A colleague of mine recently posed a question on our rabbis' listserv. He shared with us a conversation he had with a B'nai Mitzvah student, where the child was trying to understand a major concept in this week's Torah portion. The student was upset about a certain verse, and my colleague was curious to hear how we might respond to him. Our parasha is called Behar, and among other things, the reading contains the famous verse, "You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants" (Lev. 25:10), which is inscribed on the Liberty Bell. But that is not the passage that was causing the Bar Mitzvah boy great consternation.
Instead, the student was troubled by the requirement to return land to original owners every 50 years. According to the Bible, land was assigned to certain individuals, in certain tribes, and even if a person was forced to sell his/her land (because of poverty, natural disaster, death), it should always be returned back to the original owner during the Jubilee Year, which occurred every 50 years. Land is an eternal
possession. The child was upset, however, because it seemed that a comparable situation in his world would be buying a toy, and being forced to give it back after a certain period of time. How is this a fair system?? And indeed, I can see his point. The purchase was completed, fair and square, and now the new owner is being "punished" for something entirely out of his/her control. What I would say to this child, however, is that we are coming at this issue from the wrong angle. Ownership is honestly a figment of our imagination.
Judaism teaches us that God is truly the owner of everything. We are stewards of this earth, charged with the task of caring for the planet, managing all aspects of life and logistics, and ensuring that it's still here for the next generation to take over. In a sense, we are renting land, just as we are actually renting our clothing, our homes... and even our family members. None of these things are ours for eternity. When we are done with clothing, we have the obligation to clean it, fold it, and pass it along for someone else to use. Eventually we all move out of our homes, and pass them along to new owners. And someday our loved ones will die. We shake our fists at the sky and cry out loud that this is unfair and unacceptable, yet it is ultimately out of our hands.
There are no certainties in life. We spend our lives working hard, raising children, buying property, and then a natural disaster hits - like the flooding that has decimated the lives of our neighbors in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee - and all our hard work is lost. That too is horribly unfair,
and we are left feeling utterly powerless. All we can do is make the most of life while we can; enjoy the possessions we own, the people who brighten our lives, and the land we spend our days cultivating. One day it will be gone. We cannot eliminate the ending, and we cannot change the fact that we are all renters, not owners. But so what? There is so much that we CAN change every, single day of our lives. Don't worry about what will happen in the 50th year; delight in being a renter right now, and enjoy all of the wonderful blessings that enrich your life today.
Photos in this blog post:
2. CC image courtesy of loveloveshine on Flickr
4. CC image courtesy of au_tiger01 on Flickr
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