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The Moral, the Political, and the Partisan

This was the D'var Torah I gave for Parashat Behar on May 21, 2022.

Whenever people suggest that Judaism could be separate from politics, I think about this week’s parasha. The Shabbaton and the Yovel (the sabbatical and the jubilee) – these mitzvot are not just personal and spiritual teachings, about what you eat and what you share. They are about the whole system of property and ownership and power, and about our relationship to the land and the ecosystem that provides our food.

Every seven years, it doesn’t matter who owns a field and who has stored up food from the year before. Everyone has access to all of it, and everyone comes side by side to get food from the land and from private storehouses, and maybe they even eat together. Every fifty years, it doesn’t matter who has bought or sold a piece of land and who lives where. All families go back to the land holdings originally given to them in the time of Yehoshua when the people first came into the promised land. Wealthy families give back what they have bought legitimately; poor families are restored to what they needed to sell.

None of this happens individually or one at a time. Both the Shabbaton and the Yovel happen to everyone at the same time, in every region of the land. It is a social experience around property and wealth and power that is shared all at once, by society as a whole.

It occurred to me this week that Shabbaton and Yovel are far more radical than even the Exodus itself, the overturning of Pharaoh, which I have taught often and recently was unlike anything ancient people had ever thought previously about the value of human beings and about power. The Exodus was unprecedented – but it was in response to a situation of actual group suffering, imposed by a specific oppressor. Shabbaton and Yovel are not in response to any specific instance like that. They are pre-programmed responses to the regular things that happen in a society where people work the land and trade food and labor and exchange property. They are for a society that also has good ideas of tzedakah (giving) and chesed (caring acts), which individuals are responsible to carry out.

Without the need for painful suffering on a massive scale, or mobilizing against a tyrant, the Torah in Leviticus 25 mandates the overturning of our relations in the economy and society, making it all change visibly in the open every seven years and every fifty years.

Maybe the end of the book of Vayikra (Leviticus) is the real bookend to the beginning of the Exodus. Exodus begins with our ancestors as slaves building cities for Pharaoh’s regime, and it ends with them building the opposite -- the Mishkan, a spiritual central for the regime of Hashem. “Let them make me a Sanctuary and I will dwell among them,” says Exodus. But now, nearly at the end of Leviticus, people imagine building a system for recalibrating their society on the go, making sure no one can permanently accumulate Pharaoh-like wealth and power over the others. “For to Me the Children of Israel are servants,” says the end of Leviticus – and the Talmudic rabbis explain: For to Me they are servants and not servants to other servants, not slaves to each other. Shabbaton and Yovel are the social and political inoculation against more Pharaohs, even a Pharoah among the Israelites themselves.

Political this is – and yet, it’s not. I’m using the word politics a bit fast and loose, because Parashat Behar does not show us politics in action. We know the sabbatical year was implemented in ancient times and still is today, and in Roman times and modern times there has been politics around it. We have no idea whether the jubilee really ever happened exactly the way the Torah stipulates. Our parasha describes an ideal society, and we can think about the moral and spiritual principles the parasha teaches. But the actual outcome could only be ensured through political activity.

Saying the Torah has social visions doesn’t itself prove that there is a Torah of politics and political action. I love to bask in Shabbaton and Yovel, any excuse to do that is dayenu – but I want to say more about the Torah of political action, which in a way only begins with things our parasha.

I want to use a distinction proposed by Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, though I will take it in a slightly different direction. You may be starting to recognize the Hartman name and Yehuda’s name in particular from many of my d’rashot. For the past few years Yehuda has been teaching around the idea that American Jews ought to distinguish in our civic activity between the moral, the political, and the partisan. Briefly, Yehuda defines the moral as our core social principles; the political as our collaborative strategy and work in society; and the partisan as the activity we do typically within either of the two teams, the Democrats and the Republicans. Yehuda argues that it is bad for America and particularly bad for Jews when we don’t distinguish between the moral, the political, and the partisan.

