Counting Time: Parashat Behar
This week, we read Parashat Behar, a short Torah portion (of only a single chapter!) that, despite its brevity, is packed with wisdom. Leviticus 25 focuses on two big concepts, both related to the counting of time: the sabbatical (shmitah) year, whereby the land rests for a year in each seven year cycle, and the jubilee (yoveil), which features a proclamation of freedom and laws concerning the manumission of slaves every 50th year.
This parasha echoes in so many ways and on so many levels this year! I would like to share just a couple of ways that these key concepts feel relevant to me in this moment:
1) Sabbatical:
"When you enter the land that I assign to you, the land shall observe a sabbath of the Lord. Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year, the land shall have a sabbat of complete rest, a sabbath of the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land..." (Lev. 25:2-5).
As you probably recall, last year around this time, I took my first ever professional sabbatical. Just this week, R&R (the organization that had provided generous grant funding to Kavana to support my 3-months off) released an evaluation of their pilot sabbatical grant program. You're welcome to click here to learn more, but in a nutshell, they concluded that in nonprofit organizations:
Sabbaticals are transformative for those who take them, with a significant impact on well-being and burnout. They are powerful perspective-changing experiences and important for retention and productivity.
Sabbaticals strengthen organizations by deepening the bench of leadership at the staff level.
Sabbaticals help build healthy boards by creating opportunities to think about staff wellness, deepen relationships between board and staff, and begin long-term succession planning.
Sabbaticals create healthier and more effective ecosystems.
All of these findings ring true with our experience of sabbatical here at Kavana. Whether we are talking about letting land lie fallow (asParashat Beharadvocates) or encouraging an employee to take a break from work in order to return re-energized,sabbatical is a powerful tool all around.
This past weekend, Kavana's Annual Partner Meeting wasn't exactly a sabbatical, but it, too, served as an example of how we implement generative breaks in organizational work. Preparation for this meeting required the Kavana board to step back and reflect on what we've done together over the past year and how this work has moved our community forward. Taking a periodic pause in this way gives us a chance to lift up our heads collectively and gain perspective, celebrate our accomplishments and achievements, and then return to our work with renewed certainty that we are headed in the right direction. (That layer of meaningful reflection/pause, paired with the buzz of energy that happens when great people congregate and a bountiful snack table, certainly helped make our 2024 Annual Partner Meeting feel both pleasurable and productive!)
Parashat Behar forces us to think about these cycles in time, both short and long, and ensure that we take time to step back and refrain from doing, creating and dominating. The concept of sabbatical can and should be applied on multiple levels, as it has the potential to lead to greater health and well-being not only for land, but also for us, on a personal/individual level, and collectively for our organizations and communities.
2) Jubilee:
"You shall count off seven weeks of years -- seven times seven years -- so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the horn loud; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month -- the Day of Atonement -- you shall have the horn sounded throughout your land, and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to his holding and each of you shall return to his family..." (Lev. 25:8-10).
In his commentary on Parashat Behar, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks highlights the economic justice aspect of this Torah portion as he talks about the way that it provides “a unique solution to the otherwise intractable conflict between two fundamental ideals: freedom and equality.” He writes:
"Much of human history has illustrated the fact that you can have freedom without equality (laissez-faire economics), or equality without freedom (communism, socialism), but not both. The powerful insight of the Torah is that you can have both, but not at the same time. Therefore time itself has to become part of the solution, in the form of the seventh year and, after seven sabbatical cycles, the Jubilee. These become periodic corrections to the distortions of the free market that allow some to become rich while others suffer the loss of land, home, and even freedom. Through the periodic liberation of slaves, release of debts, and restoration of ancestral lands, the Torah provides a still-inspiring alternative to individualism on the one hand, collectivism on the other."
Rabbi Sacks lived in Britain, but reading his commentary this year, it feels like he is speaking directly to us in this American election year. What does it mean to live in a capitalist society that privileges individual rights, but also know that we must strive to take care of our collective needs as well? How do we uphold the principles of both freedom and equality simultaneously? In the contest between Republicans and Democrats at every level of government, there are very concrete differences when it comes to the two parties' visions regarding to the answers these questions and how to achieve the proper balance. Without making voting recommendations about specific candidates or parties (which Kavana cannot, as a 501c3), I wouldencourage you to read Leviticus 25 and think about the values that animate Parashat Behar's insistence on the Jubilee cycle, in particular.
Finally, the sabbatical and jubilee cycles of our Torah portion are tied together by a focus on counting. The idea that we are constantly counting -- numbering both our days and our years -- certainly resonates right now, as Jews worldwide are counting the Omer (today is day 31) and also the number of days of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza (today is day 231). May Parashat Behar's focus on counting cycles of time inspire us to make our time count! And may we live to see a world that benefits from cycles of rest, a world in which we can "proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants," and where freedom and equality can be upheld simultaneously.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum
