Greetings from the Holy Land. My hiatus from this blog has seen me swept away with many demands on my time, many blessings. The broken keyboard was an invitation to step away from the weekly posts and give myself over to a few months of solid teaching.
And now here I sit, in Jerusalem. Got here Tuesday.
In honor of this place, I want to share with you a terrible secret.
Perhaps the most famous question in all of Torah commentary (posed a thousand years ago by Rashi, the most authoritative of all interpreters) is “ma inyan shemita etzel Har Sinai?” What’s the idea of the Sabbatical Year together with Mount Sinai?
This question has become embedded in Jewish consciousness. Years ago a rabbi friend of mine was visiting Israel, and happened to watch an old rerun of Kojak. When one of the characters said, “what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”, he laughed to see Rashi’s question, verbatim, flash across the bottom of the screen. Ma inyan shemita etzel Har Sinai? What’s one thing got to do with the other?
As is so often the case, everything. The answer given, in the case of the Sabbatical Year and Mount Sinai, is that the laws of the Sabbatical Year (together with the Jubilee), prove that the entire Torah was given directly by God to Moses on that famous hilltop. Oddly enough, especially for Torah where pretty much anything is open for debate, challenge, reevaluation and, especially, irresolution, this answer remains entirely uncontested.
What this means is, it’s a widely if not universally accepted premise within traditional Jewish circles that the laws of the Sabbatical and Jubilee Years prove the validity of the entire Torah. That is a serious load to carry. If you have a fraction of a sense of what the Torah means within the Jewish tradition, you will recognize that to prove the validity of the Torah is to prove the validity of Judaism itself, to prove even the reality of existence—to prove God.
Do I over-inflate? I’m ready to face any who contest this.
What’s interesting though is not this “fact” itself, but its implications. The centuries of commentators move on from this startling pronouncement without the slightest reservations regarding its the truth (which is based in very early sources), to question only how the Sabbatical Year proves the Torah’s validity. And here there is a rich discussion, layered and delicious.
And with this we arrive at our terrible secret, which is really only my version (I hesitate to say contribution) of an answer to this thousand year-old question. It has been growing within me for some time, years. But some of the pieces coalesced into more concise focus this evening as I was sitting beside David’s tower within the walls of the old city, watching what I fully expected to be an exceedingly dull, drawn out sound-and-light show, but which turned out to be not half bad and blessedly brief.
Sitting there, watching the play of colors on the ancient stone walls, I was thinking about arrogance, and the propensity of some to flaunt possession of this land, this place.
And here’s the secret: we were given this land as an inheritance, but to earn it we must let it go.
I do not say this in any exclusively narrow sense. This terrible truth has implications that reach far beyond the physical. It is terrible for many reasons, but the most important is in the best, Blakeian, sense of terrible.
There is much discussion in the commentaries about the Sabbatical Year’s role as condition for living in the land. We don’t need to look far to find convincing proof of this. Not only does the Torah itself make this connection abundantly clear (we’re told the earth will “vomit” us out for not keeping the Sabbatical Year), the third to last sentence of the entire Tanach, the full corpus of Jewish sacred texts, makes clear that the reason for our exile (then and, I would argue, and I think quite convincingly, now) is not keeping the Sabbatical Years.
The Sabbatical Year is all about letting go: We release debt; slaves go free; land, food, becomes ownerless.
No human can (would?) mandate this. Certainly not in the way the Torah does, which promises that if we do so, if we let go to that extent, all will be well. The Torah promises that the land, in its state of rest and replenishment (another aspect of the Sabbatical Year that is so desperately needed at this stage of our history), will provide enough for our needs. The Torah guarantees, like no human could, that if we stop, let go and relax our grip on the world, desist from our mad rush to earn and own, hoard and consume, we will find not scarcity, not desolation, but abundance.
The Torah can promise this because it is built, however perplexingly from where we stand, on God’s terrible justice. This promise proves that its wisdom, vision, guidance and madness are not human, but divine.
The deepest truth always rests on the impossibly thin, edgeless edge of paradox. To earn the Holy Land, to gain everything, we must let it all go. God works in mysterious ways, but this is perhaps one of the most mysterious. Most spiritual paths (that I have encountered), at their deepest depths have some version of this teaching. It is terrifying to follow, a death-defying leap; yet it represents our central hope as a species.
What is it, exactly, we need to let go of? Just as I said, everything. I cannot fully express to you what this means, but whatever comes into your consciousness, imagine letting it go, even your sense of who you are. This is the reason, or at least one reason for the connection between these years of letting go and Mount Sinai. Because letting go, fully, brings us to the summit—of possibility, of humanity, of life.
Again, I do not mean letting go only in a narrow sense. This does not mean we do not act, do not inhabit. The implications are far deeper. This is about grasping, about clenching and holding. The letting go I’m talking about involves letting go even of letting go.
I will pull back here, and avoid spiraling into koan-speak. The point is, through linking the laws of the Sabbatical and Jubilee Years so intimately with Sinai, the Torah is telling us something very significant about the nature of reality, of change, of peace, justice and freedom. Sinai is the paradigm of collective awakening. It is the moment of shift, when and how we come to God not only as individuals, but as humanity. To achieve this, we must let go. We must let go of our sense of how the world works, how it is; must relinquish our conception that how things are today—our governments, our economies, our societies and families—are how they must be because we are somehow fixed in how we are.
Nothing is given. Everything can change in an instant. The Torah is offering us a terrifying glimpse of how that happens. To change the world and find ourselves again standing before Sinai, we must let go.
The Jubilee takes this to the ultimate extreme. It is, as I’ve called it, God’s holy reset button, a new beginning. We have the capacity to do just this. But to move from where we are today to where we have the potential to be involves the terrible, divine process of letting go. We cannot enter the Promised Land with our old ways intact. We must, as Joseph, Abel, Eve, Adam and so many of our spiritual masters have done before us, sacrifice our very selves to the service of truth.
It isn’t easy, but no one said it would be. From where we stand, God’s justice seems a terrible price to pay. From the other side, from that world where unity and sharing have replaced enmity and hoarding, it appears the most wonderful gift imaginable.
Peaceful Sabbath,
Yonatan
