16. What Makes Yovel Tick?

I think we might be able to find some clarity in these issues if we try and explore Yovel itself and understand, if possible, what makes it tick, how it works. Now to some extent, that may actually be an impossible task. The Torah just tells us that there is this phenomenon called Yovel, and then it tells us what Yovel does: It frees slaves; it causes ancestral land to revert back to its primary, ancestral holder. The Torah doesn't spend much time talking to us about any mechanism, so to speak, through which these things happen. It just says they happen, and that's that. But it may be that there is some kind of mechanism at the heart of Yovel, and if we look at the laws of Yovel and the text of the Torah that describes it, we might be able to infer what that mechanism actually is.

Let me start by asking you a pretty straightforward, intuitive question. We've seen that Yovel does two things: It frees slaves and it causes ancestral land to go back to its original owner. But why should one event, Yovel, do two entirely separate things? It would be more satisfying if those two things were linked so that, in a way, they are both aspects of one overarching phenomenon. So my question to you is: Are these two things linked in some fundamental way?

17. Where Do People Belong?

The Torah itself seems to indicate that such a link does, in fact, exist. The evidence comes from the language in which the Torah couches these two laws of Yovel. There’s a symmetry in the language used to describe these two Yovel laws, and that suggests, at least to my ear, a kind of symmetry in the essence of the laws too.

Listen to how the Torah phrases these laws: וּקְרָאתֶם דְּרוֹר בָּאָרֶץ לְכָל-יֹשְׁבֶיהָ – You should proclaim freedom throughout the land for all its inhabitants. That’s the beginning of this, and then, after that general-idea introduction, that immediately gets followed by what seems to be two permutations of that idea of proclaiming freedom throughout the land. 

וְשַׁבְתֶּם אִישׁ אֶל-אֲחֻזָּתוֹ וְאִישׁ אֶל-מִשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ תָּשֻׁבוּ – The first permutation is that land should go back to its ancestral owners. The second: Slaves should be freed, go back to their families. But isn’t that kind of interesting, because each of these two permutations contains the same Hebrew key verb "to return." People are being "returned" to their ancestral land. Slaves are being "returned" back to their families. 

So it seems like the Torah thinks that the two main ideas of Yovel are related: Yovel is about returning people to where they belong. Where do people belong? Well, they belong with their ancestral land or they belong with their families. But perhaps we can sharpen the connection between these laws still further. Consider a slave, the person who, according to the verse, is separated from his family. And consider someone who is separated from his ancestral land. These are the two kinds of people that Yovel laws are meant to address. How are these two people related to each other?

18. How Land Protects Us

It turns out there is a very meaningful connection between them. The easiest way to express that connection is to speak of it in economic terms, but in reality, the connection here is deeper than just economics. For insight into the economic connection, at least, let's look at how God speaks with Abraham concerning the Israelites' descent into hundreds of years of slavery. The first thing he tells Abraham is: גֵר יִהְיֶה זַרְעֲךָ בְּאֶרֶץ לֹא לָהֶם – your children will be strangers in a land not their own. And the next thing He tells him is: וַעֲבָדוּם וְעִנּוּ אֹתָם – the inhabitants of that land, they'll enslave your progeny, they’ll abuse them, for four hundred years (Genesis 15:13).

Now, these aren’t disconnected events that God is telling Abraham about. There's a kind of progression being detailed here. The process starts with being dispossessed of land, finding yourself strangers on someone else's land. That's the most benign step in the process, but it’s a starting point, and it makes you vulnerable to the next step, which is slavery. The most extreme step is the last one:  וְעִנּוּ אֹתָם - they'll be abused, crushed with hard labor.

If you think about it, this progression is not something that exists only in an ancient, sacred text such as the Torah. It’s alive and well in today's age too. Think about citizenship: What’s it like not to be a citizen? I was chatting with a housekeeper who works for a family in our neck of the woods. She came from Honduras, a nation torn apart by violence. She crossed the border illegally and was stopped by border control. They gave her papers for a court date, but she couldn't speak English, so she couldn't read the instructions and figure out when and where to go. She would have been eligible for asylum but she missed her court date – and once she did that, there was no hope for her. She was an illegal immigrant. A ger. A stranger in someone else's land.

What were her options? She's grateful to have the job. But she has no chance for advancement. She's bright as a whip. If not for the accident of her birth, she could be in medical school here. But she won't ever go to medical school. She doesn't have a way out. The family she works for doesn't abuse her, but if you think about it, they could. Abuse is actually quite common, according to an immigration lawyer I spoke to. So if the family did it, they could get away with it. What is her recourse? Calling the police? The police will deport her. She has no protection. Because she is not a citizen, because she is not a stakeholder in the land, she is vulnerable. Vulnerable to the modern equivalent of enslavement. Vulnerable to abuse.

My point is that there is a natural connection between land and slavery. The former is a bulwark against the latter. Owning land is my guarantee that I won’t become a slave. That’s true for citizens, those who hold a stake in the collective land ownership of an entire nation, and it’s also true for individuals who own their own little piece of private property. 

Think about it: Historically, how did people become slaves? You’d become a slave when you couldn't pay your debts. You’d become a slave when you couldn't feed yourself or you were homeless. As a last resort, you'd sell yourself, you’d become someone else's slave. But if you had land, you wouldn't need to do that. You’d always have a solution for food: You could grow food on your plot of land. You’d always have a solution for shelter: You could sleep on your land. And if push came to shove, and debts threatened your independence, you could sell your land and you could avoid slavery that way.

So we might say that the Yovel laws are engineered, so to speak, such that they combat slavery. They combat it in two ways. The first is a direct way, by freeing slaves and returning them to their families. But the second way is preventative. Yovel acts to forestall slavery by returning people to their ancestral land that they once sold. In other words, if you sold your land because you came on hard times, and you find yourself a stranger in someone else's land, so now you’re a step closer to slavery. You’re vulnerable to enslavement. But then Yovel comes along and returns you to your ancestral land. So now you're safer.

19. Deeper than Economics

So all this, I think, is correct, but it's not the whole truth. In actuality, the linkages between land ownership and avoiding slavery are actually much deeper than mere economics. And it's here, I think, that Yovel works its real magic.

Let me come back to that verse in which the Torah expresses the dual Yovel laws concerning release from slavery and return to ancestral land: וְשַׁבְתֶּם אִישׁ אֶל-אֲחֻזָּתוֹ וְאִישׁ אֶל-מִשְׁפַּחְתּוֹ תָּשֻׁבוּ. Now, I mentioned before that a common denominator here is that people are returning to where they belong: A slave is returning to his family; a person who sold his land is returning to that land. But maybe it's actually a little bit more than that. Maybe it's not just that people are returning to where they belong… but ask: Where do they belong? Maybe, in a deep kind of way, returning to your land and returning to your family are similar ideas. So similar that they are actually one and the same.

Go back to the Yovel language for a minute. The Torah says that on Yovel, you must "proclaim freedom throughout the land" – that's the general idea. And then it gives you an aspect of that idea, which is וְשַׁבְתֶּם אִישׁ אֶל-אֲחֻזָּתוֹ – ancestral land returns to its owner. That's a kind of freedom for the land. But ask yourself: Why does return of land to the ancestral owner somehow make land "free"? One way or the other, the land is still owned! What difference does it make if the land is owned by Berel or by Shmerel? Look, people might care that land goes back to its original owner, but why would the land itself care? Why would the land, so to speak, regard that as "freedom" somehow?

Unless… unless there is something special in the connection between an ancestral holder and his land. Each "belongs" with the other, in a way that transcends mere economics. An original owner's hold in land is something more than a monetary connection. It is almost like a family-like connection. Slaves going back to their families and people going back to their land are actually almost one and the same thing: In each case, people are returning to the embrace of their families.

To get a sense of what I'm talking about here, read Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, or watch the film version of it. One scene in particular struck me as really very powerful. A representative of a bank comes by car to deliver the news to a small Oklahoma farming family that the bank is repossessing their land. So Tom Joad, he looks at this guy, this bank representative… he just can't fathom it. He wants to talk to the person in charge. So the representative says to him that he doesn't know who's in charge. I got my orders, he says, they told me to get you off, and that's what I'm telling you. Tom says back to him, you mean get off my own land? The man in the car tells him, now don't go blaming me, it ain't my fault. Tom says, well, whose fault is it? So the bank guy says, well, you know who owns the land, it’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company. So Tom says, and who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company? The bank guy says, it ain't nobody! It's a company. So Tom goes, they got a president, ain't they? The bank guy says, oh, son, it ain't his fault, the bank tells him what to do. All right, where's the bank? It’s in Tulsa. But what's the use of picking on him? He's ain't nothing but a manager. Tom says, I want to shoot somebody, who do we shoot? The bank guy says, Brother, I don't know. If I did, I'd tell you. I just don't know who's to blame.

