Behar | Freedom: Releasing Possession of Land and Each Other

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דַּבֵּר אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם כִּי תָבֹאוּ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי נֹתֵן לָכֶם וְשָׁבְתָה הָאָרֶץ שַׁבָּת לַיהוָה׃ 

Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land is to cease, a Shabbat-ceasing to YHWH.

Leviticus 25:2 (Tr. Everett Fox)

כִּֽי־לִ֤י בְנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ עֲבָדִ֔ים עֲבָדַ֣י הֵ֔ם אֲשֶׁר־הוֹצֵ֥אתִי אוֹתָ֖ם מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם אֲנִ֖י יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me, YHWH.

Leviticus 25:23

 

This week's Torah portion, Behar, begins with a beautiful vision. Earth experiences a rest when people enter her. For humans to enter the Promised Land, we are called to evolve to the consciousness that coexists with deep rest of the land. We don't do anything to or with the land. We enter with a new consciousness.  How we long for this relationship, rather than the one that is producing the domination, overdevelopment and exploitation of modern human occupation of land. How we need this great turning.

Human turning toward releasing possession of land is directly connected in Torah to achieving deeper and deeper access to the freedom born from what Thich Nhat Hanh calls ceasing or letting-go:

אֲשֶׁר־הוֹצֵ֥אתִי אוֹתָ֖ם מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרָ֑יִם אֲנִ֖י יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃

For it is to me that the Children of Israel are servants—; my servants are they, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt, I am YHWH your God!

Lev. 25:55 (Tr. Everett Fox)

We free ourselves from anything that has enslaved us by stopping in this moment. We stop and take a mindful breath, letting go of anything we have brought into this moment that binds us. In Torah,  human enslavement is an impermanent circumstance that arises out of violence, war, economic hardship and other power imbalances. It is a temporary state. Humans are not enslaved because of any distinguishing inherent characteristics or because anyone "deserves" to be enslaved. We are all created in the image of the divine. No person is of the nature to be enslaved by another. A person held in bondage by a cruel system can, perhaps always, achieve a higher state of inner freedom than the one who derives power, meaning and status from possessing others. It is Pharoah-nature that possess others out of alienation from life and constriction of heart.

Releasing from the cycle and power structure of possession ( possessing and being possessed) brings the deepest freedom offered by Torah and other spiritual paths.

I learned this week from Torah teacher Avivah Zornberg that the person enslaved by circumstances who then does become a slave is the one who enslaves himself by taking actions and making choices according to what other people think of him or her. We all fall into making a hierarchical master the master of our mind and heart. We are all susceptible to this, regardless of our station in life. We give away our power and agency when we believe we are making choices and taking actions "for someone else." This is how we enslave ourselves. According to Rav Zornberg, this is the meaning of the story in this week's Torah portion about enslaved people who decline to be freed in the cycles of seven years when freedom is available. They become slaves by choosing a human master.

Shmita (Hebrew) and Shamata (Sanskrit) 

Buddhism speaks directly to the relationship between our stopping and our capacity to bring deep peace to the world. The Hebrew word for the deep stopping of the land described in this week's Torah is shmita. In Sanskrit, the word for stopping is shamata. These two words, both born in the oral traditions of sacred language,  carry the same sound vibration in their root. In Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhist teachings, the core practice of shamata is a deep inner stopping. We stop chasing after our thoughts, our desires, any external objects that we believe will make us free. This is the stopping that each of us can achieve when we release fully and make ourselves peacemakers for the world.

In Torah, this week's parsha is one of three that describes the shmita. Shmita practice, a letting go of possession of land every seven years, is a bold and courageous entry into trusting that release will bring the greatest freedom and repair. In Behar, these secrets of shmita are revealed on  Mt. Sinai. This signifies that the deep level of shmita letting-go arises from a liberated collective consciousness that centers space and freedom for earth herself. In smita, we are living in harmony with the ordering of the world envisioned during the highest revelation of Presence in Torah.

NVC founder Marshall Rosenberg proposed a practice that helps us move toward this consciousness of freedom through letting go of painful concept that bind us. He pointed out that when we tell ourselves we are doing something to please someone else, we are looking outside ourselves for meaning. We are chasing approval and other external sources of meaning, acceptance and other core needs and values of ours. We lose our connection to our own aliveness.

As an antidote, Rosenberg taught that everything we do, every choice we make, is an attempt to meet our own needs. We are choosing to live in harmony with values that are important to us. He urged us to acknowledge that we are indeed  "self-full". We can celebrate that our choices are attempts to meet our own needs because this frees us from needing to get others to agree with us. This helps us step into  deep rest.  Instead of harsh judgments of ourselves and others as  "selfish", we  lean in with curiosity to understand what needs we and others are trying to meet when we do whatever we do. When other people do things that aren't wonderful for us, rather than taking it "personally," we connect with or own experience of what happened, holding ourselves compassionately because our needs weren't met. And we lean in with curiosity to understand what needs of theirs the other person was trying to meet. The world needs people who touch deeply what is important to them and then strive forth to live in accordance with that. This is the antidote to the state of slavery.

The Hasidic teacher the Svat Emet taught in the 19th century that making yourself a slave means doing something for someone else, rather than feeding your own connection to the Divine.

But what of people who follow what they hear as a divine call into a murderous life-alienated, constricted place? We are reeling from this today, from armies of young men such as the young man who targeted and murdered 10 people in Buffalo, New York, this week.

How can Torah be a force for transforming the human tendency to possession and dominate land and people? As we move toward the conclusion of the Book of Leviticus, Torah connects holiness to a revolutionary concept of ownership. The Eternally Present Breath of Life is the sole owner of land and people.

Behar sets out regulations that make perpetual human ownership of land and people impossible. In the case of land, the soil is to rest every seven years, but every fifty years (7 × 7 + 1), the land is to be “released” back to its original owner (who “redeems” it). Similarly, indentured servants—those who are forced into working for someone because of debts—are redeemable, if not by kin then by the occurrence of the Jubilee year.

Our freedom is not in owning and enslaving. Our freedom is in releasing. Our freedom is completely bound up to other's freedom. This completely rejects the "replacement theory" and its variations that seems to have motivated the murders in Buffalo, and motivates anti Moslem, anti Jewish and other xenophobic hatred all over the globe.

One beginning point is to examine how we make ourselves slaves in our everyday lives by telling ourselves that we are making our life choices "for someone else," or "because we have no choice." Here is a Nonviolent Communication exercise to help restore us to choice, freedom and self connection in our thinking and our relationships.

Freedom Exercise

Part 1:

• Think of something you did, or told yourself you do, "for someone else"
  Your child, partner, spouse, country, people etc.
• Look over the list of needs.
• What needs of yours are you attempting to meet by doing what you do "for someone else?"
• How does it feel to flip your thinking to say to yourself,
• I choose to do this because of what I want more of in the world; to meet my needs for.,eg, ...meaning, nurturing, self acceptance?

Part 2:

• Think of something someone else does that you'd like to understand more? Maybe something that you felt hurt or angry about.
• You are taking it personally. What did you think about yourself that shows you are taking it personally? Did you go on the wheel of blame and shame?
• Can you become curious to understand, what needs were the other person trying to meet when they did that?
• What is their history/background/trauma/wounding /dharma/karma that led them to do that?
• It really has nothing to do with you, although it affects you. It stings because your needs weren't met; but you don't have to take it personally.

Do these inquiries take you into a deeper sense of peace and freedom?

 

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The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry