{"id":45838,"date":"2018-12-17T19:23:48","date_gmt":"2018-12-17T17:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=45838"},"modified":"2022-07-11T13:59:11","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T10:59:11","slug":"holidays-for-haves-and-have-nots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/holidays-for-haves-and-have-nots\/","title":{"rendered":"Holidays For Haves And Have-Nots"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In Leviticus 23, one of the Torah\u2019s major accounts of the festival calendar, after the description of the Temple rites of Shavuot (Pentecost, the Feast of Weeks), the text repeats the commandments of <\/span>peah<\/em> <\/span>and <\/span>leket<\/span><\/em>, <\/span><\/i>to leave the corners of the fields and the unharvested gleanings of the crops for the poor. Given the ritual focus of the chapter, this ethical addition is even more remarkable. Commentators, however, generally gloss this as a simple mental association with the harvest season of Shavuot, or as a general reminder that there are social obligations beyond the ritual ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a deeper reason.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the context of the pilgrimage festivals, Pesach, with its unleavened bread and arduous dietary restrictions is clearly in some profound way about food. Sukkot, second only to Pesah in strenuous preparations, focuses on where, in what and how you live\u2014it\u2019s theme is shelter. Both mandate a form of enforced poverty \u2013 eating matzah, the bread of affliction; living in a shack, the most modest of dwellings. These holidays are great social equalizers: fulfilling their two central obligations make the wealthy more like the poor, and no one, rich or poor, is excluded by the celebrations.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Biblical Shavuot is different. The celebration focuses on the first fruits and newly harvested grain, and the main celebrants are the landowners, those who have grain and fruits to bring.<\/span><\/p>\n

As such this festival is “about” land, a basic element of civilization along with food and shelter. Perhaps ideally, everyone was supposed to be a landowner — but the Torah realizes that this was never going to be the case. The holiday, then, has the dangerous potential of splitting the people between landed and landless, and rather than being a \u2018leveller\u2019 like Pesach and Sukkot, bringing rich and poor together in a shared experience, it could reinforce the socio-economic gap. The unexpected verse about leaving parts of the harvest for the poor (reinforced aggadically in the story of Ruth read on Shavuot) is a reminder of mutual obligation, a reminder that the land should be a source of justice and not division, that the holiday requires an ethic of care, and not just a celebration of wealth.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Biblical land ethic, codified in ritual and ethics, merged the natural with the social by expressing an inseparable link between the land, its bounty and its continued well-being, and the need for the care and support of all the people.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is also a statement about how we celebrate our holidays: gratitude for our bounteous harvests of various types is best expressed through compassion for those who have not been so blessed — not through closed, self-satisfied convocations of the favored.<\/span><\/p>\n

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