So then the car drives away, and you, you're just left there, contemplating this. There's the big impersonal bank, who's really no one. There's Tom, who's very much a someone, and his land, who for Tom, is very much a someone too.

So Tom sinks to his feet, he grabs a clod of earth, and he says: “My grandpa took up this land 70 years ago. My pa was born here. We was all born here, and some of us was killed on it." Then he just breaks down, and he's sobbing and he just repeats those words, "and some of us died on it. Born on it, worked on it, died on it. That's what makes it ours, not no piece of paper with writing on it."

It's almost like land is as much a part of his family as his own wife and kids. To be deprived of that is a tragedy.

20. Land as Parent

And to refine that idea just a little bit more: Think about what it is that land gives us. It really is a kind of parent for us. A parent gives us a home, a place to be, and our parent nourishes us. And now think about what we look to land for. It's the same things: Land provides us a home, land nourishes us. We can grow crops on land. The Ramban tells us that in the very beginning, when God said: "Let us make man," He was talking to the land. As Ramban puts it, God said, "I'll contribute the soul, and you, land – you contribute the material that will become his body.” And so it was, God took earth from the ground and made Adam, from the Hebrew word for land, adamah.

As it happens, parents do one more thing besides give you a home and nourish you. They keep you safe from strangers – and so, by the way, does land. If you couldn't pay your debts, you would eventually find yourself enslaved; you'd end up selling yourself to come up with the money you owed. But if you had land… land, the great parent, keeps you safe. By providing you food and shelter, it forestalls slavery. And not only that, if push came to shove and you owed money and you had no other way to repay it, as a last-ditch measure, you could sell your ancestral land to pay your debts, and you could retain your own personal freedom.

Think about that for a minute in parental terms, and I think you can kind of sense the tragedy here. What wouldn't a parent do for a child? If a child was facing the prospect of slavery, of being taken by strangers and pressed into their service, a parent would say "Take me first!" And in a way, that is what land, our great existential parent, does for us. In the words of the Gemara, nichsei d'inish arvin lei – a person's land acts as his guarantor (cf. Bava Batra 174a). Land will pay our debts for us, if we can't. Land will be sold so that we don't have to be sold.

But here’s the tragedy in that: You are taking a relationship you have with land that is deeper than money and reducing it to mere economics. It is almost as if you are selling a member of the family. What ensues when the land is in someone else's control is something akin to slavery – slavery for the land. Meanwhile, having divested myself of ancestral land, I have staved off the immediate threat of slavery for myself. But I have also taken one step closer to eventual slavery, because I no longer have a place on earth that I can sleep the night for free, I no longer have land that will provide nourishment for me. So I will need to buy or rent these things, and if I don't have enough money to do so, I will have to become indebted in order to purchase these things. The specter of slavery, if I cannot repay those debts, looms.

21. The Reprieve of Shemitta

But every seven years a kind of reprieve arrives in the form of the Shemitta year. Let's actually follow the trail of this person who's become alienated from his ancestral land. For him, Shemitta acts as a reprieve both for him and for his land. From the land's perspective, Shemitta is a year off, a year where no one can exert mastery over it, a year when the land is treated as if it is no man's land. Shemitta, then, is a reprieve for the piece of land, but it’s not actually full freedom for the land, so to speak. The land is like no man's land, it is not being subjugated by a stranger – but still, it has not been reunited with its family, as it were. It is still alienated from them. And so it is not yet fully free, in the eyes of the Torah.

A similar dynamic is happening during Shemitta with reference to the person, the one who sold his ancestral land. We said before that this person finds himself left without any economic safeguards, such as land, that would keep him from experiencing the kind of crushing debt that would lead to slavery. So the Shemitta year provides him at least a temporary reprieve. For one year at least he has the benefits of taking produce for free from anyone's land, because all land now is no man's land. Moreover, the Torah ordains that the Shemitta year cancels any outstanding debt. But the reprieve is still only temporary. Next year will come, and without his land, he’s still going to need to pay for a place to sleep and for food to eat. And therefore, the possibility of debt piling up and the possibility of slavery again begins to loom.

