Podcast #68: Parashat Behar

Shalom! This week's parashah, Bahar, is very powerful. It's the 32nd parashah and we are 60% through the Torah. It has 737 words and 24 mitzvot. The parashah starts with God sending a message to Moses on Mount Sinai, even though we are in the middle of the book of Leviticus. The theme of the parashah is Shemitah, which means letting go. The speaker shares a story about being at Masada with 106th graders when unexpected heavy rain caused their plans to be ruined. Despite the challenges, the kids had a great time in the tents and the speaker was eventually able to make it to a bar mitzvah, albeit late. The story illustrates the theme of letting go. Shalom Shlomo, Shalom Alesha and hi to everyone, we have a very very special parashah this week. Of course every parashah is special but this one is very very very powerful. It's called Bahar, on the mountain, on the mountain top and it's referring to Mount Sinai and Shlomo chose a particular parashah which was a very memorable and somewhat traumatic experience. So just a couple of words about Bahar, it's the 32nd parashah. So we are 60% through the Torah already, time is flying. Bahar is short and it packs a powerful bunch. 737 words, 24 mitzvot, 7 positive, 17 lotasen, negative ones and we are at Har Sinai. I guess we are there for a year which is a bit surprising. Right and it's important to stress here that we have actually forgotten we are at the bottom of Mount Sinai and Rashi makes a big deal of the fact that the parashah is starting with God sent to Moses on Mount Sinai. Yeah we are at the bottom of Mount Sinai but we are in the middle of the book of Leviticus and last time we heard about Mount Sinai was in the book of Shemot of Exodus when we received the tablets and built the tabernacle. Why all of a sudden mention Mount Sinai? That's a very key thing Rashi says. He asks a very famous question which in Hebrew is a famous idiom. What's the connection between Shemitah which is the theme of this parashah, Shemitah and Mount Sinai? Whenever someone wants to say, what are you talking about? What's the connection between what you are saying and what we are talking about? We use this idiom. What's the connection between Shemitah and Mount Sinai? It's a very clear connection. So I've chosen this drashah. It's from your book Ayyaka, the English version of your drashah and it's a very unusual drashah. It's a story. It's one long story to illustrate one point and the point is letting go which is also the theme of Behar. You talk about leading a group to Mitzadah. Maybe first, a lot of our listeners may not be familiar with the Tali schools which I think is an absolutely wonderful thing. Maybe a couple of words about Tali because you are leading a group of 6th graders from 100 6th graders to Mitzadah from the Tali Tzafari Rim school in Hadera. What is Tali? So Tali is a program for secular schools, an advanced Jewish studies program in secular schools and I used to serve as the rabbi of Tali, of all the schools in Israel and created a lot of programs and hired many rabbis to be in different schools and basically these are secular kids who, unlike American Jewish schools, day schools, people might think that here in Israel, oh it's all in Hebrew, we study the Torah and everything. Jewish education in the secular schools is really, really poor. They learn hardly anything and even the holidays, they are repeating the same basic information. Hanukkah is all about the miraculous, the oil that lasts for 8 days and that's the extent of it. There is very little beyond that. So the Tali school system is trying to do more than that and this particular program is one of my notorious programs where we go at the end of their elementary school education. All the kids, with their parents, after doing the whole process and learning about Bar Mitzvah and everything, we go up to Mitzvah. We spend about, not quite 24 hours but close enough, sleep very little and do all kinds of amazing programming where they are like a pre-Bar Mitzvah kind of initiation program. So Elisha, can you tell us briefly the story about how you were at the bottom of Mount Mitzvah with 106th graders and some challenges arise. What happens? Right, so there are actually two sides to Masada. If you have ever been to Masada, there is the side that everybody knows where you take a cable car up to the top of the mountain or you climb the snake path. That was not where we were at. We were at the western side of Masada where you have the very famous Roman ramp. So you are already like really close to the top there and all that's left is very early in the morning to storm the mountain on the Roman ramp. It takes, if you run up and the kids, they run up, it will take them about 15 minutes. For us elderly, it will take us about 25, half an hour. So we were on the western side of Masada, close to the city, the town of Arad, if you are familiar with that city. And we were there for a number of reasons, among other things because we always started with a sound and light show. There is a beautiful sound and light show which is, if you have seen it many years ago, there is a new sound and light show, it is really spectacular. And there we were, 