What Holds Us

This week’s Torah portion, Behar-Bechukotai, is the origin of the call to “Proclaim liberty throughout the land.” (Leviticus 25:10) As an American, I read those words and think of the Liberty Bell, on which they are inscribed. But in context, this verse is part of a set of mitzvot about land use, distribution of resources and the importance of sacred rest. 

One of those mitzvot is the requirement of the shmita year, a Shabbat for the land every seventh year in which fields are allowed to lie fallow and all debts are forgiven. After seven cycles of seven years, the 50th year was proclaimed as a yovel, or jubilee year. In a jubilee year, each person was told to return to their holding. (Leviticus 25:13)

This holding refers to the lands apportioned to each Israelite tribe (except for the tribe of Levi, whose income came from Temple work.) The Torah presumes that over time, people would loan or sell land to each other and ownership would become blurry. The yovel year ensured that every 50 years wealth would be redistributed and people would return to their roots.

I’m not certain what would count today as my ancestral holding. The limestone house where I grew up in San Antonio? The house on the other side of town where my father grew up with chickens in the backyard? The apartment in Prague where my mother lived as a child? The shtetls in Belarus and Poland and Russia from whence my grandparents came?  

What if instead we turn the instruction a little bit on its head? What if the Torah were instructing us to return not to our forebears’ land, but to what “holds” us and connects us? This year, these verses remind me that every so often there is a human need to consciously turn to our roots, to reconnect with the stories and values that nurture and nourish us in life’s journeys.

When I think of the stories and values that ground us, I think first of Torah. It’s our inheritance — not (just) the physical scroll or the library of commentary written about it, but the contents therein, the teaching and wisdom, the value of asking questions. When we say that Torah is a “tree of life to all who hold fast to it,” we remind ourselves that our roots are in Torah and Torah feeds our blooms.

Music is another thing that can hold us. “When people sing together,” the singer-songwriter Meklit Hadero notes, “our heartbeats align.” Making music connects us with each other. For me, singing in harmony is a transcendent experience of sacred connection. Together, our voices, instruments, even just our breathing, can be more than the sum of their parts. 

Shabbat holds us. The rhythm of six days of ordinary time capped by a seventh day of rest is built into the Torah’s understanding of creation. And no matter how we observe it — whether by refraining from work, as the classical paradigm teaches, or consciously engaging in creativity, a Shabbat hike or a shabbes schluff (Shabbat nap) — Shabbat holds us and grounds us. 

The natural world holds us. One of the best tools I know for grounding myself is touching a plant and then breathing its scent. Whether it’s a lilac bloom, the ceaseless rush of the waves, or a tiny tomato plant making its way up through a crack in the pavement, no matter what kind of landscape we call home, nature is part of the container that holds us steady. 

And God holds us. One of our tradition’s many names for God is hamakom, “The Place.” There is holiness in this place (wherever this place is), though it’s very human to forget There is holiness in the act of awakening ourselves, in the breathing mantra of “right here, right now.” Being in the now is a way of remembering that the now is holy, and that holiness is our holding. 

The call to proclaim liberty throughout the land still resonates, and I imagine it always will. In order to work toward building systems of liberty and justice for all, we need to root ourselves in sacred story, in sacred time, in the sacredness of nature and harmony. When we draw strength from these, our work toward liberty and justice will be rooted in what lasts.