Parshah Commentary

Parshat Behar

Parshat Behar begins at Mount Sinai, with God sharing a series of instructions about core agricultural practices: Shmita, the sabbatical year, observed every seven years, in which loans are canceled and all land must lie fallow, and Yovel, the jubilee year, observed every 50 years, in which all indentured servants are set free and land is redistributed. The parshah also offers a series of directives pertaining to just practices in labor and business, which has led many commentators to argue that these legal spheres are related. All of them, according to this line of interpretation, are meant to make us vulnerable; rather than relying on our own production or acquisition, these laws require us to deepen our trust in God.

The Kli Yakar, a 16th-century commentator, offers one articulation of this line of thought, writing that when the Israelites entered the Land of Israel, God worried that they would be so successful agriculturally that they would forget about God’s power: “They would think that ‘their might and the power of their hand have made them this wealth’ [Devarim 8:17] . . . The people would think that the land is theirs, and that they are its masters and no one else.” According to the Kli Yakar, God therefore required them to let their land lie fallow during the Shmita year, as a reminder that the earth ultimately belongs to God. Reading the text through this lens might lead us to believe that these mitzvot are directed only toward land-owning people who benefit from the labor of others. In this understanding, Shmita and Yovel correct a human impulse to dominate, to seek mastery and ownership of the world around us.

But the Torah’s language troubles the idea that these mitzvot are merely about humans abstaining from domination. Even before elaborating on the human role in Shmita, God tells the Israelites: “When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a sabbath of the Lord.” According to the verse, the land itself observes Shabbat. It is a full subject and actor, an equal participant in Shmita. Only then does the Torah elaborate on the human role in the land’s rest. The laws of Shmita are thus not a set of commandments to humanity alone; rather, they dictate a mutual rest undertaken by people and the land together. As Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandate Palestine, wrote in his 1909 work Shabbat Ha’aretz, “the people and the land both need a year of Sabbath!”

When we understand Shmita exclusively as a tool for cultivating our own humility, moral consciousness, and trust in God, we paradoxically perpetuate the very instrumentalization of land that this mitzvah subverts. While embodying a way of being that eschews mastery is an essential element of Shmita and Yovel, to truly counter impulses of domination and commodification, these practices must be accompanied by an earnest, authentic commitment to understanding the land’s need for rest on its own terms.

With this shift away from an anthropocentric perspective, Parshat Behar invites us to consider what other hidden subjects in the more-than-human world might require our attention, and to ask: What good are mitzvot to burning forests, acidifying oceans, or land ravaged by genocidal war? What would it take to extend our sphere of obligation to a world beyond us for its own sake?

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.