Imu Shalev: Hi, I'm Imu Shalev and this is A Book Like No Other.

A Book Like No Other is a product of Aleph Beta and made possible through the very generous support of Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum.

We ended last episode at an impasse. Our findings had opened up all these new depths to the story of the Mekallel and the moral we were meant to learn from it, but at the end of the day, what we'd seen was just a really dark downward spiral. Moshe doesn't offer the Mekallel a place, which leads to the Mekallel's blasphemy, which leads to the Mekallel's stoning. And down the line, all this leads to Moshe's legacy being polluted by the practice of idolatry. Yes, we could see reasons, even justice, in all of it, but is that really all we were meant to learn? Just this chain of sin and retribution? God has this heavy hand of Divine justice, and when you make a mistake it will come and get you in the end? It felt like, there’s got to be more to the story than that, and it was a really dark ending.

So, we felt we might be missing something. And so, between sessions, Rabbi Fohrman and I, and even our producer Tikva, we all turned back to Leviticus to take a second look and grabbed our phones to share with each other what we found.

Rabbi David Fohrman: Between these two sessions, Imu, you messaged me with a fascinating insight, and our producer Tikva independently messaged me with a different fascinating insight. And I'd like to try to put those two insights together, because when you put them together, I think they make something uber fascinating.

Imu: That’s good, because Tikva and I are in a fight. We won't message each other. We're just talking through you. It's up to you to synthesize.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. I'm going to try to make peace between you guys, or synthesize your ideas.

Imu: So Idea One, my message. I was interested in the context of the Mekallel. You know, the texts that Rabbi Fohrman had showed us in Exodus and Judges, they’d helped us to see the Mekallel in its larger historical context. But what about the story’s larger textual context? Remember one of the first questions we asked about the Mekallel story, right? It seems so out of place in Leviticus, surrounded by seemingly unrelated laws.

The question is even stronger when you think about the ending. The Mekallel is stoned and then Torah just seems to move on. But what if that’s not quite true? What if the Torah hasn’t moved on? What if the laws that directly follow the Mekallel story are the Torah’s way of responding to the Mekallel? After all, and here’s what I noticed, these laws aren’t really so unrelated.

Rabbi Fohrman: She said like, look, if you just turn the page, the next page is Leviticus 25, Parshat Behar. What is Parshat Behar all about? 

So, Parshat Behar is the story of Shemitta into Yovel. There are these laws that say that every 7 years there is going to be this year where nobody can work their land and where the fruits of the land are available for everyone to take.

And then there's this Jubilee year at the end of 7-times-7 of these years. And in this Jubilee year, this year of Yovel, not only is it a time when anybody can come and take the fruits of the land, a time essentially when all the fences are taken down, but there's something paradoxical about that Jubilee year, too; which is, it's a time when ancestral land comes back to its original owner.

So you can sell your ancestral land and that works for a while, but in the Jubilee year, there's a reset. Almost as if it's the very year that Joshua took us into the land of Israel, and the land is apportioned once again and everybody gets their ancestral land.

Imu: So, you see how there's, like, this inherent tension in Yovel, the Jubilee year? On the one hand, Yovel, along with Shemitta, radically undermines private property. It's a time when land owners don't have exclusive rights to their own produce. But on the other hand, Yovel seems to radically reaffirm private property, too. Because of Yovel, your family land is yours forever. So is Yovel really about taking down fences, or is it about putting them back up? 

And you can probably also see now why the laws of Yovel following the Mekallel caught my attention. We have a story about a man who, at least according to the midrash, doesn't have a place because he lacks tribal affiliation; and the people who do have a place won't take him in. It's all about the tension between inclusion and exclusion; who gets access to a certain place and who does not.

And now along comes Yovel, a system of laws that seems to institutionalize this tension so that every 50 years, we experience both sharing the land, the Mekallel's dream, and dividing the land, the conditions of possibility for the Mekallel's suffering. That can't be a coincidence, right? But what's the Torah trying to tell us?

To answer this question, Rabbi Fohrman began by diving a little deeper into the meaning of Yovel just on its own. It happens, the Torah actually gives an explanation for these laws, and specifically for why ancestral land cannot be sold permanently. Ironically, it's not because family ownership of the land runs so deep. Actually, it's kind of the opposite.