100 kids or so, perhaps even a bit more, and their parents and their teachers and me. And I have seen this so many times that I was doing other things while the sound and light show was going on, was being performed and I am hearing these thunders coming from the west and I am turning around, turning my head to look west and I am seeing lightning. Now we are talking about May, end of May, really rare for rains in Israel, end of May, all the more so in Masada. It doesn't rain in Masada, it is a desert. We said the Pilate tells prayer for dew a month ago. Right, right, so there should be no more rains. And lo and behold, it was spectacular. I actually have pictures, I have pictures of the lightning and it didn't occur to me that I should be worried. I mean, hey, this is coming our way and that could be a very dangerous thing, but it just didn't occur to me. And remember, for those who know the area, it is an area known for floods. The rains don't usually fall there. They fall up in the Judean Desert and they accumulate and they appear as floods in the area of the Dead Sea and that could be terribly deadly and dangerous. Because the ground doesn't absorb the water. It absorbs a tiny bit and then becomes saturated and then the water just runs off. Right, and you see flash floods, which are a spectacular sight. There are people who chase after these floods to film them, but if you are caught in a flood, you don't come out of it alive. Because there are stones, huge boulders that come down the mountains in those creeks there. And I just thought I was really so thrilled with that beautiful, spectacular sight of these lightnings. But then, sure enough, as the Sound and Light show ended, we were making our way back and I'm cutting a long story short. It's all in the book if you want to read the book. You can get it off Kindle, called Ayeka, and the rain arrives. Now again, it rarely rains in Masada. Floods, yes, but the rains are usually further up the mountains. And to cut a very long story short, all of our plans were totally ruined. We got to do nothing of our plans. We were supposed to go up to, after having a whole night program, to go to climb Masada for sunrise. No such luck. It became very clear by 4 o'clock in the morning that the rain is still raining and the area is flooded and paths were destroyed. It was really, really bad. How did the kids take all this? Well, they were in tents, like these big Bedouin tents. They were sheltered from the rain. And they had a ball because they were with one another and the parents were also okay. They didn't know that the entire program got totally, totally ruined and they didn't realize the repercussions of it. The issue was that I was supposed to be done with the program by about 6 o'clock in the morning. I was supposed to climb Masada. I do a tour there and that kind of ends our whole overnight program. And then they go down the snake path towards the Dead Sea. I go back down the ramp back to my car and drive very, very fast, drive back to Zichron Yaakov because we had a bar mitzvah that day at 12 o'clock that I had to get back to, which I knew gave me plenty of time on the way to change clothes and to become a rabbi again. So around 6 o'clock in the morning or a bit earlier, I can't remember, I get in my car, I say goodbye to the principal, I tell him I'm sorry that this is how the program fell through and I start making my way in my little car. It was a new car, quite a new car, but very small. I usually buy small cars. And basically I got stuck along the way with tons of rubble and water and mud. And thanks to a number of Bedouins along the way, those Bedouins who were sent by God, clearly sent by God. Now the whole time I'm really not concerned about the car too much. I'm not concerned even about, you know, so I can get stuck there. And at some point I called the police and the police told me not to move, not to go, it's dangerous, there are other cars stuck here, there are buses stuck here, don't get out of the car, there could be flash floods. But that was not my concern, my concern was there's a bar mitzvah. And I will mention there was a special needs kid who worked really hard for this bar mitzvah. I cannot, I cannot be late for this bar mitzvah, but I'm stuck in the middle of the desert. If only I could get to Arad somehow, I could maybe take a taxi even, and leave my car there and send a tow truck or something. But I couldn't even get to Arad, which is a half an hour away from that place in the desert. So with two rounds of help with Bedouins, they, you need to read the Rasha to get all the details, but they, I can't, to this very day I don't understand how they helped me get this tiny little car, just out, like maneuvered me out of all these obstacles. I got to Arad, there was some damage to the car, not too bad, and I went to a garage just to make sure that I could, I can continue driving. And I made it, not on time, I was 45 minutes late to the bar mitzvah, but nevertheless made it. Because there in the desert there was very little reception, but once I got to Arad I could talk to Aviva and warn her that I'm kind of, Waze was in operation again. So they waited for me for the bar mitzvah and we had