22. The Advent of Yovel

But then, every fifty years, a kind of freedom comes to the world. Yovel arrives. וּקְרָאתֶם דְּרוֹר בָּאָרֶץ לְכָל-יֹשְׁבֶיהָ – And you should proclaim freedom throughout the land for all its inhabitants. When freedom is proclaimed throughout the land, then slaves go back to their families, and land that had been, so to speak, enslaved, is reunited with its family. Yovel is the great homecoming event. When land and people experience Shemitta, they experience the land as no man's land. But a slave on no man's land has only a tenuous kind of freedom. It is only when a slave is reunited with family, or a person reunited with land, that he is truly safe. It is then that he is in the embrace of his creators, of those who will care for him, of those that will provide a home for him, nourishment for him.

So in a way, we might say that Yovel is a more intense version of Shemitta. Shemitta provides a respite from slavery, but Yovel cancels out slavery in a direct kind of way. Yovel, which occurs after a cycle of seven times seven years, is like Shemitta squared.

23. The Homecoming at Sinai

And now let me come back to a theory I began to suggest to you. Might it be that the law of Yovel itself, this fifty-year iteration of freedom – might it be that this is the legal reflection of a historical event, a great Yovel-like event, that is the source for the very idea of Yovel? The event I am talking about is the Revelation at Mount Sinai, the moment when all of Israel heard the sound of the Yovel shofar.

If Yovel is about people going back to their source, back to their creators, might something like that have happened at Sinai? At Sinai, the Creator of All showed up in the world – or to be more precise, He actually didn't show up at all, because He couldn't be seen. Instead, the moment of revelation happened through sound. It happened through a Heavenly shofar blast that became louder and louder, a Divine sound that eventually resolved itself into words, words which we apprehended as the Ten Commandments. God descended upon a mountain with all of Israel gathered around it, but we couldn't see anything; it was dark, the text tells us, and a thick fog hovered over the mountain. But we heard, oh, did we hear. And it was there that we heard God proclaim a great truth that would once again be heard in the laws of Yovel: כִּי-לִי הָאָרֶץ – the earth is Mine.

This experience at Sinai was a homecoming event in spades. In Yovel as we know it – the event that takes place every fifty years – individuals who were slaves come home to their families and individuals come home to their land. In this way, people return to their earthly creators. But now, at Sinai, all that would happen on a collective level. In the grand Yovel event of Sinai, the land, the earth itself – it would be not parent but child this time. Land itself would be gathered into its Creator. That expressed itself in very direct terms with the mountain itself: God descended in a fiery cloud atop the mountain, and the mountain was set off-limits. It became part of God's world.

So God would quite literally make the mountain His own; He would gather in land to its Heavenly Creator. And the people? He would do the same for them. An entire nation of families who were enslaved – they would be gathered in to their Heavenly Creator, too. 

אַתֶּם רְאִיתֶם אֲשֶׁר עָשִׂיתִי לְמִצְרָיִם וָאֶשָּׂא אֶתְכֶם עַל-כַּנְפֵי נְשָׁרִים וָאָבִא אֶתְכֶם אֵלָי:

You have seen what I have done to Egypt, and I have lifted you on eagles’ wings and have brought you here to Me. 

(Exodus 19:4)

In Yovel, people who are enslaved go back to their source – their parents, their families. And at Sinai, a nation of families who were enslaved goes back to its source; the nation is gathered in to the Creator of All and finally becomes secure. Until then, the children of Israel had been traveling through a desert. There was no more Egyptian taskmaster standing there with a lash, forcing them to submit to backbreaking labor. But on the other hand, there was no security. They were nomads. Where would water and food come from? Where would they take shelter? Suddenly, at Sinai, they experienced a Creator who actually descended into their world and claimed them as His own. They were standing on His land now – God-land. They had come home to their ultimate family, their Heavenly Creator. 