The moral refers to the principles and values we hold, which generate our ideas about the good society, and the actions we actually perform toward other people and in groups of people we know. The moral is also about working on ourselves as people in society. It’s about being honest about our own individual gifts and our own individual limits. It’s about asking ourselves why we care about this more than that, looking at our own inconsistencies and hypocrisies. The moral is where we make judgments, often about others though it should also be toward ourselves. The moral is about how we do teshuvah around our action and inaction in society -- how we hold ourselves accountable and recalibrate ourselves, as well as the smaller groups within which we talk about politics or we organize. The moral dimension is very spiritual and obviously very Jewish.

The political – I want to use the word in its Aristotelian sense. Not “yeech, politics”, but the elevating work of defining and creating the polis, the best society that is both aligned with our moral values and also cultivates those values at the same time. We are only real in society, and political activity enlarges us and elevates us and completes us. The political brings people together in purposeful work, helps us each discover our gifts and how they fit together, and shows us new things to admire about each other.

The political magnifies our power to achieve visions, on a scale not possible just by small group projects or even by giving tzedakah. The political is how we find the power to bring a society into alignment with the ideals of Shabbaton and Yovel.

The political is also the level where groups ought to try to understand themselves, and look at their own strengths and weaknesses and hypocrisies. Groups need to do teshuvah as well. This is spiritual work and Jewish work, and indeed the Torah presents the Jewish people as a group trying to learn the detailed social covenant from Mt. Sinai, to internalize it and build a society based on it in the promised land.

Finally, the partisan is working for the party and candidates we believe right now can bring our moral and political visions into being. It’s mobilizing behind the specific leaders and groups we believe can do that. When we use the word “politics”, Yehuda points out, what we usually mean is the partisan – picking sides, zero sum, experiencing outrage and supporting one group and being angry at the other.

The moral, the political, the partisan.

Yehuda argues that we have too often collapsed the distinction between the moral, the political, and the partisan. If all we let ourselves look at is the partisan, that becomes our good and evil and our daily religion. We will lose important parts of our moral compass to the extent that most of what we can think about or desire is that our group or favored leader wins. We need the moral as something separate, Yehuda says – and I would add (in my name if not his) that we need the political as distinct from the partisan as well.

People who object to having politics in Judaism say: Stick to the moral. But the moral alone is too general. Saying Tzelem Elohim (the image of God) does not tell us why we should care about Ukraine in this way and Afghanistan in the same way or perhaps a different way. Talking about Shabbaton and Yovel does not tell us what the tax rates should be on income or wealth. Moral principles frame the questions and suggest directions but don’t give us answers. From the moral we need those directions, and we need to circle back to the moral principles when we are doing political thinking and political work.

We need also all the processes of teshuvah – assessing ourselves and what we are bringing to political action, checking our hypocrisy and self-righteousness, making sure we are rooted more in love for those we responsible for or allies for, and less rooted just in hate of those we are against.

Too much of religious politics is the partisan alone, and that is bad for religion generally and terrible for Jews. The partisan is where work is done and things are accomplished. But it is a realm of constant fighting; it cultivates hate and anger and fear. It discourages nuance and punishes ambiguity, and it asks us to hold up as absolutely true things that are only partially true. When we equate all politics with the partisan, the losses that come inevitably in the partisan make all political work angry and fearful and dispiriting and draining, even when we have won something for the time being.

Yehuda says we rent out our moral sense too often to the partisan; and since the partisan is win-lose, our moral judgments become binary as well. Our fellow citizens are good or evil. Our fellow Jews. Yehuda quotes a Pew study that says as much bias as there is, explicit and implicit, against people of other backgrounds, whether religious or ethnic or racial or educational or economic, the most widespread hate in America is toward people of different partisan affiliation.

The moral is crucial; the partisan is where the rubber hits the road. But neither the moral that supplies our core principles, nor the partisan where we accomplish our goals or we lose -- neither of these should be the center. At the center should be the political. At the center should be the political for each of us spiritually, and for us as a Jewish community learning and acting and reflecting.

