14 May 2011 | 10 Iyar 5771 | Leviticus 25:1-26:2

On Wednesday evening I’ll be going to the baseball game (Note – I am writing this “Torah Sparks” on Wednesday morning). This time, in addition to my favorite baseball fan, Susan, my children Aliza and Josh, will join me. As the father of college-age + children, I become sentimental about almost every activity I participate in with my children.  They have their lives, we have our lives, we may see each other, but we don’t do much together. So I treasure the times we actually spend together doing something. Wednesday evening will be one of those times. There is something about baseball that brings out the sentimental in me. Many fans of the game feel similarly.

But I won’t be feeling sentimental as we take that walk from the church parking lot on Ralph Abernathy
Boulevard to Turner Field about which I have spoken in recent weeks. On that ten minute walk to the stadium, particularly when we reach the portion about a block away from the stadium under the Connector overpass, we will pass by several individuals seeking money. Since I last raised the issue of their presence with you, how I look at them and how I interact with them, Susan and I talked about what we should do as we pass these people. We have changed our practice. But on Wednesday evening I plan to talk about them with Aliza and Josh. Sad to admit it, but we’ve never really had that discussion.

I suspect that many of us have not had this conversation with our children or grandchildren. But the Torah, in any number of places, indirectly encourages us to do so.  For example, in Parshat Re’eh, we are told, “There shall be no needy among you…” (Deuteronomy 15:4) and almost immediately thereafter, we read, “If, however, there is a needy person among you…do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman” (Dt. 15:7). Of course, that last verse provides clear direction today. Yet why does the Torah juxtapose in such close proximity a world in which need doesn’t exist with a world in which need is clearly still very present? Is it a contradiction? Does this juxtaposition point to something different?  Shouldn’t the juxtaposition of these two verses give us pause and provide us with a discussion topic with children and grandchildren when the opportunity arises?

This week’s parasha provides us with a similar opportunity. We read:

But in the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath of complete rest, a Sabbath of the Lord; you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard.  You shall not reap the after growth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your untrimmed vines; it shall be a year of complete rest for the land. But you may eat whatever the land during its Sabbath will produce – you, your male and female slaves, the hired and bound laborers who live with you, and your cattle and the beasts in your land may eat its entire yield (Lv. 25:4 – 7)

The Torah is clear. Our ancestors were commanded not to actively produce anything in their fields during the seventh year. They also could not eat any of the produce that remained from the previous year. During the seventh year they could only gather the meager harvest of what the land itself had produced. Furthermore, as the Torah offers this instruction, it draws our attention to the idea that in the seventh year every single individual, including slaves and bound laborers, had equal right to the land’s produce. Why did the Torah add that fact? In the absence of explicit mention of these groups of people might we have thought otherwise i.e. some people didn’t have the same right to food as others do?  Is that possible? Reluctantly, I have to say “yes.” In the absence of the Torah’s explicit mention of “people in need,” I might well have thought it was a situation of “every man for himself” which often results in those in need going without.

Now there is a potential topic for discussion with your children or grandchildren at the appropriate time! Do all people have the same right to food? To basic necessities of life?  If so, when they don’t have access to such things and we do, what are our responsibilities to them?  Should that be a concern of ours or not?  I think you will agree with me when I say that the Torah urges us to create the world as it should be and not simply accept it as it is.