This is the week I call catch-up week.

I call it that because six weeks ago, at the end of Pesach/Passover, the Jews in Israel went back to reading the weekly parsha (Torah portion), while the rest of us took an extra day of Pesach and read a special parsha. Since then, Israel has been a week ahead of us in parshas.

This shabbat the Jews of the diaspora and the Jews in the land get back in sync. How? In Israel, they read a single parsha while the rest of us read two parshas. It will be nice to have us all caught up and unified again.

This week’s double parsha is called B’har-B’chukoti which means, “In the mountain, with my engraving.”

I am being hyper literal here because I think that what the Torah wants to teach us can carve into us internal channels that will reflect on what we can give the world in much the same way that engraving within a mountain can create underground rivers that lead to springs and allow plants and animals to thrive in places you would not expect.

Before I get too carried away with this imagery, let’s review the parsha. It begins by teaching us to give the land a rest every seven years, and then it tells us about the 50th year, the Yoval (Jubilee) year. This year is another year of rest for the land and also a time to free slaves and return the land to its original owners.

Since the Torah is talking about how we should interact with the land, it also tells us that if we follow these instructions, we will live securely on the land.

From here we talk about slavery, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

The Torah then describes the good that happens from following the ways set out by haShem (god), and how painful our lives will get if we don’t.

This section, the parsha, and the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) end with talk of redemption. Specifically how to redeem things we have declared as holy, and still want to use. Implied in this is that we will be redeemed; even if we have received the above curses, we will survive them.

There is a lot of interesting and powerful things to explore and unearth in this double parsha; many of which are useful and applicable even today.

One such idea can be found in chapter 25, verses 6 and 7 of Vayikra. The verses reads: “(6)And the land will have shabbat – to you-all for food: for you, your servants (male and female), your hired help, your temporary residents, the strangers with you, (7) and for your domestic animals and for the wild animals of your land, all her (the land’s) produce will be to eat.”

What is this trying to tell us?

What I get from this is a reminder every seven years that we are no better than our servants, the non-citizens who live amongst us, even the complete stranger.   Not only that, we are no more deserving to eat than our dogs, cats, sheep, cattle, and even the wild animals that annoy us by eating our livestock or the produce we are trying to grow.

We are all equal in the eyes of haShem and as far as the land is concerned. Given that ownership of land equates to wealth and power, this is a powerful reminder.

This idea is reinforced later in our parsha where it talks of giving loans without interest (25:36), and how to treat a poor Jew who you have bought (think of him as a hired laborer) (25:39), and other places as well.

The genius of the Torah is not just in the reminder, but also in the fact that haShem knows we need this kind of reminder every 7 years – that is is so easy for us to start to look down our nose at those less fortunate than we are.

If you find yourself doing that, we are told to remember that sometime in the next seven years, we will be just like those we are looking down out; we will be foraging for food side by side in the same fields that you might have “owned” or they might have “owned.” I say they might have owned or you might have owned, because in that seventh year, it is made clear that it makes no difference who owned the field, it is now a shared field.

May we all learn to share with each other, and with the plants and animals of this world. Blessings.

If you care to read what I wrote about this parsha last year, click here.

About the Author

Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.