an amazing, amazing, amazing bar mitzvah. But it was all about, basically the theme of this Rasha is all about, as you said, Shmita means to let go, let go of the land. You know, the sabbatical year, the seventh year, you let go of your ownership over the land. It's not yours. Everyone can come to this land and pick whatever they want, and you're not to make any money out of your fields and your orchards. Why is this related to letting go, what you experienced? Oh, right, that's a very good question. Throughout the whole, from the first moment that the clouds set in and the storm began, first of all, all of our plans were totally ruined. And you have to understand that we had plenty of meetings leading up to this. Masada was the end of a long process and quite a lot of money was also spent on it. Like you have a hundred kids and their parents make all the way down from Hadera, which is not far from Zichron, all the way down to Masada. And this is their last event at school before they leave that school and move on. This is a big, big, big, big deal. And so every part of the program we had to let go of. And so we said, OK, the rain will stop at some point and we will resume the program. But it didn't stop. And even when it did stop for a little bit, there were floods all around. We couldn't leave the tents. And then the following morning, leaving the place, I thought once I left, OK, thank God this is over. I'm heading out of here. Every time I hit another hurdle, and we're talking about serious hurdles along the way, there was nothing I could do. I called the police and they said, you know, it will take us a few hours to get to you. Just don't leave the car. Whatever you do, don't leave the car. And I have a bar mitzvah to get to. So I had to let go of that. So every few minutes there was another reminder, Elisha, you are not in control. You have no control over the situation. Let go. Just let go. Wow. So, letting go. It turns out, according to Rabbi Sachs and other rabbinim, that Behar really is a seminal parasha. It's small, 737 words, but powerful. And Rabbi Sachs explains why it's so powerful. Because, I quote, it had a transformative impact on the social structure of ancient Israel. Behar is crucial because it embodies two crucial principles that Judaism has brought to the world. The first is freedom. Freeing the slaves. Blowing the shofar. Yom Kippur and freeing the slaves. Freeing the land. Returning the land back to its original owners. Freedom. But also equality. Because when you have freedom, people are free to express themselves, to become wealthy, to acquire land. Some people are really good at it. Some people are really great farmers, herdsmen. And some people are really poor. So, by definition, freedom is a mechanism that creates great gaps in what people have in their wealth and income. And then we have the principle of equality. A society with huge gaps in income and wealth, very poor and very rich, it's not a just society. And there's a clash between freedom and equality. Freedom generates inequality. What do we do? How do we solve the conflict? And at Parshat Behar, most of the mitzvot is related to the Shemitah. And the Shemitah says, okay, so you have some really rich people and they acquired huge tracts of land. Okay. 50th year. It goes back to the original owners. And we equal things. Equal things again. I looked this up in history. I don't think it was ever really applied. No. It wasn't applied in practice. It's one of those things that's a brilliant idea and really, really hard to do. I can't even imagine how we might even try that today. Right. But I do know, Elisha, we need something similar to it. I'm a numbers guy, so here are some numbers and they're shocking. The United States. In 1982, in the United States, there were 13 billionaires. 13. Barely a minyan of billionaires. If you had a mitzvah, a prayer, and you called for the billionaires, you could form a minyan, but that was about it. In 2024, 756 billionaires. Why? Because 10, 15 years ago, the average tax rate on billionaires was 56%. Today, the average is 25%, which is less than most working people, and the truth is that most millionaires and billionaires don't pay taxes at all. There are so many ways that you can evade paying taxes. President Trump was really good at that and found ways to do that. So, we have equality. Sorry, we have freedom, which is capitalism, the freedom to acquire wealth and become a billionaire, but we don't have equality, and if you don't have equality, in the end, you're not going to have freedom either. Why? Because at least these billionaires have used their funds to build lobbying efforts and change the laws in their favor and support anti-democratic governments. We have elections in half the world this year, and in more countries in the world than not, there are autocratic leaders Democracy isn't a minority now, and it's going downhill. We didn't learn the lesson from Parshad Behar Alisha. We need freedom, we need equality, but you need to find a way to resolve the inherent conflict between them. Behar has a suggestion. It doesn't mean we have to have a jubilee year. We can simply tell the billionaires, okay, you did well, now we need