Independent Jewish Shul in Brookline, MA
Contact Us: 617-566-8171 | info@tbzbrookline.org
Dear TBZ Community,
This week’s Torah portions, Behar–Bechukotai, open with teachings about shnat shmita, the sabbatical year which occurs every 7 years, and shnat ha’yovel, the jubilee year which occurs every 49 years, concepts that expand on our weekly Shabbat practice. Shabbat is a weekly opportunity of 25 hours in which we release the illusion that we are fully in control of the world. Shabbat becomes a sacred pause, a time in which we stop trying to shape everything according to our will and instead allow ourselves simply to be present. The word shabbat comes from the root lishbot – “to cease,” to stop producing, stop striving, stop managing every detail of our lives and surroundings.
Shmita and yovel take that same spiritual idea and expand it into an entire vision of society. The land itself must rest. Debts are released. Property returns to previous owners. The economic system itself is interrupted in order to remind human beings that ownership, power, and accumulation cannot become absolute. In many ways, these mitzvot (commandments) challenge one of the deepest assumptions of the world we live in – a world that constantly teaches us that the more we own, the more secure we are; that the more we accumulate, the more successful we become; that happiness is somehow tied to having more, controlling more, preserving more.
But Torah asks us to imagine another way of living.
In Leviticus 25:23 we read:
וְהָאָרֶץ לֹא תִמָּכֵר לִצְמִתֻת כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ כִּי־גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם עִמָּדִי
But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers and residents with Me.
Torah tells us, the land does not belong to us: כִּי־לִי הָאָרֶץ – “for the land is Mine.”
What would it mean to truly live with that awareness, to understand that ultimately nothing fully belongs to us, not the land, not our possessions, and not even time itself? Torah suggests that we are not owners so much as caretakers. We receive this world, our relationships, even our lives, as something entrusted into our hands for a limited amount of time. Our responsibility is not simply to use them, but to care for them with humility and gratitude.
These teachings become even more relevant when we face loss and mortality.
This past Sunday I was invited to speak at the funeral of Vera Ventura z”l, a former TBZ member, and I had the honor of officiating her wedding to her husband, Joe Sousa, about 15 years ago. Vera died far too young after a six-year journey living courageously with breast, brain, and thyroid cancer, leaving behind her husband Joe and their two young children, Asher and Alma.
Vera was extraordinary: fierce, creative, deeply compassionate, and profoundly honest about both the beauty, the pain and suffering, and the fragility of life. She turned her passion for teaching, spirituality, wellness, creativity, and healing into a vibrant life of service and connection even amidst her own suffering. She founded Breast Cancer Goddess to support women navigating cancer, and built communities of people who found strength and encouragement through her honesty and resilience.
At her funeral, which was heartbreaking, with hundreds of people touched by her far too short life, I was reminded of a teaching of Torah: we are not masters over life. We cannot fully control what happens to our bodies, our futures, or our loved ones. We cannot hold onto time. We cannot guarantee permanence. So much of human suffering comes from the collision between our desire to hold tightly and the reality that life itself is fragile, temporary, and changing. Vera’s life was one that knew how to fight and how to let go, how to hold the joy and the suffering of every moment. I dedicate this Torah to her memory, so that we may be inspired by her.
Later in the parasha (Torah portion), in the section describing the blessings that come from living in sacred relationship with God, with the land, and with one another, the Torah says:
וַאֲכַלְתֶּם יָשָׁן נוֹשָׁן וְיָשָׁן מִפְּנֵי חָדָשׁ תּוֹצִיאוּ
You shall eat old grain long stored, and you shall have to clear out the old to make room for the new (Leviticus 26:10).
On the surface, the verse describes abundance – such bounty that the old harvest and the new harvest overlap. But in Chizkuni, a 13th-centuray French commentary on the Torah, written by Rabbi Chizkiya ben Manoach, we are offered the following interpretation on Leviticus 26:10:
ואכלתם ישן נושן על ידי רבוי התבואה שתותר בעת הקציר תערבו אותה עם החדשה בכל שנה ומתוך כך ואכלתם ישן נושן.
“You shall eat from stores long kept,” meaning that because of abundant harvests, the old and new crops will become mixed, and each year you will eat from both harvests.
This image feels deeply true not only agriculturally, but emotionally and spiritually as well. Human life rarely unfolds in neat transitions where one season ends completely before another begins. Instead, the harvests mix together. Old griefs and new joys coexist. Memory and change sit side by side. We carry those we have loved into the next chapter of our lives, even after they are no longer physically with us.
And this is not only an abstract idea.
In our own community at TBZ, in the span of just one week, we have been living something very close to this teaching. Last week we gathered in grief for the funeral of Alan Kamin z”l, a beloved member of our community, and this Shabbat we will gather again in joy to celebrate the bat mitzvah of his granddaughter, Klaire. We will hold, together with Carol, Daniel, Scott, Klaire, and their entire family, both sorrow and celebration within a single breath of communal life.
Chizkuni’s interpretation reminds us that the old and the new harvest are not strictly separated in human experience, but often interwoven. We do not simply leave one reality behind in order to enter another; rather, we find ourselves living in the overlap, where memory and future, absence and presence, grief and blessing all continue to speak to one another.
At Vera’s funeral I shared a poem, “Adrift” by Mark Nepo, that has stayed with me all week because it captures something essential about both grief and these Torah teachings:
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.
If we truly understand that life itself is not something we possess permanently, then perhaps we also learn to hold one another differently. We become more aware of the preciousness of time, more conscious of the responsibility of care, and more capable of gratitude for what and who we have while they are here.
Perhaps this is also what Chizkuni means when he imagines the old and new harvests becoming mixed together. Human life is lived in that mixture. Love and loss face each other constantly.
And perhaps this is the spiritual work of Shabbat, of shmita, and of yovel: to loosen our grip just enough to remember that we are not owners of the world, nor even fully of our own lives. We are caretakers of blessings, relationships, and moments entrusted to us for a time. And when we live with that awareness, perhaps we become more able to love fiercely, live gratefully, and meet one another with the humility and tenderness that life demands of us.
May we learn, in the spirit of Shabbat, shmita, and yovel, to loosen our grip just enough to remember that we are not owners of our lives, but caretakers of the time, relationships, and blessings entrusted to us.
May we find the strength to live with that awareness not as loss, but as invitation to love more fully while we can, to be more present to one another, and to recognize the holiness of what is given to us only for a time.
May we learn, especially in moments of uncertainty and grief, to hold both what is no longer and what is still unfolding, trusting that even in the overlap of old and new harvests, life continues to ask something meaningful of us.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rav Claudia