The political is where we ask how our principles translate, where we ask it again and again, even while we are strategizing and even as we are executing our strategies. We ask whether we are being true to our principles or just think we are.

The political is where we take time from the practical battles to appreciate and admire others: the leaders who motivate us, the teachers and writers who educate us, the people who bring the signs and the food and crunch the numbers. It’s where we see ourselves in a good light as part of such an organism.

The political is where we try to understand those we are fighting against -- for the principles they might have, for the people they are loving and standing up for. These are aspects of our opponents we might learn from or at least learn to answer, if only to make our own moral arguments stronger.

The political isn’t something you do by yourself. It’s not sermons and it’s not Facebook posts, unless they invite conversation. The political is together, and sometimes it even can be done together by partisans opposing each other. It’s what I hope tomorrow’s panel on reproductive rights will model. It’s what groups a lot of you have been involved in doing in your own political work in the local community.

It's not enough for the synagogue to do the moral, and of course we should not be doing the partisan. It’s not good for religion to stay in a corner, or to make itself indistinguishable from a political party. But the political yes, sometimes all together as us and sometimes when we lift up one issue or sometimes when we’re in a learning posture about ourselves as people engaged in the political. That is very much what a religious group should do, and what Jews should do together.

And in that sense, maybe Shabbaton and Yovel are political. Apart from the practical sharing and resetting around food and property, they were ways to get people talking about the world of years 1-6 and years 1-49, and maybe even working on that politically. Or so I fantasize. Our next half year in this country is going to be intensely partisan, and that will be hard. Let’s do our part to elevate the time, by making it more political as well.

Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy -- A Map of Spring and Summer 2021

I've been wanting to get this down for weeks.... I’ve been very affected since March by Torah time – by how the cycle of reading the Torah in synagogue has mapped onto our experience of the pandemic since its one-year anniversary.

The first anniversary of the formal declaration of the pandemic and the massive shut-downs coincided with Jews’ reading the end of the book of Exodus and the start of the book of Leviticus. The Torah itself says that one year passed between the instructions Moshe received for the night of the Exodus, and the final assembly of the mishkan, the desert Sanctuary that would be a focal point for the Divine Presence. During that year in the Torah there had been war and thirst, a complete reorientation of the food distribution system to adjust to (i.e. manna), the new laws and covenant at Mt. Sinai, the in-fighting around the Golden Calf. Then finally a process of calming and reconciliation, and a collective project of building the “tabernacle.” Everyone gave something unique, with its own texture or color, from their life of that year – to be repurposed into a symbol of their unity. When the mishkan was finally assembled, the Divine Presence visibly infused it, with the cloud and fire that was going to lead the people ahead toward their new land and their new life.

That was what we read more or less on the first anniversary of the shut-down, as we were entering a new phase too – the ramping up of Covid-19 vaccination. I expected a turn toward dealing with the new ethical challenges of moving forward, the project of reconnecting and rebuilding a reality better than the one pre-pandemic.

But Leviticus opens with a cloud around the mishkan, and Moshe himself hesitating to approach it to hear these kinds of teachings. The cloud and fire do not in fact move forward. Something is not – was not ready.

Leviticus, the book that was the backdrop of our spring, is not actually a book of moving forward in the desert. And it’s not directly a book of society and ethical teaching, at least not for the first eighty percent or so. Leviticus does open with travel – but it does open with movement. It’s the motion of individuals coming one by one mostly, in a process the Torah calls korban or coming-closer, with offerings. People coming in closer, walking into the center, toward the cloud, with their offerings. Toward the cloudy place, with offerings occasioned by basic emotions – wellbeing, gratitude, guilt. Getting out and coming toward, to eat a sacred meal with a Kohen, to cleanse themselves of something, to burn up something completely and leave it behind.