This is Leviticus, chapter 25, verse 23: וְהָאָרֶץ לֹא תִמָּכֵר לִצְמִתֻת — The land must not be sold beyond reclaim, כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ — For the land is Mine. כִּי־גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי — You are but foreigners and settlers with respect to Me, God.

Rabbi Fohrman: כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ — All the world is mine. God says, “I am the ultimate Owner of private property. I will take the land and I will do with it as I please. You think you're a private property owner? You think you have rights for landed property? You don't.”

It appears in the world of men that you do, right? But once you take God into the equation, God is the ultimate property Owner and you're just a renter. You're a ger, you're a sojourner.

Imu: It's not a metaphor. Like that's the crazy thing. Like, if we think about it like, oh, do I own the land? Like, no, really, God owns the entire land. And then, like, Jewish property law, right, actually…

Rabbi Fohrman: …Expresses that! It's almost as if you can live in your little illusion that, in this finite world, all there is is people. And in a world of people, where people are the highest power, then the owner of the land is the owner of the land. But every once in 50 years, you pull back the curtain and you see that existence includes something more than people. Existence includes the Creator Himself. He's a real Being in the world, and once the existence of the Creator is revealed, everyone can see that, you know, God is the ultimate Owner of land, and everybody else's rights are laughable.

So God says, “Okay, I'm taking the land this year. But at the end of the year, what I'm doing, in essence, is, I am renewing the idea of private property. And the way I'm renewing it is, I'm reapportioning the land and everyone's getting their ancestral inheritance once again.” 

Imu: So even the part of Yovel that seems to be reaffirming private property is really based on this fundamental premise that God owns the land, and He wants us to know that. But He also seems to want to share the land with us. And Rabbi Fohrman thought this wasn't the first time we'd seen God act this way.

Rabbi Fohrman: What's fascinating is, you know, if you think about this notion of land in the world being God’s, the first time you have that idea of land in the world being God’s is actually the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden is the ultimate land of God in this world, right? That is the paradigm.

Imu: Interesting.

Rabbi Fohrman: Now, what happened in the Garden of Eden? What happened in the Garden of Eden is, we had a command. In other words, there was this one little tree you were not  supposed to eat from, but the positive command was: מִכֹּל עֵץ־הַגָּן אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל — You should surely eat from all these trees (Genesis 2:16).

Now think about that. It's kind of crazy, from a private property perspective. Who's the owner of all these trees?

Imu: God is.

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. But God says, “I may be the Owner of all these trees, but I want you to eat from all of them. Just enjoy all these trees. Like, I'm taking down the fences. It's Mine, but I want you to have all of it.”

Imu: It's like Shemitta.

Rabbi Fohrman: It's like Shemitta. It's like, “I want you to have this consciousness that it's Mine, so I want you to avoid one tree just as your way of understanding that there are some rules here. But basically, I just want you to enjoy all the trees.”

And God is almost suggesting, perhaps, with that, a sort of paradigm which recurs every 50 years. And every 50 years when God says, כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ — It's my land again. Well, guess what happens? On this moment, when we're on the cusp of renewing private property, and God says, “I'm the ultimate property Owner, the land is Mine. Everybody come in and take food.” It's back to Eden once again.

Imu: Rabbi Fohrman was suggesting that Yovel and Shemitta, these times when private property seems to be suspended, is perhaps God's attempt to reenact our original placement in Eden and remind us that all land is a gift from God. It's through this lens that private property is then reinstated, not as a right but as a gift. Beautiful, right?

But, hold on. I imagine you're thinking, “Weren't we trying to show how Yovel is a reaction to the Mekallel? Now Rabbi Fohrman's saying it's a reenactment of Eden? What does one have to do with the other?”

Turns out, quite a bit. Rabbi Fohrman actually had Gan Eden on his mind, and particularly this idea of returning to Gan Eden, because that might have been what happened to the Mekallel himself.

I know that sounds bizarre, but let me explain. 

Remember at the beginning of this episode, Rabbi Fohrman said he got messages from me and from our producer Tikva? So the similar themes between Yovel and the Mekallel is what I noticed, but here's what Tikva noticed. Totally unrelated to Yovel, she was thinking about how the story of the Mekallel includes this odd detail.

After the Mekallel blasphemes, the people put him in jail while they check in with God about his punishment. Well, the language to describe this jail is eerily reminiscent of, you guessed it, Gan Eden.

