we come to a place where we understand that God’s blessings do not
mean an easy life or one without pain or hurt or war or death. Nor does it mean
necessarily, I think, a life of an extremely high level of material abundance.
3. But is it possible that those who cleave to God and live with a heart and hand
dedicated to pleasing God are blessed in very real and actually the most
important, deepest ways? Spiritual strength, spiritual abundance. Peace.
Confidence. A sense of being blessed with and grateful for whatever physical
resources we have. A strong sense of contentment, even in difficult times. In fact,
isn’t it this confidence in God and God’s nearness, maybe especially when we’re
in pain or in trouble, contentment and gratitude, that the text is really describing,
though in words that were on the surface geared to success in agricultural times
and on its terms? (We see this sort of remarkable and wonderful Divine support
so beautifully explored and described in the Psalms.)
4. Essentially, this path of living and being blessed is our roadmap whatever
befalls us in life. Our faith has it that we hold the course with God and that
through God’s nearness and our holding to our duties to God we are blessed in
certain ways that are very rich and sustaining, even in some ways that we don’t
entirely understand, at least in this world. We may have doubts, questions,
uncertainty; we might be weak; but God knows, remembers, and honors the
covenant, if not always in ways we can understand and at all times, certainly in
eternal ways.

8. B. Curses. We have not read all the verses in the text today, but we should know
that what’s described is an ever-worsening condition, from which return is
possible but becomes ever-more difficult the worse we stray, and the more
horrible the consequences.
1. There may be a material or physical consequences to straying away from God.
Proverbs foresees it. We certainly have seen the downfall - ultimately - of evil in
so many instances. But, again, Job and other texts and experience teach us that
we probably should be modest about “putting God in a box” in our thinking we
can be assured that we know exactly how all this will work out in the specifics of
our material lives.
2. The place where it appears we are on firmer ground is the certain knowledge
we get from faith and experience that when we abandon God we are alone. If we
put God out of our lives and reject God, we face circumstances without the
Divine support and the promise of instruction and nearness that God gives us.
For people of faith, the rejection of God leaves us vulnerable to the exact sort of
pain described, perhaps poetically, in these curses. We are visited a sort of
spiritual descent, a quite painful one, if we act out of the arrogance that pushes
God out.

9. 3. We are as a driven leaf when we leave God - unanchored, blown around
without regard to destination. We have the choice to follow and be near God. The
choice is ours, but the choice matters, to us and to God.
4. God calls us; God seeks our nearness; God has shown us how to be near and
how to return when we err. God always seeks our return. But we pay a price for
leaving and staying away and rejecting God. The text teaches this truth
powerfully.
III. Read 27:30. The tithe. Why does this portion and indeed the book of Vayikra
close with a discussion of the tithe?
This book is fundamentally about God’s call to us to draw near. We have studied
why that is important, how that happens, the consequences when we pull away
and go off on our own and against God’s hopes and expectations of us. We’ve
learned that God always wants our return and both shows us the path back and
constantly gives us the means to return.

10. Yet, in the end, we must find our way to having a heart that is inclined Godward
and acknowledges God’s sovereignty. There perhaps is no better single sign of
that quality of heart than to believe and act on the principle that we’re stewards of
our possessions, which are ultimately God’s. Indeed, at its most basic level, what
we have is a gift from God, and that a portion of it - whether our income or our
time or the spirit and effort we bring to our endeavors - ought to be dedicated
back to serving God as well as those who serve God in sacred space.
This is the giving spirit of the heart that enables us to respond to the Divine call
and draw close to our fellows and to God.