Mutual Responsibilities
This Dvar Torah on Parashat Behar-Behukotai was written by Maharat Rori Picker Neiss, the Executive Director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis.
Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash
You shall hallow the fiftieth year. Proclaim liberty / release throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof. It shall be a jubilee for you—each shall return to their holding and each shall return to their family.
- Vayikra/Leviticus 25:10
If the laws of the Jubilee year refer to the emancipation of only Hebrew servants, why does the passage proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof?
Is not this liberty, in fact, referring to only a small percentage of the population?
Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetsky points out that though a servant is indentured to his / her employer, the employer is also indebted to his / her servant.
An employer bears the responsibility of not only paying an employee’s paycheck, but also of ensuring that the employee is cared for and is afforded a safe working environment, suitable provisions, and, above all else, respect and dignity.
So in the Jubilee year, when all individuals are freed from their servitude, their masters are also freed from the burdens that accompany the responsibility of a servant.
When the American founding fathers convened in Philadelphia in 1775 to draft the Declaration of Independence, they proclaimed that all men were endowed with inalienable rights, among them the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They did not include the right to property.
The laws of the Jubilee year, as well as the laws of the Sabbatical year, teach us that property and employment are not rights, but responsibilities.
As the Torah teaches us, “For the land is [God’s]; you are but strangers resident with [God]” (Leviticus 25:23).
As residents of the land, we have an obligation to care for the land.
And as human beings, we have a responsibility to care for our fellow brothers and sisters.
And lest we forget and presume for ourselves that we have control, power, or even ownership over a piece of land or a fellow human, in the Jubilee year we are commanded to stop, to let the land lie fallow, to return all land that we had acquired, and to let all people go free – ourselves included.
Shabbat Shalom!