Rabbi Fohrman: So Tikva sent me a message via our venerable WhatsApp channel in which she was looking at the language of the Mekallel and found this. When they don't know what to do with this Mekallel, in verse 12, they place him in some kind of what you might call a jail, but the text doesn't quite call it a jail.

Imu: There is a word for “jail,” but it doesn't use that word.

Rabbi Fohrman: There is.

Imu: Yosef's in a בֵּית הַסֹּהַר, right (Genesis 39:20, et al)? 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yep, yeah. There is a word for jail, but they don't use that word. It's not like he's in a dungeon, a בֵּית הַסֹּהַר. That's not the word over here. The word is, “They placed him in a ‘watching-over’ place.”  וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ – They placed him, בַּמִּשְׁמָר — in a place to watch over him, לִפְרֹשׁ לָהֶם עַל־פִּי יְקוָה — awaiting God's explanation, as to what to do with him (Leviticus 24:12). 

So Tikva picked up on those two words which are back-to-back, וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ בַּמִּשְׁמָר. And she pointed out that the word וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ sort of echoed something for her. It turns out that the root hanach has, you know, many forms, but that particular form, וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ, is rare in the Bible. I don't know how many times it appears, but it's not that many; twice, three times.

But the first time that that phrase appears is actually in the Garden of Eden itself, when we have that particular unusual conjugation of l’hani’ach in the Creation of Man. Man was created, God takes him and: וַיַּנִּחֵהוּ — Places him in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15).

Now, you might sort of dismiss that, except, if you continue that verse in the Garden of Eden, it doesn't just say that God placed him in Eden, but he placed him in Eden for a purpose: לְעׇבְדָהּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָהּ — To serve the Garden and to watch over it (ibid).

And look at this; over here, the Mekallel: וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ בַּמִּשְׁמָר, same word. So it's two words back-to-back. It's that very strange language of וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ, which evokes God placing Man in Eden. And God placed Man in Eden for a purpose. And over here, that purpose is being echoed with the word מִּשְׁמָר.

מִּשְׁמָר, the “watching-over” place. Well, that's what Man was supposed to do in Eden.

Imu: Just going to go over that real quick. The Mekallel is placed, וַיַּנִּיחֻהוּ, in a מִּשְׁמָר, a place where he is guarded; and Adam was placed, וַיַּנִּחֵהוּ, in Gan Eden, לְעׇבְדָהּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָהּ, to work and to guard.

So, in both stories, someone is placed in a location and that placement is related to guarding.

Rabbi Fohrman: So let me just take Tikva's idea here and put it out to you, Imu. What do you make of that? I mean, that's a pretty strange resonance. Here, you have this really dark story of the Mekallel, and this climactic moment of the story is echoing the placement of Man in Eden. What, if anything, does that mean to you?

Imu: I mean, it seems like these would have nothing to do with each other. The idea of placing Man in Eden in paradise is the most intimate and high and ideal of places, and we're now talking about a criminal. The other word for מִּשְׁמָר would be “jail” or “dungeon,” right? Which we said isn't the exact word, but it's the same feeling, same spirit. It's a lowly, criminal dungeon who's eventually going to get the death penalty, the furthest away from Eden I could possibly get.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, I mean, I'll give you a chilling thing which comes to mind. You know, death, it sort of depends on your perspective, what you think of death, right? I mean, from our perspective, we fear death. It's the worst thing in the world. Strangely, people who have near-death experiences tend to see it a little differently, right? The common denominator in all the stories and near-death experiences, when people are in comas and they're dead on the table and then they're revived and come back. What's the single common denominator you hear in all those stories? Have you ever read accounts of people who had near-death experiences? 

Imu: Yeah, you recommended one book and I could barely get through it. What was it, that book?

Rabbi Fohrman: Proof of Heaven. 

Imu: Proof of Heaven. I couldn't get through it because it was so crazy, so wild? 

Rabbi Fohrman: Right, well, what do you…? I mean, it's death. Of course that's going to be crazy. 

Imu: There were, like, different levels of, like, the afterlife.

Rabbi Fohrman: Levels, yeah, that's right. Read, you know, any eschatological book that tries to imagine this sort of thing. So it's one of those strange books. But be that as it may, whatever it is that this thing is, no one wants to come back. There's this light at the tunnel that sort of pulls you and nobody wants to come back. There's this sense of complete acceptance; of being rejected in the world in which you were in, but complete acceptance in another world. 

