Parshah Commentary

In this week’s parshah, Emor, the Torah interrupts its enumeration of the Jewish holidays with a strange interlude. Just before instructing the Israelites to observe Rosh HaShanah, God commands, “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field [pe’at sadcha] . . . you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.” The Rabbis, always sensitive to surprising textual juxtaposition, ask about the relationship between this agricultural law of pe’ah and the penitential holiday of Rosh HaShanah. In response, they cite a divine prophecy from the Book of Jeremiah: “I will make an end of all the nations among which I have dispersed you; but I will not make an end of you. [However] I will not leave you unpunished, but will chastise you in measure.” The Rabbis note that the phrases “you shall not reap all the way” (“lo tekhaleh”) and “make an end of” (“e’aseh khalah”) share the root “kh-l-h” (“destroy” or “finish”), and argue that this similarity indicates a causal relationship: It is because the other nations harvest the corners of their fields that God will destroy them, whereas the Israelites will be spared the full force of God’s punishment—determined on Rosh HaShanah—in recognition of their observance of pe’ah and other agricultural laws.

The logic of the midrash can be extended even further by considering another aspect of the holiday. Rosh HaShanah is not only a day of judgment; it is also the holiday on which we acknowledge God’s sovereignty over the whole world. It is by virtue of that sovereignty that God can command the observance of pe’ah, and harvesting the entirety of one’s field is accordingly an act of hubris: In doing so, the powerful nations among whom the Israelites are exiled suggest that they alone own the land on which they find themselves—a pretension that directly challenges God’s claim to “the earth and all that it holds.” By contrast, in refraining from a full harvest, the Israelites declare that they are mere stewards of the land. It is therefore no coincidence that pe’ah is to be left for the poor: To recognize God’s sovereignty and the limits of our territorial dominion is simultaneously to acknowledge others’ claims to that land—particularly the claims of those who need it most—and our attendant obligations to them as co-stewards.

Of course, the Israelites just as often evince a hubris and moral turpitude similar to that of the nations chastised by Jeremiah. In the Book of Isaiah, for example, God decries wealthy Israelites for driving their brethren off of the land so they can accumulate more and more territory, condemning those who “add house to house and join field to field, until you dwell alone in the land.” The 18th-century Jerusalemite Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai, known by the acronym Chida, offers an incisive psychological interpretation of God’s words. The verse, he argues, should be read backwards: In order to repress the knowledge that each of us will “dwell alone in the land” when we die—that we leave the world with nothing but the “four cubits of earth” in which we’re buried—we endlessly seek wealth, power, and property while we yet live. As the philosopher Judith Butler argues in their book Precarious Life, we try to deny the terrifying awareness of our own inescapable vulnerability through “a fantasy of mastery”—the belief that enough power and violence can conclusively ensure our safety. And yet, as the midrash implies, it is that very search for security—in metaphorical terms, reaping the edges of one’s field in order to have as much as possible—that often undoes us, our relentless pursuit of mastery setting in motion the very forces that undermine the safety we sought.

But, as Butler notes, this destructive fantasy of mastery over our physical environment is related to an even more deeply-rooted fantasy: the notion that we alone form and control our own selves. “The very ‘I’ is called into question by its relation to the Other,” they write. Each of us is, at least in part, created and constituted through the desires, impingements, demands, and vulnerabilities of the Other who is, in turn, partially determined through yet other Others, ourselves included. We can only imagine ourselves to be fully self-made and independent by turning away, psychologically or materially, from those Others who form us.

Butler thus provides a framework for radically reinterpreting the symbolic meaning of pe’ah: The Other whom we would seek to exclude in order to shore up our own safety and sense of self is already within our boundaries, whether we admit it or not. And it is our acknowledgement of their unsettling, strange, and terrifying presence among and within us that is also simultaneously our acknowledgement of God. Pe’ah, as the Mishnah teaches, is one of the mitzvot that has “no fixed measure.” Though the plain meaning of the passage is that there is no maximum amount of pe’ah that one can give, we might also read it in light of Butler’s words: There is no clear, precise way to determine just how intertwined we all are, and there is, accordingly, no obvious limit to our obligations to each other.

Aron Wander is a rabbinical student, organizer, and writer. More of his writing can be found here.