What Does Unity Look Like?

Parshas Behar-Bechukosai 5780

Our parsha furnishes us with the Jewish equivalent of the question, “What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?” Parshas Behar informs us from the get-go that what is to now be related are mitzvos that were stated at Har Sinai. Then, we get hit with agriculture. The Torah dives headlong into a series of mitzvos that help create the contours of what the Shemittah year will look like, as the land lies fallow every seven years.

As Rashi, quoting the Midrash Toras Kohanim asks:

מָה עִנְיַן שְׁמִטָּה אֵצֶל הַר סִינַי? וַהֲלֹא כָל הַמִּצְוֹת נֶאֶמְרוּ מִסִּינַי? אֶלָּא מַה שְּׁמִטָּה נֶאֶמְרוּ כְלָלוֹתֶיהָ וּפְרָטוֹתֶיהָ וְדִקְדּוּקֶיהָ מִסִּינַי אַף כֻּלָּן נֶאֶמְרוּ כְלָלוֹתֵיהֶן וְדִקְדּוּקֵיהֶן מִסִּינַי

What is the relevance of Shemittah to Mount Sinai? Were not all the mitzvos stated at Sinai? Rather, just as Shemittah was related with it’s generalities and particulars and specific laws, so were all mitzvos stated both in general and in particular at Sinai.

The Midrash answers that Shemittah is a paradigm for a fully explicated mitzvah. Just as our parsha provides individual details that comprise the mitzvah, so were all other mitzvos related in the same manner at Har Sinai.

If you’re still troubled, you’re not alone. Scores of commentators are left scratching their heads, wondering what makes Shemittah so special. Couldn’t, in truth, any mitzvah be utilized as a means of teaching that both general principles and specific details were related at Sinai? Why is Shemittah, specifically, chosen?

The question becomes compounded if we consider what the individual Shemittah years ultimately lead to, also contained in this very section of the Parsha. While every seven years brings a Shemittah, seven revolutions thereof bring the Yovel—the “Jubilee” fiftieth year following seven Shemittah cycles when the land again lies fallow. But more than a mere carbon copy of a Shemittah year, the Yovel brings about another phenomenon:

בִּשְׁנַ֥ת הַיּוֹבֵ֖ל הַזֹּ֑את תָּשֻׁ֕בוּ אִ֖ישׁ אֶל־אֲחֻזָּתֽוֹ׃

At this Jubilee year, each man shall return to his holding. 

At the Yovel, prior sales of real estate are dissolved, and the land reverts to its original owners. The serves to ensure that tribal and familial borders will ultimately be maintained, irrespective of short-term changes in ownership. Come the Yovel, members of Naftali must vacate the land they purchased in Zevulun, constituents of Asher may no longer live amongst Binyaminites.

If something about that feels off, perhaps you’re influenced by the moving description of the Jewish People accepting the Torah at Sinai, when all that divided the the individual members of the nation melted away. The Torah describes the encampment of the Jewish People at Sinai with the word “ויחן–and it camped,” in the singular, rather than the plural, as would have been more grammatically appropriate. Chazal famously explain that the state of the nation was “כאיש אחד בלב אחד, like one individual with one heart.” At Sinai, we achieved achdus, unity. We were singularly minded in our desire to accept the Torah and achieved a state of oneness that caused all individual borders and divisions to disappear.

Why, then, the Yovel? Why redraw those lines, reconstruct those barriers? Why not allow for the land to indeed be sold in perpetuity, allowing for a full integration of individual families and tribes into one Klal? Moreover, why select this specific area of the Torah to be framed by the recollection of Sinai, an event that seems to stand in such clear distinction to what the system of Shemittah and Yovel ultimately accomplish?

I once heard the following remarkable story from Rabbi Efrem Goldberg of Boca Raton Synagogue. BRS was hosting Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz as a scholar-in-residence, and Rabbi Goldberg was getting him settled in at the home of his host on Erev Shabbos. As Rabbi Steinsaltz made himself a coffee, he asked Rabbi Goldberg, “So tell me, what makes your shul special?” Rabbi Goldberg responded with the official tagline, which he believes wholeheartedly truly characterizes his congregation: “Valuing diversity; celebrating unity!” “Well of course,” Rabbi Steinsaltz responded, nearly absent-mindedly as he stirred his coffee, “without diversity you don’t have unity, you have uniformity.”

What Rabbi Steinsaltz offered as an off-the-cuff remark over a cup of coffee is one of the deepest insights into communal and national cohesiveness I’ve ever heard. Further, I’d suggest it is precisely why the Torah tells us that the Shemittah-Yovel system, more than any other mitzvah, was stated at Har Sinai.

What was achieved at Sinai—one individual with one heart—was, indeed, a fantastic display of achdus. But it is at the same time unsustainable. Real life creates difference and distinction. We will not always be enraptured by a Sinai-esque experience that allows for those distinctions to be ignored. Utlimately, differences of opinion will arise; varying approaches to issues will bubble to the surface. Naftali is not Zevulun; Asher is not Binyanim.

The Torah is reminding us that this, too, is from Sinai. A singular mindset being adopted by an entire nation or community is but one model of achdus. In real life, however, these moments are rare and unlikely to be regularly achieved. Instead, the Torah provides us with an alternate model, no less valid. Embrace the distinction, the borders, the barriers, but do so peacefully and respectfully. Revel in the fact that Klal Yisrael contains a multiplicity of perspectives and personalities and yet we can still achieve harmony. Don’t hide from the fact that tribes will abide by different approaches and families will respond to similar circumstances in different ways; lean into it. Anything less would be a demand not for unity, but uniformity.

The reaction that shuls across the country had to the coronavirus pandemic was a Har Sinai moment. Within mere days, shuls were closed in an effort to maintain public health and safety, as one individual with one voice. The reopening of our shuls is now the question at hand, and the response has been markedly different. Different decisions have already been issued—in some instances, even by individual shuls within the same community—on the question of whether and how to allow for minyanim to occur. 

Is this a failure to achieve achdus that we should decry and bemoan? It depends on our response. If we appreciate the message of the Yovel, we can respond respectfully, understanding the inevitability of individual organizations to have different responses to similar questions, and appreciating the latent value in that reality. If we view our present circumstance through the lens of Yovel, we’ll understand it as an expression of achdus no less valid than the one achieved at Har Sinai.

The comparison between the road to Sinai and the road to Yovel cannot be overlooked. As we are so mindful of during this time of Sefiras HaOmer, Mattan Torah occurs only after completing a series of seven sevens. Seven weeks of seven days apiece brings us to the foothills of Sinai. Following a similar journey—seven Shemittah cycles of seven years apiece—we arrive at the Yovel. The journey to Har Sinai reminds us of the importance of achdus. The journey to Yovel reminds us of what achdus will usually look like. Unity is achieved not when we insist upon being the same, but when we learn to respectfully embrace that which makes us different.