Text Study

In The Sabbath, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously frames Jewish perceptions of holiness as holiness in time rather than in space: “The quality of holiness is not in the grain of matter.  It is a preciousness bestowed upon things by an act of consecration and persisting in relation to God.”  He describes Shabbat as a...

In the yovel year, the enslaved go free; the Hebrew word d’ror refers to this release, and to liberty itself. Perhaps the most famous use of Leviticus 25:10 is on Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, on which is enscribed: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof”.  The iconic bell was created for the...

We don’t know exactly when the Yovel year begins. It’s the culmination of seven cycles of seven years, each culminating in a sh’mitah—sabbatical—year. The only way to arrive at Yovel is to count seven years, then seven again and again until forty-nine years have gone by. Similarly, the Torah never tells us precisely when to...

Imagine the time leading up to the sh’mita year in the ancient world. In an agricultural society, people no doubt would have been anxious: what would they eat while the land rested? Would the previous season’s crop suffice for an extra year? And before the yovel year, the anxiety must have been doubled, as the produce of the forty-eighth year would have to last for two extra years! This passage in Leviticus acknowledges this fear, and also frames the yovel year as a time to cultivate a sense of security not based on material possessions.

Each yovel—the last year of a fifty-year cycle—returns the entire land to its original owners. What might be described as radical land reform aims to prevent the development of a permanent underclass, but beyond this, expands our consciousness to understand that land is fundamentally not for sale, that on some level the entire earth belongs to God and never really to us.

While this series focuses primarily on yovel as a source of wisdom for how to approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Six Day War in 1967 and its aftermath, our project would not be complete without engaging with Jerusalem itself.

A text study for considering the impact of violent speech, in political discourse or otherwise.

Policing in Jewish law, prepared by Rabbi Jill Jacobs.

A brief text study about the systemic nature of racial oppression, with thanks to Rabbi Michael Rothbaum.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the UN on December 10, 1948, is one of the foundational documents of the human rights movement. At T’ruah, we think of it as a modern prophetic text, a vision of the redeemed world where all people’s rights will be protected. Communities who celebrate Human Rights...