And so it was for the rest of their sojourn in the desert. They would wander, yes, but strangely, they would always have food, they would always have shelter, because their family – their Parent in Heaven – would directly provide it to them. It is fascinating to note the language the Torah later uses to characterize the manna that Israel would eat in the desert as they traveled to the land of Canaan. Toward the very end of the Torah, in Shirat Haazinu, the Torah speaks of God as if He were a mother bird, a powerful eagle, caring for His young. But in the desert, what would those little young chicks eat?

יַרְכִּבֵהוּ עַל-בָּמֳתֵי אָרֶץ וַיֹּאכַל תְּנוּבֹת שָׂדָי

He caused [His young] to ride over the high places of the earth, and they would eat the produce of My fields.

(Deuteronomy 32:13)

The little chicks in the desert – they wouldn't have access to the bounty of the earth. The earth was just a parched desert, and anyway, it was like they were flying over it, they weren't connected to terrestrial ground that could nurture them. They were fed from the bounty of Heaven's fields. They ate manna, bread that came to them from the sky.

At Sinai, the people experienced what it meant to be gathered into their Heavenly family, to experience the closeness of their Heavenly Parent and to be gathered around His very own earth, the mountain. Connected to Divine earth and the Divine presence, they experienced the ultimate in family connectedness. And for the rest of their sojourn in the desert, while they lived in terrestrial no man's land, they lived in the residual cocoon of Sinai's connection – in the embrace of their Creator, in the embrace of His heavenly fields.

Until… until they would come to the land of Canaan.

24. Leaving the Desert

At the cusp of entering the land of Canaan, at Jericho, we would finally leave no man's land and come into possession of land of our own. As the walls of the city came tumbling down, we had the experience of being reunited with land that was our own ancestral land to which we, as a nation, were deeply connected from generations past, from the time of our own ancestors. The event that would give it to us would be a Yovel-type event. After seven times seven circuits around the city, the land would be demarcated, as Sinai had been, back in the desert. And once again we would hear the blast of the Yovel shofar, as we heard it at Sinai.

With that blast of the shofar, the era of life in the desert came to an end. Seemingly, we had left the intimate cocoon of God's direct embrace; we were no longer fed from the manna of Heavenly fields. We would have our very own land now, terrestrial land. Land that you could touch and feel and farm it, and it would provide for you. Land that you could build upon, that you could make permanent homes for yourself upon.

Except that even as this was the case, a taste of the desert would remain with us. Because remember, Jericho was a Yovel event, and as a Yovel event, it carries a distinct message: כִּי-לִי הָאָרֶץ – For the land is Mine.

The land, at the end of the day, is Mine. It belongs to God. It is not really something that can be owned by people. Yes, people relate to the land deeply. Land provides for us, gives us shelter, gives us food. But it gives us that as a parent would give a child these things. A child doesn't really own a parent. We don't really own the land. It is too sacred and special to be owned.

And so to symbolize that, just as Sinai was set off-limits and demarcated as "God space," so would Jericho be. God proclaims that Jericho, this first bit of the conquest of Canaan, is not to be built up again by people. The spoils from the conquest of Jericho are not to be enjoyed by people. This little bit of land needs to actually be set apart from human consumption as a way of embedding in our consciousness that this entire body of land that we are getting – the Land of Canaan as a whole – although it will provide for us, although it will nourish us… we don't really own it. It’s too sacred for that. As much as we get from the land, we can never really be its masters.

25. Every Fifty Years

To help remind us of these truths about our connection to God and to the land, the Almighty ordains observances that will recur perennially, as the years unfold.

One of these is the Yovel year, brought to us courtesy of a shofar blast. This blast of a physical shofar, produced by a human being, recalls for us the blast of a Heavenly shofar we heard at Sinai. It signifies God's presence in the world, and when God is present, we become aware of the reality about people and about land. These two beings, these children of God, are too precious for us to really own. When God is present, the convention that we humans made up – the convention of private land ownership, the convention of human slavery – all that dissipates in the presence of the Master of the Universe. Land and people are free. We can never really own either. I can rent a land's crops for a number of years, I can rent a person's labor, but the idea that I can really own either, that either can be reduced to a mere economic asset fully controlled by me… that idea is a farce. In the Yovel’s shofar call of the fiftieth year, we hear an echo of the shofar at Sinai, and the message of each is the same. The Master of the Universe is present in the world, and He is claiming His children as His own: כִּי-לִי הָאָרֶץ – the land is Mine.

