The Benefit of Losing Control

Parashat B’har-B’Chukotai, Leviticus 25:1–27:34

Rabbi Russ Resnik

Last week I spent a couple of days on the upper Rio Grande near Taos, New Mexico, along with Rabbi Rich Nichol, my friend Avi, and my son Luke, who has the most experience among us in canoeing and kayaking. After our first day of running the rapids he said that what he loves about boating on the river is how you can use all your skills and all your strength, you can make all the right moves, and it’s still always beyond your control. Sometimes you just end up going wherever the flow takes you. You can navigate the current, but the current always wins out—and he loves that reality.

Luke’s comments about managing (or being managed by) the river reminded me of the Lord’s instructions in this week’s parasha about managing the land of Israel: 

When you come into the land that I give you, the land shall keep a Shabbat to Hashem. For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its fruits, but in the seventh year there shall be a Shabbat of rest for the land, a Shabbat for Hashem. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap what grows of itself in your harvest, or gather the grapes of your undressed vine. It shall be a year of rest for the land. The Shabbat of the land shall provide food for you. . . . (Lev 25:2–6a)

The Israelite farmer does all he can, sowing, pruning, and harvesting, but then, like the kayaker running the rapids, he encounters a limit to what he can control. He must let go every seventh year, to let the land rest from his labors and provide food on its own. This Torah instruction on farm management is a wider lesson on the limits of our own efforts, even the best ones. And if the lesson isn’t clear enough, the Torah mandates a still greater cessation of human effort after seven of these seven-year cycles:  

You shall count seven Shabbats of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven Shabbats of years shall give you forty-nine years. Then you shall cause the shofar to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month. . . . And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. That fiftieth year shall be a Jubilee for you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. (Lev 25:8–11)

Today, with our abundance of stored and stockpiled food supplies, it’s hard to imagine how hard and even threatening it must have been to forego preparing the soil and planting the seed for a whole year. The sages comment on this challenge: 

It is customary for a person to perform a mitzvah for a day, a week, or a month. Does one usually perform a mitzvah for an entire year? Yet the farmer lets the field lie fallow for a year, the vineyard for a year, and remains silent. Is there greater strength of character than this? (Yalkut T’hillim 860, cited in The Mussar Torah Commentary)

This great “strength of character” doesn’t arise from human exertion and competence, but from trust in God. It arises out beyond the limits of all that we can do, out in those beyond-our-control areas of human experience where we learn to fully trust in God. We realize that God is always present and active, especially there, present like the rushing current and far more powerful than our feeble paddle strokes.

The cycle of Shabbat years and Jubilee reminds us of this underlying reality, summarized in these words:  “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me” (Lev 25:23). The land we work doesn’t belong to us, but to Hashem; it requires our efforts and our diligence, but in the end, we are resident aliens, dependent on his provision. The limits on our ownership of the land train us in trusting him.

The Torah continues to post these limits to our control and to promote trust in God in an age obsessed with human achievement and technical competence. We’re learning to let go in an age that’s holding on tight, that’s running the rapids with a white-knuckled grip on the paddles. And yet the ability to relax our grip and trust in God remains essential to spiritual wholeness.

Messiah Yeshua calls us to the ultimate in letting go: “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:33). It’s clear from reading the full account of the Good News that Messiah is not calling us to necessarily live in poverty and isolation. We still have work to do and responsibilities to fulfill. But he’s calling us to the Jubilee realization that we are resident aliens here, no matter how much we’ve accumulated or accomplished, and that it all belongs to our Master, who reminds us, “The land is mine.” When things threaten to drift out of control, we may sometimes need to paddle harder, or we may need to recognize this anxious moment as an opportunity to trust God more deeply.

Renouncing all that we have doesn’t necessarily mean poverty and marginalization (although it could), but it does remove our excuses for stinginess, holding grudges, self-serving deeds, and greed of all kinds. Renouncing all that we have means we shouldn’t be shocked or scandalized when we’re expected to practice forgiveness, or generosity, or self-sacrifice. Instead of diminishing us, it reminds us that the current of God remains far stronger than our most heroic efforts, and we please him as we learn to entrust ourselves to its flow.

 Scripture references are the author’s translation, based on the ESV.

Photo: New Mexico River Adventures