Shabbat Behar-Bechukotai, 2025
“Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to travel to Nigeria to learn from and be in community with the Igbo Jewish population. We spent Shabbat together, we broke bread, we danced, we taught each other formally and informally. It was an incredible two week experience. And after Shabbat morning services, I happened to overhear a conversation between a member of my traveling group and one of the people from the community in Nigeria. The person from my group remarked how beautiful it was that all of us, black Jews from North America and South America and African Jews were all observing Shabbat together, and how one day he wanted to see us all together in the land. And the person from the Igbo community said something I will never forget. He says, achi, my brother, we are B’nai Israel. We are the children of Israel. The land is wherever we are in that moment and even now, I am struck by the powerful simplicity and the matter-of-fact-ness in which he said this. If we can see ourselves and each other as pieces of the land, a blade of its grass, a drop of water from its seas, or a bud of its hyacinth flowers, then Shmita and Yovel are for us too…
Shmitah invites us to check in with ourselves and ask some questions, questions like, what areas or situations in my life have I spent a lot of time cultivating? What actually needs further cultivation? What needs to lay fallow and untended? What must I release? What do I need to let go of? This is Shmitah on the personal level, and for the god who’s speaking in this Parsha, the most unfathomable and unacceptable outcome for any of the Israelites is to be enslaved again, to be treated b’farech, with severity or ruthlessness like they were in Egypt. On a collective level, Yovel asks us to confront the ways in which members of our communities are still shackled and are still held in bondage by their systems of oppression, and when we as individuals find ourselves in positions of capacity, capacity and not just power, it is up to us to do what we can to release one another from these bonds, as Toni Morrison taught to her students: ‘if you are free, you need to free somebody else.’”
Cooperberg-Rittmaster Rabbinical Intern Marques Hollie gave this drashah on Friday, May 23, 2025 / 26 Iyar 5785. Watch their full talk above.
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