26. And Every Year

But this truth is so important that it is not something we should remind ourselves of only every fifty years. God ordains another observance too, a yearly observance, to help us live these truths, a Yovel-like holiday during the year: Shavuot.

Look at how Shavuot lines up with Yovel. When it comes to Yovel, God first asks us to count seven years and then experience the neutrality of no man's land that is the Shemitta year. After that God asks us to count seven times seven years – שֶׁבַע שַׁבָּתוֹת – and then experience the homecoming, the freedom, that is Yovel.

And now look at Shavuot. God first asks us to count the seven days of Pesach, days on which we remember exiting the land of slavery and heading into the desert, into no man's land. After that, God asks us to count seven times seven days – שִׁבְעָה שָׁבֻעֹת – and then to re-experience the homecoming, the freedom, that was Sinai… the event that transpired forty-nine days after we exited Egypt.

It is now that we see how the Biblical and rabbinic concepts of Shavuot really fuse into a single seamless whole. On the one hand, Shavuot is, as the rabbis say, an event that commemorates Sinai, the Revelation. But it commemorates that event from a certain perspective. The language of the Biblical text focuses our commemoration of that experience, so that we view it through a certain particular lens. That lens, so to speak, is the Yovel-like quality of Sinai.

God's radical revelation, His presence, vibrates through our very bodies through the sound of the shofar. That sound at Sinai, it set us free. It brought us back to our Parent in Heavenְ; it allowed us to be gathered in by Him. And at that moment we stood around Sinai, land that literally exited the terrestrial sphere and became taken over, as it were, by God – it was at that moment that we also came to understand, as clearly as never before, that לִי כָּל-הָאָרֶץ (Exodus 19:5) – that the land is the possession of God's, we don’t really possess it. In the language that the Torah later on uses to characterize Yovel, גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי – we Israelites, all we really are, are sojourners in God's land (Leviticus 25:23).

In a way, this idea that Revelation was a homecoming day of sorts is actually the foundation of the Torah itself. What we received at Sinai, the Torah, is inconceivable without how we received it, without the homecoming experience of Revelation. The original Shavuot at Sinai was a day on which we humans came home to our Father in Heaven, and it was a day on which we experienced land coming home to Him as well. On the day we experienced these truths about the sanctity of people and of land, about the fact that we cannot really own either – on that day, we received the Torah. It is a Torah built on those truths, a Torah that tries to help us live those truths every day of our lives.

27. Sharing God’s Bounty

And so the Torah tells us that Shavuot is a חַג הַקָּצִיר – a harvest festival. We celebrate it during the time of our harvest. It is a time when we would otherwise be inclined to triumphantly reap land's bounty and proclaim our sovereignty over this land that gives us wheat. Instead, though, we take pause and ask ourselves: Who really owns this sacred resource?

So instead of hoarding the harvest and simply stockpiling the grain in silos, Shavuot asks landowners to celebrate the harvest in a particular way. In the words of the text, on Shavuot we are asked to take מִסַּת נִדְבַת יָדְךָ אֲשֶׁר תִּתֵּן כַּאֲשֶׁר יְבָרֶכְךָ יְקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ – the bounty of your hands’ work in the fields, as God has blessed you. וְשָׂמַחְתָּ לִפְנֵי יְקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ – And you should rejoice in the presence of God with a great feast. And who should you invite to the feast? Your whole family: אַתָּה וּבִנְךָ וּבִתֶּךָ – you, your son, your daughter. Because after all, Shavuot is a homecoming day, a day when people are gathered into their families. So you must certainly celebrate with your families, but look at the definition of family here. Curiously, it has been expanded. Because look who else you are celebrating with: וְעַבְדְּךָ וַאֲמָתֶךָ וְהַלֵּוִי אֲשֶׁר בִּשְׁעָרֶיךָ וְהַגֵּר וְהַיָּתוֹם וְהָאַלְמָנָה אֲשֶׁר בְּקִרְבֶּךָ – you must also rejoice in your bounty with your servant, with your maidservant, with the Levite, with the ger, the sojourner, with the widow (Deuteronomy 16:10-11). 

Who are these people? These are all people who don't have any land. They are the dispossessed. And they are your family, too. What are we supposed to do with these people? We are not supposed to give them charity. Leftovers, handouts? No! We are to rejoice with them, celebrate with them. The point here is to include them as equals in the feast, to let them experience the joy of the harvest the way an owner would, the way a real stakeholder in the land would experience that joy. 