Something got my attention in March, when I looked at the Torah and realized that it was telling me not to expect people to be ready to plunge ahead. Especially I shouldn’t expect people to be ready to engage in discussion about ethics and society fully just yet.

For a while, the Torah says n Leviticus, moving is just getting used to back and forth. It’s not one direction, from alone to together, from isolated to the Divine. It’s back and forth. Leviticus doesn’t command offerings from everyone on the same schedule. Yes, there’s some paying attention to right and wrong, sometimes you have to bring something in because of that. But mostly, we’re guided by ourselves, we know when to try moving. Closer and back out. The cloud and the fire are in the center and draw our eyes even when we’re still alone, to help us remember that there is something common even on the days we don’t bring anything. Do it like this for a while, move in your own directions, says the Torah for eighteen chapters, and then we’ll get back to ethics, and then we’ll try moving on together.

The commentaries on the opening verse of Leviticus focus on the last letter of its first word Vayikra. In the Torah scroll, the last letter alef is written as a small superscript. That alef has two dimensions. Its presence or absence changes the word from calling to happenstance. The letter alef signifies ani or anochi, “I” – which can stand for the ego in a strong sense or the Divine, “I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Leviticus opens with a cloud around the tabernacle and a spiritual teetering between calling and being just tossed around, between a sense of our own “I” and not having it. Reclaiming what “I” feel like, who “I” am, is what a lot of us were doing as the pandemic hit its first year and we contemplated the next phase ahead. We were, and surely still are, disoriented. Leviticus gives that spiritual state a name and a picture and a pacing.

That was most of Leviticus, and it turned out to be not just accurate but for me soothing.

By the time the book of Leviticus turned to its code of ethics in chapter 19, and its social vision in chapter 25, things had in fact changed around us quite profoundly. The accelerating progress of vaccination in many places led just at this time to the CDC’s revision of its mask guidelines for fully vaccinated people. It was time to open the book of Numbers – the book of the march forward, the organization of people toward the battle for the new land, and the conflicts and delays along the way. But at least it’s the book of moving together, even if together is starting and stopping, and quarreling among ourselves.

Leviticus and Numbers share the perception that not everyone is spiritually ready to move in the same direction at the same time. But at some point, there is something you could call movement of the group, catalyzed by leaders or critical mass. Numbers acknowledges that deciding to move is hardly all there is. You’ve got plenty of opportunities to grind to a halt. In the Torah, these include questioning leaders and their motivations; people getting focused on immediate ease vs. longer-term goals; issues of justice and inclusion; people defining the end of the road in different ways. This last particularly struck me when we read about the tribes of Reuven and Gad who wanted not to go all the way to the new land with the other tribes, but settle where they were. To declare the journey and the fight were over. They and Moshe had it out, and eventually figured out a way for the tribes to work on setting up the common future together, even though tribe by tribe they would separate and live differently both economically and culturally. We should be so fortunate. In Numbers, some 38 years pass and if you read the book you can’t see where they went.

That’s more or less where we got in the Torah by early/mid-July. Now it’s time for Deuteronomy. What’s coming is preparation for the new year – the Jewish new year which starts this year in early September, as does the new school year. The new Torah year starts a few weeks later. Deuteronomy is about getting to the cusp of the new land, the future. It is a book of review of the teachings, going over them for the first time in a long time. At long last, Moshe gets to focus on the ethics and laws and teachings. He gets to talk about them, and also to remind people to continue to learn and study and talk about them from the moment they enter the new land. The time for putting that off – for delaying our ethical conversations, or pushing them to the side or to a small group of interested people – we’re being asked to consider that time over. To be fully human, ready to live, is also to be accountable ethically and intellectually and spiritually. That is what the Jewish new year is all about, and the intellectual explorations in Deuteronomy coincide in the Jewish year with weeks of spiritual introspection. And since this is hard any year, and especially this year, the rabbis of our tradition long ago paired Deuteronomy with (Second) Isaiah, with words of comfort and encouragement, with a welcome of people back to the Divine, back from exile toward home and each other.

