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Parsha Ponderings – Bechukosai

SWIPE YOUR VISA,

NOT YOUR MASTERCARD

והארץ לא תמכר לצמיתות כי לי הארץ כי גרים ותושבים אתם עמדי

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity for the the land is mine, for you are sojourners and citizens with Me

The Land of Israel is unique. Each tribe is assigned a region, each family a domain, and never can that piece of designated property be entirely removed from the realm of their ownership. While inherited land may be sold to others, the property automatically reverts to its original recipient come the semicentennial Jubilee Year.

Why?

As the Torah tells it, the reason is simple: “For you are sojourners and citizens with me”.

And yet, we remain perplexed. Are we sojourners, or are we citizens? And how can the fact that we are one, the other, or both, explain why land cannot be sold indefinitely?

Sojourners. That one seems easy. The land is God’s, we are merely temporary citizens, and God wants to remind us of that by forbidding us to acquire land forever.

But citizens? That can’t be a reason why not to buy land, can it?

Of course not. Obviously, it is instead a reason why we cannot sell the land God has assigned our respective families. We are citizens, and must remain citizens, of the land God has apportioned us.

And so we learn that we are citizens in our designated land, and must be nothing more than sojourners in any land other than ours.

Any message there?

Certainly.

The land we are assigned, is the land upon which God has determined we can best achieve our spiritual goals. Tailor-made to suit our soul, it is land we must never leave for an extended period of time, lest we forfeit the opportunity to attain perfection. Any other land, on the other hand, can at best provide for our physical needs for a given time, and no more.

We are neither prohibited from tending to those physical needs, nor from absenting ourselves temporarily from our spiritual needs. We are prohibited, however, from turning God’s plan on its head.

We can, and indeed must, be citizens of spirituality sojourning through physicality, yet we dare not sojourn through the spiritual while residing in the physical.

And its not about the time. Fifty years is no short leave of absence, yet infinity is infinitely longer. God may be generous with visas, but He is positively stingy when it comes to citizenship renunciation.

The flag we fly must be that of spiritual perfection, even as it remains temporarily planted in the earth of earthly survival. Our anthem must sing the praises of morality, even as we are compelled to occasionally dance to the tune of practicality.

Because we are what we must become, even as we do what we have to do.

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