Parashat Behar-Bekhukotai: Returning to our Holding

The Torah wants to ensure that, no matter how far we wander, we always know our way home.   

And so, every fifty years we are called home by the shofar of the yovel (jubilee) year.  The Torah describes the return in physical terms -- each inhabitant is called to return to his ancestral land holdings, to the place he originally called home -- but I think the concern here for homecoming also has a deeply relevant spiritual meaning.  Indeed, the use of the shofar as well as the timing of the call --  Yom Kippur -- naturally link us to another form of return, teshuva, the spiritual return of the High Holiday season.   

What exactly are we returning to here?   Veshavtem ish el achuzato.  Each person should return to his achuzah, his “holding” (Lev 25:10). Literally, the sense is -- the piece of land that he holds or owns -- but we can add another layer -- not just the place he holds, but the place that holds him.   This is the definition of home -- a place that holds us, a place where we relax into trust and safety and support, a place where we are held -- embraced really --  in all our suffering and imperfection.  

Being able to return to such a place of holding is essential emotionally.   Many forms of therapy and meditation include such a holding vessel as part of the healing process.  As we come into contact with suffering parts of ourselves, the instruction is to surround them with love, to place them inside a container of compassion rather than our usual harsh internal climate -- and in that compassionate holding space, the suffering parts shift on their own; they feel accompanied and relax; they are warmed and begin to transform as they need to.  Just touching the suffering is not enough; the work involves creating a place inside us that can actually hold the hurt.  

And so when the Torah tells us that every fiftieth year we should return to our holding, perhaps it is speaking about the human need for a continual return to such an emotional holding place.   The Torah of course is referring to physical land, and, interestingly enough, in many meditation and therapeutic practices, it is precisely the physical ground which helps us to establish this sense of emotional holding inside ourselves.  The place we start is the ground, feeling the ground beneath our feet, feeling how it supports us and knowing that we don’t have to do anything to deserve that holding; the ground is always there, right under us, “holding” us up.   Similarly, no matter how much a person may have strayed from their ancestral home, how poor they may have become, how many lands lost, on the yovel year, we declare a return, no questions asked.  Return now to the land, return now to the ground; it is here to hold you no matter what.   Know that you can never lose that holding.

Ultimately, to be held in this way is to feel the holding of God.   In the Torah, part of the return to your own holding is a return to the knowledge that none of the land is really owned by humans at all, but always only by God.  As you return to the land, you return to the knowledge of God, to the sense that you are not in charge and can relax into the holding of the One who is.   To feel the holding power of the ground under us is thus a way of feeling the divine embrace at all times, a way of knowing that universal holding and bringing it inside us as the true holding  -- and healing  -- vessel.   

Perhaps this understanding of God as the ultimate “holder” explains why this section of the Torah is explicitly connected to Mount Sinai, a classic conundrum (see the first Rashi of our parsha).   Perhaps the implication is that when we return on the fiftieth year, we are returning to “base,” and base or home for us is also always that experience at Mount Sinai -- the intense divine revelation and presence that we experienced there, along with the very groundedness and steadfastness of the mountain itself.   We are returning to that stability, that knowledge of ground under us, that clarity of an eternal divine presence as our achuza, our holding or inheritance.

The return to one’s holding implies groundedness, but it also, strangely, leads to its opposite -- a sense of freedom and upward motion.   The call on the yovel year is a call to liberty, to dror, a word that also means “bird.”    There is both a return to the ground and a sense of flying in the air, free as a bird.  How do these two motions go together?  Here, too, there is a parallel in the world of meditation and also in the world of yoga  -- we ground down with our lower body and reach up with our upper body, coming into awareness of two opposing forces happening at the same moment.

Emotionally, it can be understood this way -- when we do relax into the ground and trust that we are held, we become incredibly light; it is as if all those burdens we have been carrying on our shoulders for decades -- our sense of overwhelming responsibility and the anxious need to do things right and control outcomes -- all those burdens are suddenly not just ours to carry, but shared with the universe, with the ground, with God Himself.  We let down our burdens as we sink into trust, into the knowledge of being held, and as we let down our burdens, we begin to fly, to be light as a bird, to feel a kind of freedom we have never known before, the freedom of one who knows she is always held.