This week marks my mother Roslyn H. Benamy’s 21st yahrtzeit so my thoughts are very much around how she might have reacted to current events, as well as the weekly Torah portion. We are still at Sinai, as the first words of this last portion of Leviticus reminds us: “God spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai saying:” (Lev. 1:1) and we are being told (again) to keep the Sabbath. Here, in chapters 25 and 26 at the end of the third book of our five book series, we have the addition of giving the land itself a rest every seven years [shmitta], and of forgiving debts, returning ancestral lands and freeing slaves in the fiftieth year [yoveil[. Very uplifting ideas, but were they ever implemented? My mother was an optimistic person, but the cynicism I inherited from my father creeps into my answer. Two thousand years ago most people didn’t live until the age of fifty, and the idea of losing one’s tribal inherited land was a truly terrible circumstance, as without land one would starve. The redistribution of wealth looks good on paper, but the implementation seems near-impossible.
The value they all have in common is the cementing of the covenantal relationship between Israel and God. If we observe God’s commandments our lands will receive rain and we will prosper. If not, not. Thus Orthodox Jews faced the dilemma of how to survive in the State of Israel during the shmitta year when no agriculture is allowed and the land must lie fallow. There are less than a dozen Orthodox kibbutzim in Israel, all of which were founded as agricultural settlements. One of them, K’vutzat Yavneh (a kibbutz despite the name), has a large pickling factory that shuts down for the shmitta year and production shifts to their secondary business: watches. If you have a wristwatch with Hebrew letters that wasn’t made in China, it may have been made at that watch factory.
Most Orthodox Jews in Israel are more concerned about where their vegetables will come from in the shmitta year, as importing them is extremely costly, involving air freight, rather than ground transport, and Israelis have high standards for their fruit and veg! Enter the halachic work-around for the shmitta year: Heter m’chirah. This works just like chametz at Pesach: the Chief Rabbinate sells all the agricultural land to a non-Jew who is allowed to work it and make profit. Thus we have more expensive salads in Israel, rather than a heightened environmental and agricultural awareness during the shmitta year, which seems to have been one of the original intentions of it. We in the US don’t have the dilemma, I’m not sure that that is necessarily a good thing.
All of this brings me back to my mother, may she rest in peace, who was raised in a poor Orthodox home in the Bronx, raised her own family in a middle-class Reform home in New Jersey and scoffed at legal fictions and paying lip service. I’d like to think she would have pointed out that she doesn’t have the problems I do as an Israeli while perhaps wistfully wondering if she wouldn’t have liked to take on that challenge too. Her insight and humor continue to sustain me even after her death. When I visit her grave this Mother’s Day I will have to think of a witty joke so I can smile through my tears.
Shabbat Shalom Rabbi Leah Benamy