I’m waiting to see how Deuteronomy maps onto the end of the summer. But I wanted to get this spiritual journal of the Torah cycle down now, because I am so grateful I had the Torah in this way these past few months. I’ve had more than the Torah’s specific teachings, each verse or each week – I’ve had this structure. It has helped pace me, and see the moment I’m in and some weeks ahead. I have always paid attention to the seasonal flow of the Torah readings, but this year I have seen in the Torah’s pacing through the desert so much I hadn’t seen before. I am grateful, and hope I’ll be attentive to the same things in the weeks and months ahead.

E-Maggid: What Shall We Eat?

From the insights of the Netivot Shalom ("Paths of Peace") from Rav Shalom Noach Barzovsky, the Slonimer Rebbe:

In this week's parasha, Behar, we learn the mitzvah of the Shabbaton -- the sabbatical of the land.  Every seventh year, the Land of Israel is to rest.  People are to eat simply what grows naturally from the land in that year.

 

The Torah itself raises the obvious question.  "What will we eat in the seventh year?  We are not planting, and we are not harvesting our crops!" (Leviticus 25:20)

 

Reb Chaim of Tchernovitz observes that the Torah could have asked the question differently: "How can we possibly survive in the seventh year?"  Instead, he says, the Torah portrays a person who knows he will eat, but wonders what the miracle of our food really is, and how God brings it about.  (He imagines a person asking:  Will we see manna from the sky again?  Will extra animals show up for us so we can eat them?)

 

The question of "what will we eat" is not about doubt.  It's about trying to understand in general what goes into having enough, not just in the seventh year.  How much is my own effort?  How much is augmented because of my merits, the extra goodness that flows to me as a consequence of what I do in the world?  How much is unpredictable and miraculous?  How much is consistently miraculous?

 

The seventh year is a thought experiment meant to prod us into these questions.  Our bodies, says the Slonimer, don't just want the food, but actually crave our answers.

Parashat Behar: Redeeming Coupons, Redeeming the World

My rav at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, once said in class that Parashat Behar is the most profound biblical text about redemption.  (Rabbi Tucker, who was the dean at the time, is something of a genius.  In his seminar, he would take the chit-chat of the group as we entered class about that week's "Saturday Night Live", and almost two hours later weave it into his wrap-up of whatever discussion we had on Jewish theology.)

Leviticus 25 is about redemption.  But rather than talking, say, about the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, the Torah here talks about the technicalities of land and home ownership once the Jews enter Eretz Yisrael.

In Parashat Behar, we learn about yovel, the jubilee (same word in English) that occurs every fifty years.  Every fifty years, all land returns to the possession of the family to which it had been assigned when the people first entered the land.  If during the fifty years, a person had to liquidate his land and sell it in order to have money to survive, there was an opportunity for a family member to redeem the land on his behalf.  That family "redeemer" would pay the new order the value of the remaining harvests until the upcoming jubilee.  Then the land would revert to its original family possessor. 

Notice that I'm not using the word "owner."  More on that.

Why is this called redemption?  Why does the buying back of property use the same word as the liberation from slavery?

Think about what "redeem" really means.  In commerce, you can redeem an offer or a coupon.  The coupon represents a possibility, a potential.  In a sense, when you "redeem" it the merchant pays you back for something you are willing to pay to have.

In Judaism, we have pidyon haben, the redemption of the first-born male.  The parents go on the thirtieth day to a kohen, a descendent of Aharon (Aaron), and give five coins to "buy back" the son.  The son is already theirs, but the Torah says that the first-born is also potentially God's, in appreciation for God's saving the first-born boys in Egypt.

We also have, more seriously, the command of pidyon shvuyim, the redemption of captives and hostages.  Here again, the Jews are required (under most circumstances) to pay for someone's freedom, which the capitve is already entitled to.  That freedom is there, even though it's being submerged or hidden, to say the least.