And maybe one side of this is, here's a person who really has no place in this world, and the final door that he slams is to turn his back on God. And one way of thinking about death is, you know, it's really a bummer from a human point of view. But from God's point of view, He's just sort of gathering you in and bringing you back to a world where He is going to take you in.

And you know, that very book, Proof of Heaven, written by a former atheist; you know, he said the one message that he got in his seven day experience beyond the grave is that it's okay. No matter what you did, there's this kind of acceptance. It's okay now, and you're being taken care of, and you're being loved, and it's okay.

And here is this person who, the last door that he slammed is the door against God. And God is like, “Okay, there is no place for you in this world,” right? “So you're coming back to Me in My world.” And what is God's world but the Garden of Eden?

And isn't it poignant that here they place him, right, in this place? “We don't know what to do with him. We're going to ask God.” And God is like, you know, “You think you've placed him in jail, but another way of thinking is, you placed him on the precipice of Eden. You're going to bring him back. I'm going to take him in.” 

Imu: That's very chilling. Basically, this man who has no place in human society, and God's like, “Okay, I'm going to have you formally reject him, but in your rejection of him, I'm actually going to take him in.”

I don't know, there's intimacy in all of this; in just that word that Tikva was pointing out, that the jail is a מִּשְׁמָר, right? Like, בֵּית הַסֹּהַר or a dungeon is, you know, you throw someone in and you slam the door. A מִּשְׁמָר is, you keep watch.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah. Instead of Eden, where we watch God's world, it's like, “God, I think you need to watch over this guy and figure this out.” And God is like, “Okay, I'll take him in.” And maybe that's one, you know, “flip-the-table-over” way of seeing it.

Imu: Throughout this season, we'd been struggling with God's harsh treatment towards the Mekallel. And even when we offered reasons for why the Mekallel's punishment might have been justified, we still saw God just as a strict Judge and the Mekallel as a dejected man. So Rabbi Fohrman’s theory here, seeing God as the Caregiver who welcomes the Mekallel in, really was a flip of perspective for me.

I do think it's worth saying, this new perspective didn't overwrite the old one, and I don't think Rabbi Fohrman intended it to. Stoning is still a severe punishment and the text certainly presents it that way. But what I heard Rabbi Fohrman saying was that, maybe the Torah was very subtly wording this one moment, when the Mekallel is placed in jail, so that this image would evoke in us the image of Adam being placed in Gan Eden. So that would challenge us to expand our perspective; see this story not just through a human lens as it relates to the reality of this world, but also from God’s view beyond this world.

 And doesn't death, in general, look so different when we think about it from the perspective of us left behind versus the perspective of the departed who has, hopefully, please God, gone to a better place?

Maybe the way to think of it is like an optical illusion. You know the one that can look like a duck or a rabbit? And you can just sit there, shifting your vision, going back and forth; duck, rabbit, duck, rabbit. Not to compare God to ducks. Or rabbits. But, the point is, the image is a duck and it is a rabbit. In this story, maybe God is Judge and He is Caregiver. Neither view is more true than the other. The larger truth is what emerges when we recognize both perspectives are equally there. 

At least, that was what was beginning to happen for Rabbi Fohrman and for me. Seeing God as more than a Judge but also a kind of transcendent Caregiver brought a glimmer of redemption to the Mekalell's story. And that opened up for us the possibility that this story wasn't just a harsh din, judgment, leading to a downward spiral. Maybe the Torah was trying to give us a way out of the darkness.

And that brings us back to Yovel. Isn't it interesting that a story which seems to end in a death evoking a return to a kind of heavenly Eden is followed by laws that seem motivated by God's desire to reenact a very earthly Eden down here among all of us?

Rabbi Fohrman: And here you have Tikva’s idea merging with your ideas, back to Eden once again. And God said, like, “Look, I'll gather in this guy. I'll bring him into My Gan Eden in the next world. I'll take care of him.”

“But there is another path. Let Me show you how it's done. Just because you're a private property owner, just because you can assert rights in a world of justice and put up these fences, doesn't mean that the fences always have to stay up. There is a choice to be made by private property owners. Private property owners can take their cue from Me, the ultimate Owner of property, and say, ‘You know what? I'm going to put my arm around you and say, you can have some of this fruit from the trees and I'm going to hang out with you. I'm going to give you a place. You'll sleep in My backyard.’”

