All We Achieve

May 16, 2008
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

Between 333 and 331 before the common era, the land of Israel was conquered by Alexander the Great. Along with the coming of the Greeks, came Greek culture: Hellenism. In the Land of Israel, the Greeks set up trading posts along the coast and built gymnasiums and theaters in the Greek fashion. They did not set out to draw local peoples like the Jews into their religion, their dress, or their language. But many Jews found Hellenism attractive, especially because it was the culture of the rulers. For a while, the priests in the Temple in Jerusalem believed that they could combine the easy life, the enlightened life that Hellenism promised with the Jewish way of life they practiced. Even the scribes and the Jews living in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria in Egypt began to speak of Torah in a worshipful way, calling it "Wisdom" instead of "Teaching," and "Wisdom" instead of "Law." And the Greek word used for this idea of ultimate "Wisdom" is logos.

It is possible that some of the priests and scribes read some of the works or were influenced by the thought of the Greek philosophers. Thirty years before Alexander set out to conquer the world, Plato had written his famous dialogue called The Republic. He envisioned a world perfected by reason, what we today call a utopia. This was not the first time that human beings had thought about such a world. The Garden of Eden, described in Genesis, was also a vision of a perfect society, but it was a description of a society that was lost due to human passion.

Some time, probably between 300 and 250 BCE, a priest or a scribe, probably working in the Temple, conceived of a system whereby God's kingdom would be continually renewed. The week was already used to calculate the recurrence of the Sabbath every seven days, with the number seven becoming an almost magical feature of Jewish thought. The counting of the Omer was fixed as a period of seven weeks of seven weeks, forty-nine days, with Shavuot, the "Feast of Weeks," falling on the fiftieth day. So, it was natural that our priestly scribe determined that the land should have a Sabbath year each seven years, one year in which the land would not be worked and the people would rely on God to provide enough wild growth to sustain them. This led naturally to the concept of seven years times seven years, with a final Yoveil year, a Jubilee.

What if the Jubilee were a year of redemption? That was the idea that our priestly scribe began to toy with. Looking back to the time of Joshua when the land was divided so fairly that each tribe had its own area, each clan had its own area within the tribal lands, and each family had its own area within the clans' lands, the scribal priest assumed that in the Jubilee year all could be returned to the way the land had originally been divided. In this way, a family that had become poor during the period of forty-nine years would be restored to its family land. Clans would be reunited, even if some members of the clan had sold their land for one reason or another. And tribes would be reconstituted no matter what had transpired during the forty-nine years.

When Joshua had divided the land, it was done according to the casting of lots, using chance as a way of deciding who belonged where. And because it was done by lots, it was not controlled by human beings, it was controlled by God. It was God who had decided what plot of land was given to each family. By returning families to their land and giving them back their possessions, the scribal priest was telling us that things would again be the way God had intended them to be in the first place.

This was the utopian ideal behind the Torah's concept of Yoveil or Jubilee. Of course, it was beset from the start by terrible problems of practicality. If a family sold their house and land in the forty-ninth year, they would not be able to ask much for it, since in the fiftieth year they would appear to reclaim it. If a family died out by not producing any children in the forty-nine years, there would be no one to reclaim that land in the fiftieth year. If a family had inherited a worthless plot of land to begin with, it would be sentenced to return to that same worthless land every fiftieth year. And if a family had moved to town -- and most Judeans soon lived in the towns and cities of the Holy Land by that time -- why would they want to abandon their residences in the cities to return to a small holding somewhere in the countryside?

In the end, there is no evidence that the Jubilee was ever celebrated by a real return of Jews to their homesteads. Mainly, under the Maccabean kings, the Jubilee was celebrated by letting the land lie fallow for two straight years. And this was no redemption. It often lead to extreme poverty throughout the land and sometimes even caused starvation to reign among the people.

But it raises the question: What is redemption? What would it mean to be restored to a perfect world? As human beings, and as Jews, we have always lived in a world that is unredeemed. We pray for peace and hope for peace, but we face nations who would destroy us and we find that we must arm ourselves to save ourselves from harm. We build and decorate our homes, the better to live with beauty and grace, but a hurricane destroys, an earthquake upsets, a flood overthrows everything we have assembled to reassure us. We diet and exercise and prepare ourselves for the future, only to find ourselves subject to illness and pain and the threats of imminent demise. We are human and imperfect, always less than we wish to be.

And yet, God has made us little lower than the angels. Through the laws of nature, our destiny is attached to the destiny of the stars. The greatest among us may be insignificant to God, but even the smallest one of us may be the most important being in continuing God's eternal scheme. Somehow, we sense redemption even as we seek to overcome one weakness after another.

Where will our utopia be? Will it be in the next life? Will it be here in this world for our children? If we had to conceive of a way of reaching it, what would we conceive? These are the issues that always place utopia just beyond our reach, just outside of our wisdom. In the end, we look back on the only certain redemption that has ever taken place, the crossing of the Sea of Reeds, when our nation was saved by God from destruction. And every time one of us feels that we have been saved, every time one of us recovers from illness, narrowly escapes a brush with death, is released from bondage and brought to freedom, is saved from the hands of terrorists and enemies, brings a new life into this world, or even dies leaving behind a legacy of greatness, we see that as God's work, as a work of God's redemption.

So we no longer strive to return to a plot of land that came to us by chance, but we still respect the idea of redemption. We know we are human beings flawed beyond perfection, yet we strive to achieve perfection. We try to be holy, as God is holy. And we trust that when we reach that far shore, when we have completed crossing our personal sea of reeds, we will be able to join in the dance and sing the song of Moses. All that we achieve, we owe thanks to God for our achieving it. And let us say: Amen.