Redemption, in all these examples, is a process where something potential becomes real.  When something that exists beyond view is brought to the fore.  Redemption is a "transaction" that completes, not an exchange created on the spot.

In Parashat Behar, redemption is linked with the idea that everyone has an equal place, an equal stake, and an equal possibility to prosper in the Land of Israel.  Between he jubilees, that becomes submerged.  As we know it does all the time, as some people prosper and others suffer.  The real diverges from the ideal.  But redemption exists; the ideal will become real again, either through a family "redeemer" or universally at the jubilee.

In the Torah's vision, there is no ownership of land by people in the sense of a permanent, individual right.  (There is, actually -- houses in cities can be owned in perpetuity.)  Land is owned by God, and that means that each individual Israelite or family is leasing or using what it currently holds.  (Even today, large swaths of Eretz Yisrael are not actually owned by individuals, but held by the Jewish National Fund or the government and leased out to "owners.")

And the Torah builds the jubilee into the Land of Israel from the very first moment of Jewish settlment there.  In that way, entering the land to build a society based on Torah is itself a completion of the creation of the earth.  It is the way that the ideals that are potential in any society become real through Torah, the Jews, and the Land of Israel.

Redeem means "re-deem" -- to reaffirm a declaration, a reality, in the event it had become obscured from view.  And this all is the secret of God's redemption of the Jews from Egypt as well.  In addition to ending our oppression, God re-deemed us:  returned to us and the world our name, and our essential purpose.

 

Behar/B'chuoktai: That You May Live on the Land

At first reading, the two parashiyot that are combined this week seem like a divine split personality.  Behar ("At the mountain [of Sinai]") is the most utopian parasha in all of Torah after Genesis 1, in which "God saw and, look, it was very good" -- all of Creation!  Behar imagines a land in which every seven years, people lose the basic privilege of land ownership.  They are forbidden from working the land to cultivate produce and sell what they grow.  Instead, everyone eats from whatever grows.  And every fifty years, people and families return to the property that belonged to them when the Israelites first came into the land.  All transactions are, to use the language of today's papers, "unwound."  If your family became wealthy by accumulating land, when the jubilee year arrives everything goes back where it started.

Imagine how highly God must think of us, to imagine that we could realize this vision.

 

B'chukotai ("by my laws"), in contrast, is mostly taken up with divine reward and punishment.  If the Israelite community obeys the covenant in Eretz Yisrael, God will prosper them.  If they don't, and continue to slide away, God will make the land infertile, bring hunger, and eventually banish the people from the land.

 

This is a more graphic version of the second paragraph of the Shma, the so-called "standard theology" of the Bible.  Utopian it isn't!  It is almost as if in these sections, God views the Israelites as always children, presumed to respond primarily to incentives and punishments.

 

For a long time I found it very difficult to pray my way through the second paragraph of the Shma.  Or to find any divine inspiration in the theology of reward and punishment.  Behar, in contrast, spoke to me and prodded my dreamiest dreams.

 

About fifteen years ago, I was given an article by Rabbi Arthur Waskow that changed my outlook about these passages in the Torah.  And I began to understand that Behar and B'chukotai are not two poles, but two sides of the same coin.

 

Rabbi Waskow reads sections like B'chukotai with an ecological lens.  When our way of life becomes unmoored from Torah, we cause the land we live on to become unforgiving, inhospitable to our life.  When we don't live by the laws that restrain the power that one person might exert over another, we spin ever faster in a materialistic frenzy.  When we ignore the Sabbath and draw out of the earth unrelentingly each week and each year, we abuse the Life that is God's presence in the soil, the waters, and the sky.  We cause God to leave our land, our earth.  And as a result, we well know from environmental scientists, human beings are having to leave lands that are becoming progressively less habitable.

So in the end, Behar and B'chukotai flow from the same divine vision.  The laws of the covenant are, among other things, limits on our use of the earth.  Respecting those limits from day to day creates the habits that might one day lead us to the mountaintop, where we might contemplate Shabbat on the wider scale.  The scale of pausing our economic machine, or sharing its rewards more equitably, or making sure each family has a chance each generation to start fresh if they need to.

