In this week’s double parashah, B’har/B’chukotai, we read of the mitzvah to observe the yovel, the fiftieth “Jubilee” year. Leviticus 25:10 tells us that the yovel: “shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family.”
For a year (actually two because the 49th is the sabbatical year) the land is to lie fallow. Nothing is to be planted, and God promises the Israelites that enough food will grow for them to eat and stay healthy until the harvest returns after their resumption of planting in the fifty-first year. And, as the text demands, every Israelite is to return to the original tribal land that was parceled out during Joshua’s conquest of Canaan.
Commenting on this passage, Rabbi Yitzkhak Nafkha (third century CE) looked at Psalm 103:20 (“Bless the Eternal, O God’s angels, mighty creatures who do God’s bidding, ever obedient to God’s word.”) and wrote, “This is referring to those who observe the mitzvah of letting the land lie fallow. Why are they called ‘mighty creatures’? Because while it’s common for a person to fulfill a commandment for one day, for one Shabbat, or even for one month, can one do so for an entire year? This person sees his field and trees ownerless, his fences broken and fruits eaten, yet controls himself and does not speak. Our rabbis taught, ‘Who is strong? One who controls passion.’ Can there be a mightier creature than a person like this?”
In reflecting on this passage I cannot help but to think about the frenzied age we live in, where the passage of one day or one hour, is seen as important. We are in a time where the expression 24/7 is carried as a badge of honor. Twitter, Facebook, email, cell phone, laptop: these are the instruments of our constant interaction with – what?
Wired. That is the one word in the lexicon unleashed by the computer age which perfectly captures how we feel, whether we like it or not.
We have realized the dream of the futurists, those mostly Italian artists in the early 20th century who glorified the themes they saw associated with the future: speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city.
The founder of futurism, Filippo Marinetti, gives us a taste of the dream in this quote from 1909: “Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed… …(we will sing of) the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumbed serpents… …deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hoves of enormous steel horses.”
Even of we have become virtual cyborgs, however, we nevertheless have our humanity – a humanity that calls us to long and very long tasks: like raising our children, honoring our parents, loving our spouse and building our house of worship.
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