The reading בְּהַר Behar (“on mount” [Sinai], Leviticus 25:1-26:2) is the shortest parashah (portion) of the entire Torah cycle, but it gets to the heart of a recurring problem as God has been working to call back mankind from wandering away from the only Source of life. Just as land needs rest from cultivation to produce bounty, how much more do people need to be freed from the burdens weighing on their hearts and minds.
Here’s what true freedom looks like: Yeshua (Jesus) preached it, died in it, rose in it and intercedes for us to make us continue in mercy and grace.
“On this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his own property.” (Leviticus 25:13 NASB)
Does the Land of Israel take a nap? Does God take a nap?
What do you see in this passage so far? There’s a lot of talk about a Shabbat, not for man, but for the land. How does the land rest? How does it not do its ‘normal work”?
Why does an almighty powerful God need to rest from creating? Making the universe was as easy for him as building Legos is for us? He rested because He stopped making things.
I am not here to tell you when the Shmitah or the Yobel years are called. There are genuine Torah experts who can tell you that. I am just sharing what I have learned at this time from this Torah portion.
Most of the longer feast days include a Shabbat in them, including Pesach and Sukkot. What do we “rest” from during Pesach? We abstain from leavening, but is that rest?
The word they use for removing the חמץ chametz is תשבתו tashbitu. The root letters are ש Shin ב Bet ת Tav, which also spells שבת Shabbat. So we are taking a Shabbat from leavening but how do we do that?
He rested because He stopped making things.
Bread as a representation of the death-life cycle
How do we make bread? What you would do is grow wheat. So you’re making life and then you then what do you do after its after it’s ripe? You harvest it, in effect you’re killing it.
When you make bread the old fashioned way, you start by growing wheat. When it’s full grown, you harvest it and removed the seeds, which are supposed to make more life and then crush them and grind it into fine powder until they’re really dead. Then you add water to this ground up wheat seed powder, which we call flour. When you add water back to the flour, it brings it back to life, in a sense. When the wheat flour mixed with water sits out in the air, yeasts settle on the mixture of water and flour and begin to eat the natural sugars in the flour and such and they exhale carbon dioxide, which causes the dough to expand.
Once that fermentation is complete, the dough is formed into a loaf, and baked in a hot oven. Then the yeasts which are puffed up, explode and die as the dough rises up. Then we take it out of the oven and eat it. In the eating, we have joy and it extends our lives.
The entire cycle of making bread is a repeated cycle of life and death.
There are repeated cycles of life and death in the process of turning wheat into bread.
That’s almost in our hands. Not really because we know God is the master of all life and death. We’re, in a way, playing God every time we make bread, we get life, then we kill it, then we make life again then we kill it then we make life again to ultimately get life.
God does the same thing, He has made a repeated cycle of life and death. That’s the connection between God resting from making life or setting up a pattern of life and death. God makes things and then they die and decompose. And then something else pops up in its place and decomposes and died and something pops up again and again.
So God made all His creation. He did not say to Himself, “I’m so exhausted, I need to sleep.” He just enjoyed Himself. He sat back and enjoyed what He had made.
But during Pesach, we rest from this pattern from life and death. This cycle is seriously circumvented as we eat flour made with water that is baked very quickly before any yeasts can land on it and puff it up. The matzah doesn’t have the same joy and spark of life as leavened bread.
After all is said and done, when we rest from something, we are taking a break from creating things. When the land rests, we are taking a break from co-operating with God to create new life.
The signature of G-d
In this Torah portion, after God is done talking about not working on Shabbat or working during the Shemitah or Yobel, He give us what appears to be just a list of real-estate laws.
Every time we see a set of commandments, punctuated by phrases such as:
- “I am the Lord your God,”
- “I am the Lord your God, keep My commandments”
- “Keep My statutes”
- “Perform My statutes”
- “Keep my ordinances that you will live”
These are, in a sense, His signature. They are a way to emphasize the point. It’s like an exclamation mark, begging for our absolute attention.
When we keep God’s commandments, it is called קדוש השם Kiddush HaShem, meaning sanctifying God’s name. When we do these things, we sanctify His Name. When we ignore them, we are desecrating His name.
God says “the land is Mine.” If the world would recognize that, this whole thing makes sense. God allows us to use it. We can sell the things that come from it, to get other things that we need. And we can barter, sell, exchange these things, but land belongs to God. That’s like our whole world has forgotten that. And it’s the basis of an awful lot of our problems. The world ultimately belongs to God, not us. We don’t act like that though, and it’s gotten us into a lot of trouble. Mankind are stewards, not owners.
Charging interest is as poisonous as snake venom
The root of the Hebrew word for interest, nekesh, comes from the root word for “bite” like a snake bite. What does a snake bite do? Once the snake bites the prey or the enemy, it steps back and lets the venom do all the work. The venom builds up damages or even kills the prey. The snake itself is immune to the venom. This is what interest on money, particularly compound interest works. It is injected into the contract and then the lender steps back and let’s time do its work.
This is what happens when you charge interest to people. It just builds up, especially for people that are destitute, they need the money to survive. If you charge them interest, they’re never going to pay you back. It’s just going to build up and up higher and higher, until it kills them, figuratively or literally.
This is why God tells us not to charge our brothers interest. God tells us to loan money to people when they ask, when they pay it back, don’t charge interest. Just let them pay back the exact amount of what was borrowed.
This rule regarding the refrain from charging interest is one of those rules that God even signs by saying, “I’m the Lord your God who took you out the land of Egypt to be your God.”
This is a failsafe so that the children of Israel don’t fall to become slaves, again, through economic means, especially to other countries.
If you’re don’t charge interest, you don’t have a high concentration of money at the top of the social structure.
Give when people ask, and when they need it, if you can afford to do so. Don’t inject interest, like snake venom, into the transaction.
The Messiah warned us that the love of money is the root of all evil.
This Torah portion is proof that men did not invent the Torah. Humans, when living in the flesh, are willing to even charge their own parents interest. The Torah and all its wisdom really came from God Himself. Who could be so wise and intelligent as to present these things?
If we recognize that the Land belongs to God, then our presumptions regarding our “right” to use the land or our money in any way we see it fade away.
The economy God is teaching us in Parashat Behar is not communism, socialism, crony capitalism or laissez-faire capitalism. It’s something in between those extremes.
Even in exile, the children of Israel still ‘own’ the Land
In this Torah portion, God emphasizes the fact that the land is His, but it become even clearer in today’s Haftarah, which is found in Jeremiah 32:6-27.
The backstory is that Jeremiah is in jail at this time. The Babylonians and Chaldeans are literally at the door, ready to conquer and vanquish Jerusalem. The siege works are in place and the residents of Jerusalem are barricaded. The Babylonians will soon have full control over the land of Israel.
Yet, Jeremiah absolute faith in God’s words, because right now, looking at his predicament logically speaking, this purchase was the dumbest thing he could ever do.
Yet Jeremiah is buying a plot of land from his nephew during the bleakest of times, to show that although God is taking the children of Israel away from the land for a time, He will bring them back because the Land belongs to God, not to us. He decides who lives there.
Jeremiah wasn’t about being logical but about being obedient and faithful, which is very important.
“’You have said to me, O Lord GOD, “Buy for yourself the field with money and call in witnesses” — although the city is given into the hand of the Chaldeans.’ Then the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, saying, ‘Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh; is anything too difficult for Me?’” (Jeremiah 32:25–27 NASB)