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The Law of Fairness

Parashat Behar-Behukotai 5775/16 May 2015

May 19, 2015

The reading of a double portion of the Torah is, theoretically, an accident of the calendar. There are so many parshiyot and so many weeks in the year and we adjust accordingly. Yet, so often, as we have seen this year, such double readings multiply the experience of meaning far transcending the mere technical explanations. And so it is again this morning.

Parshat B’Hukotai ends by echoing Parshat B’har, creating a literary unit that stands alone within the larger book of Leviticus which it concludes. “The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai” gives the Parsha its name: B’har: “on the mountain.” “These are the commandments that the Lord gave Moses for the Israelite people on Mount Sinai,” closes the double reading and invokes the beginning. The simple question raised by the literary echo can be framed in a number of ways. Where else could Moses be, given the narrative up to this point? Weren’t all the laws given to Moses on Mount Sinai?

Why single these out? How are these laws different form all the others?

A possible context for this emphatic act of locating the provenance of these laws is found in the fact that with the looming beginning of the book of Bamidbar, the beginning of Israel’s journey away from Sinai into the wilderness some emphatic distinction needed to be made between those laws conveyed at Sinai and those that would be conveyed later. Except that no such distinction has any significance on the level of authority of later laws. They all have the equal status of Divine Law.

Rather, it is to the particular nature of the laws contained within these two parshiyot that we must turn for understanding. To put it bluntly: these laws defy reason. They run counter to what we heretofore understood as human nature. To be accepted as anything but the ravings of a mad man, to absorb the challenge being thrown down, that of transforming our understanding of what human nature might truly be, the Torah must emphatically imbue these laws with the patina of Divine Revelation.

That is, in part, what the ascription of Divine Revelation means: laws that transform our understanding of human nature away from conventional wisdom in favor of behavior that is not self-serving – which is what constitutes conventional wisdom.

Who in his right mind would take a day off from work and cease all involvement with material pursuits, whether buying or selling? And, if you can possibly conceive of the utility of such a Sabbath day, who could imagine extending it for a year? And only a madman would suggest that the exigencies of economic life are such that every fifty years all debts should be cancelled, everyone enslaved by the system should go free, all wealth should be equally divided and everyone should be given a new start in life. The entire system of ideas is absurd. Which is precisely why it is ascribed to the Divine, the source of all that conventional human reason deems to be absurd.

Who in his right mind would insist that minimum wage levels for workers, often in the most menial positions, makes sense or that setting those minimal levels should realistically ensure that a person can feed and clothe and educate her family adequately to the standards of the majority? Who in his right mind would insist that adequate access to medical care is an obligation of every civilized society and certainly a civilization that aspires to holiness? Or that the maintenance of exceptional educational resources in a technologically advancing society is a responsibility worthy of the laws of tithing and voluntary taxation described in parshat B’hukotai? And who doubts the possibility of catastrophic social dislocation as described in the Parsha for the society that refuses these seemingly irrational, but truly Divine, ordinances? Behar-B’hukotai is as current as the upcoming presidential campaign.

The Torah emphasizes that God spoke at Sinai to tell the people exactly what they did not want to hear. In that regard God continues to speak from Sinai and we continue not to want to hear.

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