to use your resources to help all those people who need it. Right, so I want to just clarify something and then come back to the issue that you're raising. There are two main issues here in Parshad Behar. One is the seventh year, the Shemitah year, which is like a Sabbath for the land, and the other is, as you mentioned, is the 50th year. These are two separate things. They're connected, and they're also the same parasha, and 50 is like 7 times 7, and then plus 1. So really, on the jubilee year, the Shemitah has been observed and is observed. It's observed in Israel, but the jubilee year, already from the time of the sages, Rabbi Hillel, the elder, he already basically annulled the jubilee year. It's very famous. It's a famous, it's called Pulsbul, where he annulled the jubilee. It just wasn't practical. It's so extreme, it's so utopic that it was impossible to implement it. However, I think what you're taking out of it, with the help of Rabbi Sachs and others, is we're taking the intention. Even if we're not fulfilling the jubilee year to the letter, and, for example, the hardest thing is returning the lands to their original owner. Who are the original owners? That will be very, very difficult. And secondly, it would mean there's no equality there because if I wasn't an original owner, then I may not have any land at all. And for many, many other reasons. Debts were released, etc. However, there's still the spirit of the law. And there are groups in Israel today who are taking it upon themselves to take the jubilee idea and see how they can implement parts of it, if not all of it. But we're not going to get the practicalities of that because we don't have time and it's not necessarily our field. But I think what I want to take from what you're saying is what I'm really drawn to in this parasha is the notion that you don't truly own it. And all these billionaires that you're talking about, all the landowners, Judaism is okay with people being wealthy. It's fine. It's really okay. As usual, the question is, what do you do with your money? Do you bring blessing with it? Do other people benefit from it? Or do you create these lobbies where you just benefit from it and others are enslaved to your policies and your dreams and your fantasies? And the fact always infuriates me. And I've heard it so many times from so many people. The fact, as you said, that the wealthy are the ones who pay the least amount of tax and the poor or the middle class are paying most of the taxes. It's really outrageous and problematic. But as a rabbi, what I'm really drawn to is this notion of we really don't own anything. We don't own any of the stuff. We don't own the money. We don't own the land. We don't own the air. We don't own the water. We have an illusion of ownership. We act as if we do. Exactly. We act as if we do. We feel as if we do. But we really don't. We come into this world naked. And all we have for a number of years, we have this body. And we leave the world naked as well. And it was the Egyptians, the Egyptian pharaohs, who when they were buried in the pyramids, they were buried with all their wealth and their wives and their slaves. They couldn't take the land with them. But they were supposed to carry them with them to the next world. And Judaism comes here and says, the Torah says, The world belongs to me, to God, and not to you. And that is so radical, so powerful. And with the Jubilee year, they sound the trumpets and call, And you called out, Freedom in the land. Radical, radical, radical freedom. But it's not the capitalistic kind of freedom. The capitalistic kind of freedom is the freedom to own more. And here's the freedom from ownership. Freedom that you don't own anything whatsoever. Let it go. That's the freedom. These are two very different kinds of freedom. Capitalistic freedom is from the notion of, You have the freedom to own more and more and more. And the Torah says, You have the freedom from ownership. Let it go. It doesn't belong to you. And it's a giant. That's why it comes from Mount Sinai, from the source. Rashi says, This is such a deep concept, this idea of letting go, That if Moshe just said it out of the blue, Then people say, Okay, okay, let's move on to the next law. But I'm saying, Hey guys, listen, this is from the source. This is from Mount Sinai. Absolutely. And you know, Elisha, We read the Torah as a moral document. How to live a good life. But it's actually a very practical document. Even though we've just said that the Jubilee year isn't very practical. But the Shemitah, the seventh year, really is. And I have a small story. So I grew up in Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan is the Great Plains. Huge fields of waving wheat. And farmers raised wonderful wheat crops. Tall as your head. And they did this year after year. And ignored the principle of the seventh year of the fallow, Of the summer fallow. In 1930, there was a drought. And then some really strong winds. And within a year or two, The topsoil, the really rich soil, That the wheat needs, The topsoil blew away. And then there was no crops. This was the start of the Great Depression. And in Saskatchewan, it lasted for ten years. In all the agricultural