Unscrolled, Behar-Bechukotai: A Number of Harvests

In Parashat Behar-Bechukotai, God commands Moses concerning the agricultural and economic arrangements to be practiced in promised land. The Israelites are to reap and sow for six years, and in the seventh year, they are to let the land rest. The fiftieth year, after the completion of seven of these cycles, will be a “Jubilee” year. Debts will be forgiven and slaves freed. Land will be remitted to its original owners.

The Israelites are not to sell land permanently, for it isn’t truly theirs to sell. “The land is Mine,” God reminds them. “You are but strangers residing with me.” (Leviticus 25:23). One must therefore set the price of land according to the amount of time until the next Jubilee year. After all, it is not really land that one is selling but rather “a number of harvests” (Ibid 25:16).

These are radical commandments. God’s vision is for an economy of impermanence, one in which all ownership is borrowing. In many ways it sounds utopic — an antidote to our modern world, in which wealth is seized and hoarded by the few while the land is exploited nonstop for resources.

But for all its revolutionary potential, impermanence can be a terrifying notion. That which is fleeting reminds us inevitably of that which is most fleeting of all — life itself. As Moses says in Psalm 90, “We spend our years like a sigh. The span of our life is seventy years, or, given the strength, eighty years; but the best of them are trouble and sorrow. They pass by speedily, and we are in darkness.” (Psalms 90:9).

This is the only psalm whose authorship is attributed to Moses himself. Throughout the Torah, his subjective voice is muted — subsumed into the flow of the divine words being channeled through him. As a prophet he is present, but as a man, he is silent. Here, in Psalm 90, his voice is recovered. Through these words we can know Moses as Moses knew himself. We find him vulnerable and afraid, weary from life but unready to die.

As a prophet, Moses is present, but as a man, he is silent.

If we had to guess as to when in his prophetic career he wrote this psalm, it would be a safe bet to say that it was sometime during the Book of Numbers. After all, that’s when most of his troubles will befall him. That’s when his closest kin, Miriam and Aaron, will pass away. And that’s when God will condemn him to die without ever entering the holy land.

But it is also possible to imagine that the writing of Psalm 90 took place right here, in Parashat Behar-Bechukotai.

There are different traditions about how Moses received the Torah. Some say that he received it scroll by scroll, writing down the story of the Israelites in real-time as it unfolded. But there are also those who say that Moses received the entire Torah, from beginning to end, on Mount Sinai.

If we accept this second scenario, then it would be during this week’s parashah, the last parashah dealing with the Sinai revelation, that Moses would complete the writing of the Torah. With the whole story of his life set thusly before him, he would be able to see with Godlike perspective how fleeting and painful the life of man is. As the Talmud relates, “The Holy One, Blessed be He, dictated, and Moses wrote with tears” (Bava Batra 15a).

Perhaps, then, it was here that Moses turned away from writing God’s words in order to pen his small poem. After all, at the heart of these laws of land and commerce is a truth about our mortal condition, our vulnerability, our impermanence.

Like the land, our lives are ours to borrow, not to own. They are short. They contain both suffering and joy, and the best we can hope for is a fair balance. They are an unknown “number of harvests,” a quantity of winters and springtimes, new and full moons, goings to bed and risings up —  entrusted to our stewardship for the blink of an eye.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.