In Israel: BeHar
Ancient Israel was largely a farming economy. This week’s Torah portion stipulates that every seventh year is to be a “sabbatical” for the land: “You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard” (Lev 25:4). In addition, once every fifty years a “jubilee” year was declared, whereby, among other things, real estate property reverted to its original owner.
This raised an obvious question, however. If the jubilee year was just around the corner, what would be a fair price to charge for any land being bought or sold? And, on the other hand, what if the jubilee had occurred only recently, so that many years would pass before the land would revert to its original owner? The Torah stipulates that in either case, the price should be determined by the total number of anticipated annual harvests: the more harvests, the higher the price.
To this general rule, the Torah adds this specification: “When you sell to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you may not take advantage of him.” (Lev 25:14). That is, the price has to be fair, determined in keeping with the number of anticipated harvests. The Rabbis of the Mishnah found it somewhat surprising, however, that nearly the same stipulation should occur just three verses later: “You shall not take advantage of one another, and you shall fear your God; for I am the Lord your God.”
It was an ancient assumption that even when the Torah seems to be repeating, the repeated words will actually contain something new, some additional teaching. In this case, the Mishnah states that there are in fact two different kinds of “taking advantage”: the first is taking financial advantage—charging more or less than a fair price—and the other is “taking advantage with words” (ona’at devarim).
In both cases, a person takes advantage by having some information that the other person doesn’t have. Thus, if he knows that property reverts to its original owner in a sabbatical year, and also knows when the next sabbatical year is to occur, while the other guy (a foreigner, or someone simply ignorant of the law) doesn’t, he is not allowed to conceal that knowledge to his own advantage.
The other kind of taking advantage, “ona’at devarim,” doesn’t involve monetary loss. Rather, the person uses something he knows to hurt or embarrass or inconvenience the other fellow.
The Mishnah provides a number of examples. Someone who pretends to be interested in buying something and enters into negotiations with a seller over the price—“How much do you want for this?”—when he knows perfectly well he has no intention of buying—such a person is guilty of taking verbal advantage. True, there is no actual monetary loss involved, but he is still putting the seller through his paces quite needlessly.
Some more examples: if he knows about a person that he is a ba‘al teshuvah (someone who became religious after having not been), he cannot say to him, “Don’t be so uppity—remember the things you used to do.” Or if he knows that the person is the child of parents who had converted to Judaism, he cannot say, “Remember the things that your ancestors used to do.”
The Babylonian Talmud (Baba Metzia 58b) goes on to give further illustrations: If a donkey driver comes into town in search of grain, you cannot tell the man, “Go to such-and-such an address,” when he knows perfectly well that the person who lives there has never sold any grain. Maimonides also suggested that asking a person a scientific question when the person knows nothing on the subject was likewise a form of ona’at devarim: the result can only be to display the person’s ignorance.
The verse mentioning this second kind of “taking advantage” adds a further note: “And you shall fear your God.” Some ancient interpreters took this expression as saying that it is impossible to list all the various things that might constitute ona’at devarim. The list would be endless! Besides, two people can do exactly the same thing, the first in all innocence, the second out of malice. So the various forms of “taking advantage,” along with certain other laws in the Torah, were described as a “matter given over to the heart,” that is, you know it when you’re doing it for the wrong reason.
Here is the Talmud’s example. King David, in the Talmud’s account, was not only busy with the affairs of state, but he was also a teacher of the complicated laws of ritual purity. Once when he had finished an exposition of some of these laws and asked the class if they had any questions, one person replied: “David, what is the penalty for someone who sleeps with another man’s wife?”—an obvious allusion to David’s sin with Bathsheba, and something that had no connection to the matters discussed. David answered: “If found guilty, he is punished by death, yet he still has a portion in the World to Come. But someone who shames another person in public”—as the questioner had just done—“has no portion in the World to Come.” What might otherwise look like a student’s innocent question in this case was not; that is why ona’at devarim is a “matter given over to the heart.”
Shabbat shalom!
Weekly Reading Outside Israel: Emor
Why Do We Count the ‘Omer?
In this week’s reading, the Torah commands the people of Israel to bring the first sheaf (‘omer) of the new grain harvest to the Temple. This is to be done, the Torah says, “on the day after the Sabbath”—which, in our tradition, refers to the day after the start of the Passover festival. This week’s reading then further commands that, starting from that day, we are to count off seven weeks (Lev 23:15). On the day after this counting is complete, another festival is to occur, appropriately called Shavu‘ot (“weeks” in Hebrew).
Regular readers of this column will have heard of the ancient book of Jubilees, an anonymous work written in the second century BCE—and one that reveals a lot about what was on the minds of Jews in that turbulent century. One of the more surprising aspects of Jubilees is how it handles the whole matter of counting off those seven weeks between Passover and Shavu‘ot.
In Jubilees, there is no mention of counting weeks or days.
Why was this book out to eliminate the counting? Actually, this was quite consistent with the overall ideological stand found in Jubilees—and frankly, among some Jews today as well. Jubilees did not like the idea of any human role in things sacred, not only in determining the date of Shavu‘ot, but in other matters as well. So, for the same reason, Jubilees warns against people who “will carefully examine the moon” and use it to determine the months—as we do with the Hebrew calendar—since this also required human intervention, first in having human witnesses spot the new moon and then having other humans—a rabbinical court—use their testimony to officially establish the start of each month and publicize it. The Hebrew calendar’s luni-solar nature also required human authorities to add a second month of Adar from time to time, at irregular intervals. “How awful!” one can almost hear Jubilees say. Instead, the book championed a sun-based calendar that was virtually automatic—no human meddling involved.
Our rabbis, on the contrary, gloried in this handoff from the divine to the human. The Torah, they said (appropriately reinterpreting Deut 30:12), is no longer in heaven, where it began: it is now in the hands of human beings to interpret and put into practice. This of course doesn’t mean that Judaism is a do-it-yourself religion, given to revision by whoever wants to change it; we depend on past rulings and established practice. What it does mean is that ultimately, at some stage or other, what came from God must always be given over to mere human beings, to make the best of it that they can.
So in the same spirit, we thank God on the first day of every lunar month for having sanctified the people of Israel and thereby given us the role of establishing when each new month begins. This requirement hands off to us, in the process, the authority to determine as well when each festival will occur, in fact, even when the Day of Atonement will occur. So, as it also says in this week’s reading, “These are the Lord’s festivals, sacred occasions that you will proclaim” (Lev 23:4); in other words, you will be the ones to determine My sacred days.