Indeed, the Torah even goes out of its way to tell us that at the feast, we should serve our guests נִדְבַת יָדְךָ אֲשֶׁר תִּתֵּן כַּאֲשֶׁר יְבָרֶכְךָ יְקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ – food commensurate with the way God has blessed us. If we got more that year, the feast should be bigger. If we got less, the feast should be smaller. Now, you might intuitively say: “Look, here's a rich guy, he's a landowner, he’s making this once-a-year feast for the poor. So let him feed them generously this once, even if it's been a relatively lean year for him. He can afford it!” 

But the Torah says no: Give your guests bounty as God has given you. Treat them as stakeholders, as if they were landowners too, reaping more in good years, less in lean ones. Why? Because we and them really are similar: גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי. You are all sojourners in the land. 

So on this holiday in which you recognize that truth, here's what you do: Bring first fruits to God, and recognize that the land is really His. And feast and rejoice in the land's bounty with your family, but expand that sense of family to include all God's children, far beyond what would seem the obvious borders of family. On this day, on Sinai day, the Master of the Universe made a nation of slaves free and proclaimed us all members of His family, all eligible for sustenance from the fields of Heaven. So on this day, emulate that with your fields. Bring the poor and the dispossessed, those on the verge of slavery and those in slavery, and let them all partake in the bounty of the land that God has given us.

In so doing, וְזָכַרְתָּ – we remember, as the verse concludes, כִּי-עֶבֶד הָיִיתָ בְּמִצְרָיִם – that we were all slaves in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 16:12).

[Imu] So let me share with you my reflections on this piece. You know, for many years, when I celebrated Shavuot, I would show up to shul, to synagogue, after the meal on the first night, ready to get together with friends, to stay up all night learning, learning Torah, really demonstrating my love and the collective love of our people for this book, for the Torah. And when you see Shavuot that way, the questions we asked in this course really stick out at you. If Shavuot is a celebration of this document, then why is the Bible telling me that the way to celebrate this holiday is by bringing my first fruits, or by making a party for the slave and the stranger? What does that have to do with celebrating the giving of the Torah? 

What this piece shows me is that the way God sees His own revelation is that when God shows up in this world, it's not so much about the document or the book, but about the relationship with its Author. When God shows up in our world, we return to our home. And it's a very beautiful thing, you work hard in your field, you produce something. Shavuot is the day that you take first fruits, and you say: “This thing that I’ve invested in, that I’ve toiled in, these fruits that should be mine – I realize that I only have them because of you, God.” 

And so there is recognition vertically, there is a homecoming vertically. And in the weeks leading up to Shavuot, the ownership that I feel isn’t complete horizontally either. The large family of Israel can come into my field, can glean in the corners or can take the things that have fallen.  And on Shavuot itself I throw a party. I enjoy the fruits of my labors, but I let those who are less fortunate enjoy together with me. Do you think that diminishes the joy that I have? To recognize Creator vertically and to recognize family horizontally? It extends my joy, it widens the circle of my joy, it helps me see myself in the context of my larger family. 

I’ll just say one more thing, because we are not landowners today. We don’t have fields, we don’t give bikkurim. But in the years since I first heard this piece and taught it to others, there are a few of us now who use Shavuot as a time to give to charity. To take stock of who are the strangers in our lives, who is the orphan, who is the widow, who are those who don’t have access to capital, who are relying on us. Shavuot at Aleph Beta is a time where we ask our employees to make a meal with their family, with their loved ones, and take a picture of themselves celebrating and share it with the rest of the staff. I love getting to see everyone’s families, their extended families. And the net result of that little tradition is that we appreciate the fact that we are all really celebrating together. It’s a bounty made possible because of the hard work of our coworkers, it's a bounty made possible because of the gifts of God. And, dear listeners, it is a bounty made possible because of your listenership, because of your support. So thank you. Chag Sameach.

Credits

This episode was written and recorded by our lead scholar, Rabbi David Fohrman. 

When this episode originally aired on Aleph Beta, it was edited by Rivky Stern. 

Into the Verse editing was done by Sarah Penso.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman. 

Our CEO and editorial director is Imu Shalev. 

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