Don't Shrink the Holy Land

Parshas Behar-Bechukosai: The Land That Reaches

Of all the things one might expect to need a Shabbat, the land is perhaps the last. The human being, pulled between the spiritual and the material, tempted, prone to envy and anger, addicted to work and laziness, certainly needs a weekly pause. But the land? Inanimate, solid, and fixed — why exactly does it need to rest?

Yet Parshat Behar opens with the mitzvah of Shemita, the Shabbat of the land. Six years of working the soil, and then a complete rest — Shabbat l'Hashem. And then the mitzvah goes further: seven cycles of seven years. Then the fiftieth, Yovel, the Jubilee, a year the Sages describe as, kullan taivin le'atreihu — all things return to their place, to their root, to their source.

The parallel to Sefirat HaOmer is hard to miss. We too are counting — seven weeks, seven times seven — building toward a fiftieth day that transcends the system that produced it. Ordinary Shabbat cycles back around every seven days, renews us, and then the week begins again. But Sefirah does something different: it counts, and counts, and then reaches beyond. Day fifty is Matan Torah, a completely different order of existence.

Why does the land experience a higher Shabbat than we do?

The answer begins with the word eretz itself. We tend to think of land as the most inert thing imaginable, the ground beneath our feet, solid and unmoving and simply there. But eretz carries within it ratzon, will and desire, and rutz, running toward something. The land is not passive. It strives. It yearns.

Kohelet tells us: V'yitron eretz bakol hu — the advantage of eretz is in everything. Even the king, who holds the accumulated dreams and ambitions of an entire nation, is indebted to the field. The most physical thing in creation already contains, built into its very name, an infinite reaching toward its Source.

This is what the Gemara means when it calls the land of Israel Eretz HaTzvi — like the skin of a deer, it stretches beyond what its natural dimensions allow. It is called Eretz HaChaim, the Land of Life — not a land that simply is, fixed and finished, but a land that lives, that grows, that is by its very nature bigger than itself.

The Torah describes creation with a curious phrase: ki sheishet yamim asah Hashem — for six days God made heaven and earth. Chazal notices something odd: shouldn't it say b'sheishet, in six days? The answer: what G-d created is the six days. Not a collection of finished objects, but a process. Time, space, cause and effect — these are what was made.

Science has arrived at a somewhat similar understanding. Reality is not static matter but energy and process, everything in motion. And yet even this insight can describe a closed system — a process that circles endlessly within itself, going nowhere in particular. Profound, but still without a ‘beyond’.

Shmitta teaches us otherwise. The process has a tachlit, a destination. The six years of working the land are not a loop. The finite is not self-contained. Live a life of Torah, absorb the kedusha of Eretz Yisrael, and you discover that the finite is rooted in the Infinite. In the place where heaven meets earth, earth can become heaven.

"When Moshe stands at the burning bush, his question is simple and overwhelming at once: who shall I say sent me? What name do I bring to a people who have been waiting, suffering for so long?" Hashem's answer is two words: Ekyeh asher Ekyeh. I will be what I will be.

The Maharal describes Ekyeh as the root of the tree — the hidden, ever-renewing source of existence beneath the surface. Havaya, the name we do not pronounce, is the crown of that same tree — the full, revealed glory toward which all of history moves.

The name Ekyeh carries two tracks at once. The first is the track of survival in darkness — Ekyeh imahema b'galus, I will be with them in exile. Whenever we call, Hashem answers. This is the promise that has held us through every generation of suffering: that distance from our Source is never abandonment. From the depths, mimamakim karaticha Hashem, there is always a response.

The second track runs deeper. The very distance between finite creatures and an infinite Source — that gap, which feels like exile — is not a flaw in creation. It is the point of creation. Because each step we take toward Hashem opens onto a view we couldn't have seen from below. The horizon keeps moving. The closer we come, the more we discover how much further there is to go. And that discovery, rather than discouraging us, pulls us higher still. This is the purpose of existence: an endless, joyful journey toward our Source — one level of connection opening into the next, forever.

The mitzvah of Shemita is the door to this second track. The farmer who lets his land rest on the seventh year is not simply following a rule. He is declaring something: that the earth beneath his feet is not a closed system. That it reaches. That even the most physical thing in creation yearns for its Source.

And when that door goes unopened — when the land is treated as just land, and we treat ourselves as just another nation — something shifts. The first track of Ekyeh opens instead. Not through Shemita and the joy of reaching for the Infinite, but through suffering and exile. The Talmud records the accounting precisely: for each Shemita year not observed, a year of exile followed. Same Ekyeh. Same love. A different door — and a far harder one.

This is why Hashem's first words to Avraham about the land matter so much: el ha'aretz asher ar'eka — go to the land that I will show you. Not a fixed address. Not coordinates on a map. A land that is always being revealed, always beyond the last horizon.

That is the essence of Eretz Yisrael. It is the place in this world where heaven and earth meet — where plowing a field is a spiritual act, where the material and the infinite are not in contradiction but are the same reality, seen from different vantage points.

There is something deeply tragic about reducing Eretz Yisrael to a coordinate, a border, a fact on a map. That reduction is not just a political mistake. It collapses the very structure the land was created to embody.

The prophet Yirmiyahu is uncompromising on this. The worst suffering comes when the Jewish people say sni'hiyeh k'chol hagoyim bais Yisrael— let us be like all the other nations. But there is no such option. We do not exist as a nation like any other. We exist only when we are who we are — a people whose presence in this land is meant to show that the world is not a closed system, that the Infinite finds expression through the finite, that eretz, earth itself, reaches beyond its fixed nature toward its Source.

We are here, counting. Seven weeks of Sefirah, building toward Shavuot. Seven years of Shemita building toward Yovel, when everything returns to its root.

The name Ekyeh is with us in both its meanings, as it always has been. We call out, and Hashem answers. We reach, and the horizon opens. The land — the most physical thing we can imagine — is still reaching, still running, still yearning toward its Source.

And so must we.

Shabbat Shalom.