areas, ten years. With very, very few or none, no crops. Because the topsoil had blown away. And the farmers hadn't realized they need to let the land rest. You let the land rest. And it restores itself. It builds its nitrogen. If you try and extract nitrogen from the soil year after year, In the end, nothing will grow there. So we learned a bitter lesson. My parents ran a general store in a small farming town. I wasn't born yet. But they were there for the whole Depression. And apropos of freedom and equality, My father helped poor farmers. In many cases, when they didn't have money to buy food, The general store provided it for them. So they could pay it back later. It was a terrible time of suffering. It was a time when the Americans introduced legislation. Unemployment insurance and social security. That came out of the Great Depression. So we learned these bitter lessons, Alicia. But sometimes we get the right conclusion. And one more short comment. There's another principle buried in the Parshat Behar, In the Shemitah, in the 7th year. And it's the principle of not only letting go, But setting aside, not using up everything. So here's the thing. If the 7th year is a year of fallow, You're not allowed to use the produce. Some produce grows wild. So the 6th year, you have to store quite a lot of food. Because you can't grow food in the 7th year. And then the 8th year, Okay, so the 8th year you plant. But it takes another year for the crops to come up. So in the 6th year, you need food for the 7th year, Shemitah, the 8th year. And then part of the 9th year, Takes time for the crops to grow. Set aside, save. Treat the land with respect. And don't be greedy. That's another lesson. Right. And one of the big messages of Behar, As you mentioned there, Is kind of testing our faith. Saying like, you know, God will provide. I.e., on the 6th year, there's going to be abundance. Because of abundance, you'll be able to store things. And let's just remember that storage is not easy. There were no refrigerators at the time. Storage may require salt. And salt was very, very expensive. So they had to dry things up. Things were dried up. And that's not easy. But nevertheless, I guess there were ways of doing it. And it's trusting. It's really trusting that you're going to have enough. Or the religious term would be, God will provide. So it's letting go comes along. If you don't trust the process, If you don't trust life, If you don't trust that God will provide, Then letting go is very, very difficult. Yes. And I might mention, Alisha, I looked this up, I found a book with the title, The Art of Letting Go. It's by an author named Damon Zauriades. How to let go of the past, Look forward to the future, And finally enjoy the emotional freedom you deserve. So this is a principle of psychotherapy. We are chained to our past. Sometimes people with trauma relive it again and again and again. And part of becoming a strong and well person is letting go of not only material things, but letting go of all these dragons and dreams and nightmares that shadow us from our past. And looking to the future. So letting go is not just a principle of equality in Bihar. It's also part of our mental health. Yes. I want to share a little story. Yesterday I was sitting here with a family. It was actually a single mom and her son and her parents, the grandparents. And the son was severely mentally handicapped. I'm not so sure what the current terms are right now in English. But he doesn't communicate. And he's agitated most of the time. And we're going to do his Bar Mitzvah. He deserves to have a Bar Mitzvah. His mother deserves to have a Bar Mitzvah for him and his grandparents too. And it was a pretty powerful meeting where we were talking about having a Bar Mitzvah. I don't know how much he understood from what was going on in this conversation even. The grandfather says he understands everything. He just can't express himself. Well, it didn't seem as if he was understanding, but hopefully he does. And at some point the grandfather said, the grandfather and the grandmother are very, very supportive of the mother. She has two older children. They're twins actually. And they're living with the grandparents and they're really, really, really helping out. And you can imagine this kid needs a lot of help. And at some point the grandfather said, yes, and I'm so worried. I'm so worried about this kid. What will happen after we're no longer alive? Now, I'm familiar with that concern, obviously. It's a genuine concern. It's an authentic concern. It's a real concern. And I understand where it's coming from. But I was looking at the mother as he was saying that. And she didn't seem to share his concern. Maybe because he was older than she was. I don't know. But I don't think that was the reason. She kept on just hugging this kid. He had this round, round face. She kept on pinching his cheek and kissing him and cuddling him. And he wasn't easy. He was resisting a little bit. And she was smothering him with love. And at some point when he was repeating it over and over again, she said to him, stop, stop. He will be okay. It will all be okay. He will be fine. He'll be okay. And it was really