Jubilee

The following was given as my student sermon at the end of the academic year in Jerusalem.

In thirteen days, a voice over a loudspeaker will proclaim: “Now boarding El Al Flight 331 to New York.” My jubilee.

At least, that’s what I first thought when I sat down to write about this week’s parasha, which includes instructions for counting to the Jubilee year. I admit it: I am counting down, and in my mind I’m counting down to “jubilee,” popularly connoting joy and celebration, a translation of the Hebrew yoveil,.

When the ancient Israelites followed the laws of the Jubilee year, what did they do? We heard this morning, V’kidashtem et shnat hachamishim shana u’kratem dror ba’aretz l’chol yoshveha—yoveil hi t’hiyeh lachem –You shall sanctify the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty in the land, unto all its inhabitants: it shall be a yoveil for you.

The Torah instructs us to observe the yoveil by counting seven times seven years, and by blowing the shofar to proclaim the fiftieth year, a year of liberty—d’ror. Any Jew who has sold himself into slavery is released; planting and harvesting cease. Land sold in the previous years reverts to its original owner, and we live on the previous crops, like in the Sabbatical year. As Modern Orthodox commentator Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch notes, the yoveil year is a leveler: all people become equally dependent on God for their sustenance, from the rich landowner to the poor slave. All are reminded that what we own in this world does not belong to us, but rather, is given by God. We remember that we cannot be slaves to any human master because our only avodah, our only service, is to God.

Most of us aren’t counting out the years to the Jubilee, carefully planning our crops. In the past, the yoveil concretely reminded us that we don’t own this world in which we live. Today, without that concrete returning, what does the yoveil teach us? What does the word itself mean? And how helpful is the contemporary association with release, freedom, jubilee and, indeed, jubilation?

While Rashi tells us yoveil means “ram’s horn,” to symbolize the shofar proclaiming liberty, Ramban wonders, “what sense is there” in declaring that a year “shall be unto you a blowing of a ram’s horn”? Instead, the focus of the yoveil, for him, is the d’ror, the liberty. This freedom is not the shichrur we hear about in the news, hoping for the release of Gilad Shalit, nor the chofesh of vacation. D’ror is a unique word, appearing only this once in the Torah. Brown, Driver, and Briggs translate it as both “a flowing” and as “free run, liberty.” In Jeremiah, a d’ror is a stream, an abundant flow of water, and a d’ror is a swallow, a bird that resists captivity.

The shofar blast announces, then, that we are, each of us, free to flow where the current will take us, free to bear responsibility only to ourselves and to our God—no longer bound, no longer slaves. The yoveil announces this freedom, but, according to Ramban, it also does something else. Yoveil denotes transportation. The word is derived from the root yud-vet-lamed, l’hovil to conduct, to bear along, yuval, to to be transported. The 18th-century commentary MeAm Lo’ez reads this “transportation” literally: things are returned, physically moved. Land reverts to its original owners, slaves return to their ancestral homes. Shimshon Raphael Hirsch digs a bit deeper, saying that the yoveil is a kind of spiritual homecoming, “to bring a person to where he is suited to be, or a thing to whom it really belongs.”

So we’re back to the beginning, then: I will return to where, and to whom, I really belong, in thirteen days, and it will be unto me a yoveil.

But I’m not so sure. Because the yoveil is also about being transported, being carried … but carried to where?

U’kratem dror ba’aretz l’chol yoshveha—yoveil hi t’hiyeh lachem—v’shavtem ish el achuzato v’ish el misphachto tashuvu—and each of you will return to his holding and each of you will return to his family.

The yoveil, after the counting of seven times seven years, in the fiftieth year, an occurrence perhaps as rare in our lives as the word d’ror is rare in the Torah—the yoveil carries us, brings us home. We return to our source, Ramban says, referring to a verse in Jeremiah: Baruch hagever asher yivtach b’adonai, v’haya Adonai mivtacho. V’haya c’eitz shatul al mayim, v’al yuval y’shalach shorashav—“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Eternal, whose trust is the Eternal alone. He shall be like a tree planted by waters, sending forth its roots by a yuval, a stream.” The yoveil promises to return us to our roots, to our nourishing source, to a cool and steady stream.

Where is your source, the place where your roots drink deep? When the shofar proclaims d’ror to all the land, where will the yoveil transport you?

Perhaps the sound of the shofar has already proclaimed d’ror, and the yoveil has carried us to the Year in Israel.

What if this has been our Jubilee year?

D’ror might not be the first word that comes to mind, but what else has this year brought?

It’s brought culture shock, tiskul, dramatic surroundings and spiritual heights. It’s brought moments you’ll remember: your first trip to the Kotel, a sunrise in the desert, and meeting a new friend who has become a lifelong friend. We have lived a unique experience, one intended to nourish our roots and make them stronger.
We have been transported to the land to which Avram migrated, sight unseen, leaving behind his land and his birthplace and his father’s house—the land that became the birthplace of the Jewish people as a people. Whether we criticize it or praise it, Israel remains an origin, the achuzah, the portion or holding that one returns to during the Jubilee year, the achuzah of the Jewish people. However much Hannah Shafir and of course Harrison would be thrilled to hear it, I don’t mean that we should all cancel our return flights and set up permanent homes here. I mean that we will always be linked to this place; our future congregants and students will expect us to have a relationship to Israel as a State, a homeland, or a nation—positive, negative or indifferent—but some kind of relationship. During this Jubilee year, how has Israel served as your achuza?

Or perhaps it has not. Perhaps you’ve learned that your roots are utterly disconnected from this physical place, but they are nourished by Israel in the sense of peoplehood. Our parasha instructs us, v’ish el misphachto tashuvu, each of you will return to his family. Our community can strive to be for one another a mishpacha of colleagues. And we can continue to engage with Hebrew, the language of the Jewish mishpacha.

Yoveil comes from the verb l’hovil: to bring, to bear, to carry. I don’t know about you, but I was carried here—carried here by Judaism, faith, career goals, idealism… and, sure, carried here (somewhat unwillingly) by HUC. We have been brought, and we have brought with us our histories, our knowledge, our ignorance, our faith, and our doubt. I sincerely challenge each of us to recognize that this year has indeed served as a yoveil, a return to origins, a release into a year of introspection, study, and relationship to God, Israel, and the Jewish community. I have been carried to Israel, but I hope and pray that I have also been transported—transported to a new understanding of what it means to live a Jewish life, transported and transformed.

After all, we won’t get a chance like this for another forty-nine years.