The utopia of Behar is far beyond us.  There are first steps and next steps.  This Shabbat and next week we call attention at Temple Beth Abraham to the New England Carbon Challenge.  It is a simple and fast on-line tool that enables a household to model different changes in the way we use energy.  You sit down with your bills, and explore different options.  The website tells you how much that choice will reduce your bills and your carbon emissions into the atmosphere.  On Monday at 8:00, we are welcoming Arden Cala, outreach director for the mayor of Nashua's citywide Green Team to talk about it.

It takes maybe 15 minutes, and the average participant comes up with ideas that could save more than $700 each year.  Most of the ideas are far short of installing solar panels on your roof or wind generators in the yard.  Try it!  I hope for 50 households to log in this month and see what's possible.  You can do it at home, or come in during religious school next week on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and someone with a laptop can walk you through it.

These changes are a win all the way around -- for the bank account, the atmosphere, and the swaths of our planet that we are ruining in our quest for more fuel.  And they are very much in the spirit of the teachings at the end of Leviticus and the second paragraph of the Shma.  Try some, that we may continue to live well on the good land that God has given us.

Parashat Behar -- Jack Kemp, Housing, and Torah

Jack Kemp died just a couple weeks ago, on May 2.  I thought of the long-time conservative political leader as I studied Parashat Behar last week.

I've always considered Jack Kemp to be one of my influences, as someone who came of age in the 1980s, because of the particular kind of free-market conservatism he espoused.  He was fanatical for low taxes and economic freedom, but he never used those principles to say that society should turn its back on the poor.  Instead, he championed market-based strategies, whether school choice or support for home ownership, as the most effective tools for fight poverty.  He served as Secretary of Housing in the administration of George Bush.

His interest in helping individual own homes -- that's what I thought about when he died, and what kept him in mind during the week of Parashat Behar.  Leviticus chapter 25 says two things.  There is the law of the sabbatical year, when essentially no one in Israel owns any property, but all eat equally off the land.  Then there is the law of the jubilee, which returns everyone to the property and home that belonged to their families originally, when the Land of Israel was divided among tribes, clans, and families.  Much of the chapter elaborates procedures for helping someone "redeem" or buy back a home that he had to sell because of financial difficulties.

There is an idea here, that combating poverty for the Torah is not just about feeding people, making sure that people do not suffer.  A person is entitled to a place, and to a sense of place.  Being planted somewhere matters.  We deserve not just to survive, but to be able to go home.  It's an interesting angle, especially for people as mobile as Jews.  Once we were forced into exile, but today even by choice we move around at least as much as any other subgroup in American society.

The idea of redeeming a home shows up in later Jewish law.  To support a person who has become poor, the laws of tzedakah state that we must provide the utensils typical for a home.  The law reminds us that there is a certain dignity that comes with having a home -- a place to go to, a place to make Shabbat, to invite guests.  I asked in shul last Shabbat how our social policies in America would have to shift in order to be more in line with the Torah.  The most effort in our social welfare system goes to feeding people and helping them find jobs.  Having a home -- Jack Kemp's preoccupation -- is something we do less well.  Housing policy -- subsidies, public housing, etc -- is a very complicated topic.  But so much flows from it in terms of real dignity, a sense of having one of the homes in a community.

Which gives me one more opportunity to plug a Jewish project called TZEDEC, organized by the Jewish FundS for Justice (that's not a typo).  TZEDEC pools capital from individual Jews and institutions to invest in low-income community development, including affordable housing.  It's a terrific example of how Judaism is neither liberal nor conservative in its social philosophy, or perhaps both at the same time.  TZEDEC is one of the most innovative Jewish tzedakah initiatives in the country, a way of bringing the values of tzedakah and the Leviticus 25 to investment and the market.