There's this ability of private property owners to go beyond the letter of the law and to give in kindness and in love, and the model for that is God himself. 

Imu: Are you saying basically that, like, God is taking this man back to Eden and essentially showing us how to build an Eden in our society?

Rabbi Fohrman: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. “I'll take him in and build an Eden, but you guys can have an Eden down there. Let Me show you how it’s done, and I'm showing you because I’m re-Eden-izing the world every 50 years. But you can do some of that”

Imu: Bringing all the pieces together, it seemed like Yovel wasn't just about recognizing God as the ultimate land Owner, or even recognizing His generosity in sharing that land with us. Through the lens of God as Caregiver for the Mekallel, Shemitta and Yovel appeared to be a continuation of this care, God's way of modeling for us how to be generous landowners ourselves so that when the land is back in our control, we're less likely to dismiss those like the Mekallel in the first place. 

The idealist in me loved this theory. Again, God here stood in such contrast to the judging, punishing God we'd been seeing. Instead, God really did seem caring and patient. He seemed to be saying, “Look, you have to do better, but it's ok. I'm going to show you how, and I'll show you how over and over again. In fact, every 50 years, we'll just reset and start from the top.” This was the way out of the darkness. We'd found what we'd been missing. 

The skeptic in me, though? Not buying it. I mean, really? We're supposed to believe this is God's solution to the Mekallel being ostracized? A complex 50-year cycle of economic and ecological disruption, on the off-chance that people will get the message and do better? I mean, if God really wanted to protect people from falling between the cracks, why didn't He just make a law that does that? “Anyone like the Mekallel who falls between the cracks gets their own little plot of land.” End of story. Why this whole runaround?

I wanted to raise these doubts with Rabbi Fohrman, but before I could, he actually began to address them. Not directly, of course. What podcast do you think you're listening to? But indirectly, by way of something he noticed; another connection between Yovel and Gan Eden, grounded in another of Yovel's strange laws.

Rabbi Fohrman: By the way, Yovel has one other quality to it. Not only can everybody eat from the fruits, not only does ancestral land go back to its owner, but…?

Imu: Slaves go free.

Rabbi Fohrman: Slaves go free. Think about that in terms of Eden.

Imu: Yeah, so we actually just got through a different podcast, on Meaningful Judaism, talking about the advent of slavery; talking about, Man's original charge in the garden is a dual role לְעׇבְדָהּ וּלְשׇׁמְרָהּ, where they were serving and protecting the garden. But that word for service is the same word for slavery, and when Man is kicked out of the garden, they're sort of cursed.

Interesting; they're cursed. Hmm.

Rabbi Fohrman: Isn’t that interesting? Talk about curses.

Imu: A person who curses and loses his world. Well, here's mankind who is cursed and loses their world, and they have a sort of corruption of their destiny, which is, service turns into avodah, turns into work. They end up being slaves to the land. And we talked about how mankind has a tendency to enslave one another. And sort of, you know, Israel ends up in Egypt and this long road out of Eden; enslaved and slaves. 

Rabbi Fohrman: But even before you get to Egypt, just stay there for a moment. Even in the post-Eden world, just to keep it simple, what is it that makes it slavery in that post-Eden world? Like, there was agricultural work in Eden. Indeed, we were placed in Eden not just to watch over Eden, but to work it. Like, you had to wake up in the morning and you had to work those trees, right? But yet, there wasn't this curse that wasn't this sense of slavery that you get from that language of: בְּזֵעַת אַפֶּיךָ תֹּאכַל לֶחֶם — By the sweat of your brow you'll eat bread, until you return to the earth from which you were taken (Genesis 3:19).

So what made it different? What if it was the same work, the same agricultural work, but what's the only difference between the world of Eden and the post-Eden world? Why does it all of a sudden turn into slavery, this avodah which we once had in Eden? 

Imu: So the idea you've taught is that the only thing that really significantly is changing is the land you're working.

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes. 

Imu: In Eden, I'm working in God's land, and outside of Eden, I'm working in the world at large. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Yes. So I'm working in a world at large and it just feels cyclical and I don't even understand why. I work to eat and I eat to work and I work to eat and I eat to work, and it just feels tedious. And this thing that I just do it over and over again until: עַד שׁוּבְךָ אֶל־הָאֲדָמָה כִּי מִמֶּנָּה לֻקָּחְתָּ — Until I just die (ibid). 

