Parshat Behar  15 Iyar 5763, 17 May 2003

By Shlomo Riskin

Efrat, Israel - Both in last week's Torah portion of Emor as well as in this week's Torah portion of Behar we find a commandment to count:

"And you shall count for yourselves seven complete weeks shall there be, from the morrow of the Sabbath (Passover Festival), from the day of your bringing the uplifted omer barley offering, until the morrow of the seventh week; you shall count fifty days..." (Leviticus 23: 15,16)

Let us begin with the counting of the days and weeks between Passover and Shavuot: Passover is the Time of our Freedom, the Festival of Matzot and Shavuot is the Time of the Giving of the Torah, the Festival of the First Fruits. The linkage between these holidays may be seen from the perspective of three different levels: the personal, on the personal level, an individual who is free from obligation - but is without a sense of responsibility, a student on vacation who has nothing constructive to do with his free time, an adult who need not go in to work but who has not accepted for himself a clear code of ethical conduct, can only get into deep trouble as a result of the unsupervised and undirected leisure hours (or days) at his/her disposal. One dare not experience herut, freedom, without a concomitant sense of aharayut, responsibility. Freedom "from" without freedom "for" can lead to maddening boredom; independence without responsible maturity can lead to crime, abuse and self-destruction.

On the national level, a nation which gains its freedom only to enslave its citizenry, a nation which establishes an army and utilizes its soldiers to perpetuate acts of terror against neighboring peoples, has forfeited its right to be a nation, has perverted and vitiated the very concept of independence. This is why the Almighty commands us to unite the Festival of our national freedom, Passover, with the Festival of the Commandments of Sinai, "Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt not steal;" this is why we must connect our first taste of Freedom to the taste of the poor bread-matza which we ate as slaves in Egypt and why we must count the days until we bring the first fruits and declare our obligation to the G-d of the stranger, the orphan and the widow (Deuteronomy 26:11, 12, 13). In effect, the connecting count is telling us that the purpose of our national freedom must be to establish a free society of justice and compassion, predicated upon sharing its bounty with those who are in want. At the very least, a nation is only worthy of freedom and independence if it establishes a non-terrorist democracy, as expressed by President George W. Bush of the United States of America on June 24, 2002.

But it is the third universal level of linkage which brings us to the very mission of the nation of Israel. We read in last week's Torah portion how "You shall not eat (of the new crop of five species of grain) until that very day (the sixteenth of Nissan, the second day of Passover) when you bring the omer barley offering" (Leviticus 23:14). We are then told to count the seven weeks, after which - on the fiftieth day - we are to bring two loaves of leavened bread, "a new minhah offering... first fruits to the Lord" (ibid. 16, 17). The Mishnah explains that "the (Passover) omer barley offering permitted the new crop of the five grains within the land of Israel whereas the (Shavuot) two leaves of bread offering permitted the crop of the five grains within the Holy Temple" (B.T. Menahot 68b).

From this perspective, our count of forty-nine days links the land of Israel to the Holy Temple, the Jewish State to the City of Jerusalem (whose sanctity derives from its position as the Temple Mount). This linkage is perfectly in consonance with the count of the seven Sabbatical Years until the fiftieth Jubilee year in this week's Torah portion of Behar (Leviticus 25:8-10). During the Sabbatical year, the major Biblical mandate is that the land of Israel must lie fallow, in order to enable the land to continue to produce its sustenance and in order to enable even the land-less indigents to express their right to the produce of the homeland in which they share. The fiftieth year, Jubilee is to be announced amidst the shofar sound in the Holy Temple on Yom Kippur, is to be declared sacred by the Sanhedrin within the Temple, and heralds unusual redemption when everyone returns to his ancestral homestead and freedom becomes the recognized legacy of every human being (Leviticus 25:9, 10).

The land (and State) of Israel is to provide produce and secure borders for the children of Israel; the Holy Temple of Jerusalem is to be a House of Prayer for all nations, from whence the Divine message of universal morality and world peace is to emanate to every corner of the globe (Micah 4). Perhaps the right of the Jewish people to live peacefully in Israel is the litmus test as to whether the world is ready to accept an Ethical monotheism which provides for "everyone to sit under his vineyard and fig tree without fear." Undoubtedly, however, our nationalism is a gateway towards the unusual acceptance of every person - no matter by what name he calls his G-d - who accepts the absolute value of "Thou shalt not murder" and "Thou shalt not steal" (Micah 4). The land and State of Israel must be linked to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and humanity must be committed to ethical monotheism if free humanity is to endure.

Shabbat Shalom.

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