by Rabbi Richard Hirsh

May 15, 2008

In the opening chapter of this week’s portion, there is a description of the yovel (“jubilee”) year that was to occur every 50 years within the borders of biblical Israel. The yovel would be characterized by the emancipation of Israelites who have become indentured (a nuance not captured in the usual translation of “slaves”), the remission (or perhaps postponement, according to some scholars) of debt, and the restoration of property to its original owner if that property had been sold off since the previous yovel.

While there is considerable post-biblical discussion by the rabbis as to the laws of the yovel, contemporary scholars have raised the question of the historicity of such a jubilee year. The Bible records no description of the actual implementation of a yovel, although the absence of evidence does not lead to a necessary conclusion that this is fantasy rather than fact. The contemporary scholar Jacob Milgrom records several scholarly suggestions that there are allusions to some form of yovel observance in the Bible, but even if these can be linked in some way, we have no full-blown description of the implementation of such a process.

Given the social and economic upheaval that might have occurred with widespread emancipation from slavery and property redistribution, it is not difficult to imagine that ancient Israelite society might have managed to evade or avoid the fulfillment of this mitzva, or at least failed in any attempt to implement it.

Let us assume for the moment that the yovel is a fantasy. Why, then, does the Torah preserve this unusual obligation?

The imperatives behind the yovel may be the answer. For the description does not occur in a vacuum; it is embedded in a section of the Torah that stresses the importance of the people of Israel understanding their tenure in the land of Israel as conditional rather than absolute. Within these same chapters we find: “...the Land is mine [says God], to me you are but resident aliens” (Leviticus 25:23).

Further, we recall that the escaped Israelites all too easily would have remembered slavery in Egypt; becoming an indentured servant in perpetuity would displace the redemption of Pesach by subjecting and subjugating individual Israelites to other Israelites, evoking the very status of servitude the Exodus was designed to rebuke.

Perhaps, as some scholars argue, the concept of the yovel is an early biblical idea, dating from the ninth or eighth centuries BCE, an attempt to rectify the economic and social inequities cited by the classical prophets of that period. Or, as other scholars have argued, perhaps the yovel is a late biblical idea, dating from the Babylonian exile or beyond, reflecting an idealized image.

Whatever the biblical roots may be, as the religion of ancient Israel evolved into what we know as Judaism, we may imagine, then, that the yovel was preserved not as an administrative directive but as a spiritual teaching, sacred not for its implementation but for its imperatives. Property restoration seems to have been intended for the smallest division of ancient Israel, namely the bet av (“father’s house” = “household”). The imperative here is to preserve the family structure and stabilize its economics. The model would seem to be the time of entry into the Promised Land, when tribe, clan, and household acquired holdings. Formal emancipation seems to have been designed for similar purposes, to restore each Israelite to the status he or she enjoyed at that same moment of entry — freedom.

Curiously, the yovel embodies the polarities of the conditional and the unconditional. On the one hand, the unconditional status of an Israelite is to be a free person. His conditional status may be indentured, but ultimately freedom is victorious. Similarly, for financial hardship a household may have sold off its property; but this conditional consequence yields before the unconditional claim to restorative registration of family land.

In preserving the tradition of the yovel, the Torah reminds us — in words from this week’s reading which, in an inaccurate but no less stirring translation, are recorded on the Liberty Bell — to “proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Richard Hirsh is executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.

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