BeHar: Once More With Feeling

Mah Inyan Shmita Eitzel Har Sinai?

I was standing outside of Angel’s Bakery and I was confused by what I saw. A tough looking guy in Jerusalem, sans kippa, was yelling at another guy who also wasn’t wearing a kippa. It was like a scene out of a Beit Medrash; one of the oddest sights I’d ever seen.

It was business a related dispute, and I couldn’t figure out why this guy kept screaming Rashi’s question on the start of this week’s parsha – "Mah Inyan Shmita Eitzel Har Sinai" at the other guy. Rashi wants to know what prompts the Torah to describe specifically this mitzvah as given on Sinai. It’s a great question. But why was one non religious guy screaming it incessantly at another man?

One day the answer to my question was provided by a book which included a story about watching Kojak on Israeli TV. When Kojak snapped –"What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?" and the subtitle read, "Mah Inyan Shmita Eitzel Har Sinai?" the author realized that this phrase was an Israeli idiomatic expression, meaning - what’s that got to do with anything? It was then that I figured out that the man on the street seemed to be quoting Rashi, because that phrase has become part of the man on the street’s language in Israel today.

But the deep meaning of Shmita is not known to the man on the street. The answer to Rashi’s question seems elusive. One Shabbos a while back Rabbi Reuven Drucker, Rabbi of Agudah in Highland Park, NJ offered the following insight: Everyone used to work a farm, so when G-d instructed people to rest the land for a year, He was telling them not to work for a year.

I think this can be well explained using imagery I heard from Rabbi Noach Weinberg: If you're drinking coffee and someone asks who you are, you don’t say I'm a coffee drinker, as you realize it’s not your total definition. However one might say I'm CEO of IBM. Is it accurate to define ourselves by our job? According to Rabbi Drucker, the point of Shmita is that we are not our job.

Practically, Shmita meant that Jews had to face themselves without titles. Even noble jobs are not a person's total. As the Rabbi of the shul I grew up in, Rabbi Louis Bernstein, was fond of saying – “your kids don't call you Rabbi.” We've all met doctors, teachers, and other professionals that are almost unrecognizable without their professional setting providing context and confidence. We know workaholics that are afraid of the kind person they might be exposed to be without the protection of their business. Shmita provided a check system against hiding behind titles.

Rashi says that the statement that Shmita was given at Sinai teaches us that just as Shmita was given at Sinai, so too were all mitzvot given at Sinai. Perhaps this means that just as the point of Shmita is to remind us that more than our jobs, we are servants of G-d that gave us Torah at Sinai, similarly all mitzvot should serve to remind us who we are in life. Mitzvot shouldn’t be just something that we do without being a meaningful reinforcement of the centrality of serving G-d in our lives.

May we be blessed to remember who we are and what is important in life.