Resources

I am starting to write this from a cramped seat on an El Al flight to join the Center for Jewish NonViolence action from May 14-23 in the West Bank. I’ve been asked to drash Beha’alotecha in light of this trip, but, full disclosure, I have to write now because there won’t be enough time after...

In Israel, it is common for religious Jews to celebrate Yom Yerushalayim with Hallel, the psalms of praise sung on Jewish holidays. In the US and Canada, different communities have different practices. Rabbi Ezra Weinberg has curated a series of tunes for Hallel that are thematic to Jerusalem and set a more mournful mood. This captures...

Reading haftarah on Shabbat Chol HaMoed Pesach, we saw through the prophet Ezekiel’s eyes a valley full of dry bones (bikah meleah atzamot) declaring that their hope is gone (avdah tikvateinu). For a living human being, bearing witness to human mortality at vast scale is profoundly unsettling. These bones in earth show us where we come...

If the full yovel sourcebook feels a little overwhelming, consider these two condensed forms as a starting point. The Yovel Sampler offers one text from each of the eight sections, in Hebrew and English, with discussion questions. It’s a great way to get the 30,000-foot view on yovel in a single class. The “Yovel at...

Many groups and individuals have decried Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories on moral or legal grounds. The purpose of this white paper is to envision what the values of the halakhic tradition might be if we considered the State of Israel and its occupation through those eyes. Its analysis will also inform to some...

The Jewish mystical tradition offers depictions of periodic cosmic rebirth, in which every 50,000 years, the entire universe returns to its original state. This can be seen as a more mythic, cosmic version of a the radical notion of land-return in our earthly yovel, the biblical commandment in which every fifty years, land would return...

I love Israel. But I could never live in a place called “the Jewish homeland” when progressive Jews are treated as second-class citizens. In Israel, the Orthodox establishment controls matters of personal status – primarily conversions and marriages. Jews who wish to be married, religiously, by a Conservative, Reconstructionist, or Reform rabbi generally leave the...

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.