5-23-2024 Bilingual Torah Commentary / Comentario Bilingüe

This week’s Torah portion is called B’Har. It is the penultimate section of the Book of Leviticus, and you will find it in the Book of Leviticus 25:1-26:2.  The section deals with issues of ownership in every sense of the word: from ownership of property to ownership of time.  Although this week’s parashah speaks in great detail about ownership, the parashah’s theoretical underpinning is based on the idea of community and the social contract that binds society into a cohesive unit.

Leviticus views the people of Israel as one community.  Reading Leviticus carefully we note that there is a  constant tension running throughout the text.  This tension is still very much with us; stated in a few words the text’s central theoretical question is: where do the individual’s rights end and his/her responsibility to society begin? For example, do we own our bodies?  Many would argue that a person owns his/her body yet, even today young men are forced to register for the draft young men and hypothetically can be forced into war. Does the draft symbolize that men between the ages of 18 and 22 do not own their bodies?  

Leviticus argues that no society can long survive if the individual is its final arbiter.  From Leviticus’ perspective our responsibilities are not only to ourselves, but to our community, to the land, to G-d, and to time. Thus, we are not free to pick our own Sabbaths, but rather all Israel must make the seventh day holy. In a like manner, we fast on Yom Kippur, if that is a convenient or inconvenient day to fast.  Through this communal ownership of time, we transform Saturday into a “cathedral of time.”

Leviticus would not agree with the approach that many moderns take: that the individual is the final judge of his/her own action, it would call the use of a term “my truth” to be close to fascism. Leviticus would argue that truth is truth, no matter what a person says. Leviticus argues that the ‘my truth” concept leads to the “cult of individualism” and a lack of community and communal responsibilities. In that case all will suffer from a world of selfishness, isolation, anomie, and alienation.  What do you think?  When does your freedom end and societal responsibility begin?