Sabbaticals and change.
This Week's portion begins with (Lev 25:2-6)
Speak to the people of Israel, and say to them, When you come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a Sabbath to the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in its fruit; But in the seventh year shall be a Sabbath of rest to the land, a Sabbath for the Lord; you shall not sow your field, nor prune your vineyard. That which grows of its own accord of your harvest you shall not reap, nor gather the grapes of your vine undressed; for it is a year of rest to the land. And the sabbath produce of the land shall be food for you; for you, and for your servant, and for your maid, and for your hired servant, and for the stranger who sojourns with you,
This begins a description of some fascinating institutions, the Sabbatical and Jubilee years. Every seven years, there is to be a year of rest for the land, where it will remain fallow. The year after the seventh Sabbatical year there will be another Sabbatical year, the jubilee year, where the land would remain fallow, and there would be a full economic reset.
Bothe the jubilee and sabbatical are not observed anymore. Yet I wonder as to the importance of the Sabbatical in the modern world. There are three different cycles of rest in Torah. Of course, there is Shabbat. Every seven days we are to rest for a day. Then there is the sabbatical, where every seven years we let the land rest for a year. Finally there is the period of seven sabbaticals, the jubilee, where we let the land rest another year. Over and over again, we have the magic number seven. Indeed in caculating the Jubilee, Lev 25:8 Mentions the number seven, the number of rest, four times. Hechel is his wonderful book The Sabbath gives the metaphor of Shabbat as an island in time where we get the chance to witness creation. But, to misquote Thomas Merton, no man is an island, but a whole continent. There are things that happen over a bigger amount of time that require a different perspective. One can see this in one story of the Jewish wonder-worker Honi the circle maker. [Taanit 23a]
One day he was journeying on the road and he saw a man planting a carob tree; he asked him, How long does it take [for this tree] to bear fruit? The man replied: Seventy years. He then further asked him: Are you certain that you will live another seventy years? The man replied: I found [ready grown] carob trees in the world; as my forefathers planted these for me so I too plant these for my children.
Honi sat down to have a meal and sleep overcame him. As he slept a rocky formation enclosed upon him which hid him from sight and he continued to sleep for seventy years. When he awoke he saw a man gathering the fruit of the carob tree and he asked him, Are you the man who planted the tree? The man replied: I am his grandson. Thereupon he exclaimed: It is clear that I slept for seventy years.
Through assimilation of folklore with Germanic culture, where such a story also appears in the works of the brothers Grimm, this story may have found its way to the pen of Washing Irving in his famous short story Rip van Winkle. Yet in this story there is an important lesson: there are things we cannot see in the immediate situation which are clear when we look far more long term. There are things, like the carob tree, which take time to change. We cannot witness the change in the short term of seven days. Change, measured in seven years and fifty years, lets us see the world around us and witness the world around us in ways that seven days does not.
Punctuating this for me this week is my second attempt at chanting Torah. As I explained a few months ago, one of my goals is to learn all of the trop marks and thus to be able to chant Torah and Haftorah. So when a friend asked me to chant this week’s portion, I looked at the first few lines of the portion, saw they weren’t too bad with new trop to learn and said yes -- which I’ll admit was a bit of a mistake. It was a mistake because the next few lines are incredibly full of interesting new trop, meaning I would have to learn a lot more than I thought I was going to. Yet as I learn the Telisha Gedolah, Gershayim, and Yitiv with a few more common Revii and Tevir phrases thrown in, all of which I hadn’t learned before, I noticed something about this portion, and why these marks are so thick in this portion.
The Telisha Gedolah (right leaning lollipop), Gershayim (end double quote), and Revii (diamond) trop marks all have long emphatic and incredibly expressive sounds associated with them. This is the kind of sounds that cantors and opera singers get the big bucks for since they can expressively sing such phrases. Such emphasis often starts the verses in the passage of sabbaticals and jubilees. Such an emphasis I believe is not to merely make the chant sound better. It is making a point, an underline. It stresses the need for the Sabbatical and jubilee, even when we no longer let the land rest. But as a beginner trying to learn all this stuff, I noticed something else as well -- How difficult it is to keep all these long expressive notes separate in my mind. They come too close together and in such abundance and I’m constantly getting confused. It’s been five months since I tried for the first time to read Torah. I think it would have been easier to learn the Telisha Gedolah and the Revii with a few months in between each.
Like Rip van Winkle and Honi, longer passages of time help us to have a different perspective on what is important in life, and like my trop, make learning somewhat easier. Getting intensive to learn these little marks on the page so I can chant properly on Saturday, I realized something about myself - my own intensity in the short term might be affecting my life in the long term. Such intensity of study and work cuts me off from everything, It thus makes me anti-social to an extent and incredibly disorganized as I found out when I lost a final exam I was supposed to correct some errors on. Honi was known to be one of those sages who always lived intensely in the moment, and didn’t understand the long term, in turn alienating his colleagues to the point they wanted to excommunicate him. Tragically, it is in the long term Honi learns a very important and sadly permanent lesson:
He [Honi] returned home. He there enquired, “Is the son of Honi the Circle-Drawer still alive?” The people answered him, “His son is no more, but his grandson is still living.” Thereupon he said to them: “I am Honi the Circle-Drawer,” but no one would believe him. He then repaired to the Beth Hamidrash and there he overheard the scholars say, “The law is as clear to us as in the days of Honi the Circle-Drawer, for whenever he came to the Beth Hamidrash he would settle for the scholars any difficulty that they had.” Whereupon he called out, “I am he;” but the scholars would not believe him nor did they give him the honor due to him. This hurt him greatly and he prayed [for death] and he died. Raba said: Hence the saying, Either companionship or death.
Like Honi, without a continuing relationship, while our legacy may continue or even change from derision to great honor, we are forgotten. While the sabbatical is about the land resting, it is the seventh year and fiftieth year where we spend our entire year relating to everyone, and doing the repairs necessary to the relationships in our lives that we cannot do in a day. In eating produce we didn’t cultivate that year, we realize another relationship even more important: the one with God. Food we eat is made with us or without us. Cultivation may maximize yield, but life continues with us or without us. We do not want to forget God, nor God to forget us and thus should spend that year of Sabbatical connecting not just to each other but to God as well. It is very intentional that the Jubilee begins not on Rosh Hashanah but on Yom Kippur, when we ready to confess and ask for forgiveness. We ask for forgiveness not just for a year, but for a half century of ignoring things we didn’t see in the short term. Like Honi, our relationships have changed radically in the fifty-year period - and its time to seriously ask for forgiveness
I’m going to spend a rather intense few days getting ready for this reading. I can think that my third reading will go much smoother since I will know a lot more than I did before (or at least I hope so). Yet I also got cranky at people more than once this week, and had to cut short many a social event just to study. April through July was supposed to be for me a mini-sabbatical, a time to stop all my classes and try to relate to people more. That I volunteered for this also shows the temptation to go back to getting intense, one I’m sure the farmers of biblical Israel felt as well. But the sabbatical is for us to stop and look around our world and to seriously contemplate how we are to change ourselves to keep our relationships alive and well.
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