But in God's land, there was a way out of that hamster wheel, which is, I wasn't just working to eat and living to work. There was a meaning to my work, which is, it was somebody Else's world. I was devoting myself, in love, to Another. I was taking care of God's world, Who loved me and I loved him. And somehow, that gave life meaning and it didn't feel like work anymore.

 And what was that world? It was a world in which, even though it's God's world, God devoted that world to me and said, “I want you to enjoy these fruits of these trees.” And it's great, and it's wonderful. And God has meaning in that world because He devotes himself to another, to us, by giving us the fruit of the trees, and that somehow makes it meaningful. And I wonder if that's part of what the Gan Eden motif is; it’s a salvation from slavery.

And what Yovel is is maybe, at some level, a return to that Eden-like existence where the world is God's, but where God says, “Even though the world is Mine, I want you to have all these trees.” And in so doing, your work of that world doesn't feel like slavery anymore. It feels like you're doing something meaningful, working a world where the private property owner says, “It's open for others to take.”

You can take pride in working for that kind of world. It doesn't feel like slavery. You can wake up early in the morning and go to sleep late at night, and it's the same work, but somehow there's meaning and joy, and somehow slavery disappears. But when you turn your back on that, it's the beginning of the dark shadow of slavery.

Imu: If you’re curious to hear more about how avodah, service, evolves in the Torah into avdut, slavery, you should check out the Meaningful Judaism episode. Link is in the show notes.

For our purposes, though, what’s really important is Rabbi Fohrman’s take on Adam’s curse. After eating the fruit, Adam is cursed that working the land will now be a hardship. The simple meaning of that is that, pre-curse, the land did’t require much farming to yield great harvests. But if Adam wasn’t doing some kind of agricultural work in the garden, what was the avodah he was supposed to perform?

So Rabbi Fohrman's suggestion is that maybe it wasn’t the land that changed, but Adam's sense that by working the land, he was contributing to something larger than himself.

Tying this back to Yovel, maybe Yovel wasn't just about God being the ultimate Landowner, or recognizing God's generosity, or even learning to be generous landowners ourselves. Maybe Yovel was also about finding renewed meaning in our partnership with God as tenders of His world. A partnership grounded — and this was the part I found really cool — in God’s original act of generosity which showed God’s investment in us, and inspired our dedication to Him.

I could see how these ideas resonated with the themes we’d been discussing in the Mekallel, but textually, it felt like we’d wandered far afield. After all, the word avodah doesn't even show up in the Mekallel story. But as we chatted about that, the absence of this word actually began to seem strangely significant.

Remember that connection we'd seen between the Mekallel being placed in jail and Adam being placed in Gan Eden? Adam is placed in Gan Eden, the text says, לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ, to serve and to guard. But the Mekallel is just placed in a מִּשְׁמָר, a “guarding place.”

Rabbi Fohrman: What word is missing from the echoes of those words and the Mekallel? 

Imu: I don't see slavery or לְעָבְדָהּ. 

Rabbi Fohrman: That's right. It's almost as if, as he's placed in this little place, the word that's missing is avodah. All he's doing is to be watched over, and it's flipped now. He's not doing anything; God is watching over him, but it's almost like he's in this world. But what kind of world? A world which seems dark and closed, the world in which there is no place for him. The world in which no one opened their borders and no one opened their land. 

And the last thing that happens to him before he leaves that world, as he is placed into this cusp of Eden, is that, almost as if the avodah disappears from his life, right? And if he would ask himself, what does it feel like to be in a world like that? It feels like just drudgery. It feels like slavery. And it's almost like the last thing that happens is, God is there to look over at him as He takes him back, but the word לְעָבְדָהּ is gone. 

Imu: And right here, something clicked for me. I'd asked earlier why God didn't just legislate a simple law in response to the Mekallel. Why this whole runaround with Shemitta and Yovel? But now I felt like I had an answer. A law could have corrected the Mekallel's material inequality. It could have evened things out, made things fair and square. But it couldn't have made the people truly accept the Mekallel. You can't legislate real generosity. By definition, a law like that would undermine itself. Without the people genuinely welcoming in the Mekallel, even if they had given him a place, he would have still been an outsider in the most important way, in the sense of truly being part of the community and truly being able to serve that community himself.

And now I could see where Shemitta and Yovel came in. It was God’s way of teaching the people what He couldn’t just legislate — compassion, and how compassion, in turn, helps to build a meaningful society.