amazing. Because will he be okay? I don't know. When she's no longer around, who is going to take care of him? Will it be someone who loves him just as much as she does? Clearly not. But she made this conscious decision. There's nothing I can do about it. I am letting go. Telling her dad, let it go. Let it go. Let's smother him with love as long as we still can. And do the best we can right now, here and now. What will happen in the future? Who knows. It's not in our hands. And that's a huge, huge, huge lesson in letting go. Absolutely. There's something else really powerful in this parasha. Again, Rabbi Sacks points it out. There are two kinds of time that we find in the Torah. We find cyclical time, which is a form of a circle. The Chagim. We return to Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Pesach, Shavuot. And this repeats the cycle of life. Birth and death. So there's time that's a circle. There's time that's linear. The past, the present, and the future. And there's always a clash between these two kinds of time. And I think there's a third kind of time, Elisha. And it's related to letting go. And I call it non-linear time. A small story about non-linear time. On Monday, I did a workshop with a high-tech company. It was a kickoff for their innovation project. They need to reinvent some of their products. And they're going to work together and come up with new ideas and conquer the world. It's a very hard time to do that. And I offered them a possible tool. And I called it a photograph of the future. So use your imagination and envision not the past, but the future. Perhaps the future of this young man who was bar mitzvahed. And envision it as you wish it. A vision of the future. A photograph, a special camera that can take a picture of what things will be like five years from now. And be very concrete. Because the more detail you put on it, the more real it becomes. And then non-linear time, you turn the arrow of time backwards. And you work backwards from your vision. And then you ask yourself, what do I need to do today so that this vision will come about in five years? So you kind of reverse time. And sometimes it can be really powerful. In some ways, it's a form of letting go. We let go of the mess that we're in in the present. And we envision something better. But it can't stop there. Then you have to go backwards and do practical things today to make it better tomorrow. Right. And I want to challenge that a little bit. I don't know if we have much time. Probably not a lot of time. We have to end probably shortly. Two minutes. Two minutes. Okay. I would kind of argue, because in a word, you have to argue, that so you have this vision of the future, which I love. It's really beautiful. You visualize the future. And when you start making your way back in order to now plan the steps to get to that future, I think part of letting go is letting go of two things here. One, we're going to envision the future, but we're going to recognize that the future can be even that much better than we're even imagining it. If we're imagining and then we want to force this future on reality, then we're limiting reality. So envision the future and letting go of things like saying, this is how right now this future looks really exciting to me. I could even see a mental picture where I'm putting it in a balloon and I'm letting it go. Letting it go. Let go and let God. And then indeed, go back and think, okay, what are the steps that we need to take? But I would argue that even in that process, there's a letting go that can be really helpful. For example, saying, if this is a wise vision for us, then trust God to get us there. Now trust God doesn't mean now let's go to sleep and let's see how this thing happens without any effort. Not at all. But allow ourselves to be carried away and driven by a higher vision, a higher power. That's what faith is all about. We'll be there to do the work. We'll be there to do the dirty work. We'll be there to implement it. We'll work really hard to start up. So clearly we're going to work very hard. But really do the envisioning, do the planning, but at the same time, a seventh of your effort, let go and let God. Otherwise you are binding your vision to something that could be even that much greater than you can even imagine. Absolutely agreed. I'm blessed to get to work with incredible people. When I watch them at work and see what they do, Alicia, I really do believe that they are instruments of God. These amazing ideas come down to them, through them, and they implement them with hard work and sweat and diligence and persistence and courage. But absolutely, they have to come from God, these ideas. There's no other explanation. Yeah, yeah. And it kind of reminds us, maybe if we were a start-up nation, then maybe the reason we're a start-up nation is because we have this special relationship with God. And there's a covenant here. We're together in this start-up nation vision. God and us Israelis. Absolutely believe that. So we'll wish everyone a good Shabbat of letting go and letting God and see how that works for you. Absolutely. And beware of flash floods. Yes, Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom everyone.