Parsha for Kids: Behar 2023
Below is the transcript for the past week’s episode of Parsha for Kids, Behar 2023.
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Season 3 Episode 9:
Hello! My name is Chana and this is Parsha for Kids. The Parsha of the week is Behar. Behar means “at the mountain.” It refers to God speaking to Moshe at Har Sinai, or Mount Sinai.
The big idea in this week’s parsha has to do with a reset button. You are likely all familiar with the concept of a reset. If you are playing a game, you lay out all the pieces, play, finish the game, and then reset the game if you want to play again. Then, everyone is able to start from scratch and gets an equal opportunity to win or lose the next time around.
There are several different reset buttons that are discussed in this week’s parsha. The first is Shemitah. Shemitah refers to the practice of having the land of Israel rest every seven years. During that seventh year, the farmers- and remember that during the time period when Bnei Yisrael entered the land, nearly everyone was a farmer- had to let the land lie still. They were not allowed to plow it, which means getting the soil ready to plant, to plant seeds, or to harvest from it. Instead, the land was left alone. It was like a Shabbat, day of rest, for the land, but for an entire year. One reason this year was so important was because it forced people to trust in God. In that time period, Jews did not have refrigerators, freezers or canned goods with preservatives that would last a long time. They only had their crops. So they had to rely on God to provide them with enough food during the sixth year to last into the seventh year. This was a dramatic form of having emunah, faithfulness and bitachon, trust, in God.
The word Shemitah literally means “to release.” In this case, people released their personal ownership of the fields. Anything that happened to grow during the Shemitah year was hefker, ownerless, which meant anyone who wanted could come to the field and eat from any produce they found there.
An additional form of resetting and way in which people were being released during Shemitah had to do with money. During the Shemitah year, all outstanding debts between Jews are forgiven. This means that if a Jew named Yossi lent his friend Mordechai money, and Mordechai did not repay it, when Shemitah comes around, Mordechai no longer needs to repay it. Yossi would release Mordechai from his obligation to pay the debt and Mordechai gets to experience a reset of being a person who doesn’t owe others money but can instead start over.
Shemitah gave Jews the opportunity to refocus their energies on connecting to God. Instead of having to go out to their field every day and worry about plowing, planting and harvesting, they had free time where they could focus on studying, learning the laws of the Torah in more detail and reflecting on their lives. This gave them a reset button within their own experiences.
TRANSITION
But that’s not all. After seven Shemitah cycles, which would total 49 years, comes the 50th year. This is called Yovel, or the Jubilee Year. Do you remember we learned about the Eved Ivri, or Hebrew slave, during a previous parsha? During Yovel, any Hebrew slaves would be permitted to go free and return to their family. In this way, every Jew had the possibility of experiencing life as a free man, having that reset button that would enable them to go from slave to someone who could make their own choices or decisions without being obligated to a human master.
Additionally, if a Jewish person had become very poor and therefore sold their property in the land of Israel to another Jew, during the Yovel year most properties would go back to their original owners. This means that to some degree people were only ever renting land or property in the land of Israel, not outright owning it. The land, God makes clear, belongs to Him. He is the ultimate owner and therefore He is the one who can tell us what to do with it.
There are also laws in this week’s parsha that tell us that we are not allowed to loan money to a Jew and then demand interest. Interest is a system where you can ask for more money back than what you originally borrowed. For example, let’s say Chaim lends David a dollar. Practicing interest would mean that Chaim would say, “I’m happy to lend you this dollar. But for every day that you don’t return this dollar, you will need to pay me an additional quarter.” This would mean that if Chaim lent David the dollar on Monday, and David pays it back on Tuesday, David would have to pay $1.25. The Torah forbids this practice and says we can only ask for the exact amount of money we lent the person, not more than this.
TRANSITION
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks spends a lot of time explaining why the system laid out in this week’s parsha is so important. He focuses on how it is a system of justice, specifically social justice. You may have heard the words social justice before. It refers to having justice- which means fair and equal treatment- within a society. Rabbi Sacks explained that God believed in the dignity of man. A person who is dignified is a person who believes themselves to be capable of - or who indeed has the capacity to- support themselves. Nobody likes to take charity or be reliant on others. The problem is that sometimes people can end up in situations where they then can’t get out of the situation. For example, maybe they lost all their money so they sold their house. Now they don’t have a house so they hire themselves out to be a slave. And then not only will they be a slave but their children will be born into slavery.
The Torah doesn’t want this to happen. God wants people to have second chances. Thus, through a system of Shemitah, where debts are forgiven, and Yovel, where slaves are set free and property is returned to the original owners, everyone gets the chance to live a dignified life. Everyone gets to benefit from a reset button, starting fresh and starting anew. In a society like that one- a society with Shemitah and Yovel- you can always live with hope. Because if someone is having a tough time, they can realize that things won’t always be the way they are now. There will come a day where I can be free or where I can reclaim my ancestral property. And living with hope is very important.
TRANSITION
So here’s what we learned this week!
God devised some very important concepts, especially Shemitah and Yovel, to create reset buttons for every member of Bnei Yisrael who lived in the land of Israel.
It’s important for us to consider how we can create these reset buttons for our friends and family as well. If we live in Eretz Yisrael currently, we may have experienced what it is like to keep Shemitah. But if we do not, we can consider the bigger concept behind Shemitah. Are we willing to give people second chances? If not, maybe that is something we can work on, in keeping with the ideas taught in this week’s parsha.
If you have any questions or comments on this week’s episode, please email me at parsha4kids@gmail.com. That’s parsha the number 4 kids at gmail.com. Good Shabbos!