And so, for eight out of every 50 years, God would use law. He would impose all these strange laws that echoed back to Eden, but with the hope that, through that practice, we internalize an ethical sensitivity beyond the law that stays with us for the other 42 out of 50 years.

This felt like a richer take on a theme we'd been dancing around since Episode One, since we first asked why Moshe didn’t offer the Mekallel a spot in his own backyard. What is the limit of law? And what is the value of what lies beyond it? And now, we took a step back to consider this theme more broadly.

Rabbi Fohrman: This passage in Vayikra, this book that the Blasphemer appears in, probably the most famous words in Sefer Vayikra are the words that open Parshat Kedoshim: קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ — You should be holy (Leviticus 19:2). Everyone struggles to understand what that means. What does it mean, “You should be holy, כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אֲנִי יְקוָה אֱלֹקיכֶם — because I, the Lord your God, am holy?”

And the Ramban has a particularly fascinating way of understanding that. The Ramban says קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ means that you shouldn't be a menuval b’reshut ha’Torah; you shouldn't be stuck on the letter of the law and find yourself being just a terrible person working within the letter of the law. And what the Ramban is really saying is that, as much as God demands adherence to law, He also demands more than that. There's something mysterious that's beyond the laws. So you say, well, that's really strange. I mean, there's all these laws; like, 613 laws, and all these countless other laws. I mean, like, there's so many laws. What does it take to be a good person? You mean it takes more than just adhering to law? And the answer is, yes. It actually takes more than adhering to law. 

What is this other part of this, this other part of the equation other than adhering to law? The truth is, you see it in other parts of the Torah as well. Just the fact that there are other parts of the Torah other than laws, the fact that there are stories suggests that there's other ways that we can be guided in our lives other than laws; that God expects us to be guided by stories and not just law.

It's almost as if what law is, in and of itself, is a domain that's not large enough, that's too narrow to encompass all of human existence, and human existence requires something more. And as oxymoronic as it sounds, just as there is a legal requirement to adhere to the law, there is also a requirement by the Lawgiver to do more than adhere to the law, to adhere to some code of ethics which surpasses that. Another way of thinking about that is really thinking about two values that the Torah talks about. And it's interesting because if you look at the story of Moshe himself and the story of the Mekallel, you see these values resonating with each other.

I think it's these two values that we've been sort of dancing around; law and another kind of value. Maybe even we can come back and explore that. But in the meantime, I think the imagery of Gan Eden as a world where God kind of models these two values; in the way that He sort of stewards our understanding of private property is a fascinating and mind opening one.

I want to thank you and Tikva for opening the door to that really wonderful explanation, which frankly never would have occurred to me without you guys. So thank you.

Imu: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for helping make sense of such a troubling story, but also a glimpse, a sort of ray of light at a story that seems pretty dark; seeing, you know, almost a paradisiacal…is that the right word? 

Rabbi Fohrman: “Paradisiacal.” 

Imu: Yeah, paradisiacal view on a dark story. Thank you.

At the end of this conversation, I found myself thinking back to our last three episodes. I'd kept asking Rabbi Fohrman for the moral of the Mekallel, but I realized now, what I was really asking for, ironically, even when I was angry at Moshe for not going beyond the law, was itself law. I wanted to justify this story, and I thought I could do that if we could just pin down the moral law that would show how everyone in the story got what they deserved. We were so grounded in that one value, that's what we were looking for, and that's what we found. The law of reciprocity.

Ask someone where the duck is and that's all they'll see in the optical illusion. As soon as we put down that lens, that's when we started seeing the other side, the rabbit if you will, the way this story itself resonates with values beyond law and strict justice. How it transcends reciprocity to allow space for redemption. We'd seen the caring side of God who gives second chances, the Mekallel finding a place in Heaven, and the redemption of Yovel on earth. 

It was a beautiful way to end the season, except for one thing — Moshe. I’d forgotten about him for a second, but for all this redemption we’d found, Moshe’s story hadn’t changed. He’d still just left the Mekallel out, and his grandson paid for it. Moshe still seemed like the bad guy. Even more so now, after our discussion about the importance of generosity for building community, it was hard to relate to Moshe's coldness with anything but judgment and condemnation.

Luckily, we still had one more episode to go, and one more noticing to share; this time, something Rabbi Fohrman had noticed when he returned to the text.