Behar-Bechukotai: What is Enough?
What is enough? When do I have enough? When am I enough?
As soon as I ask the question, I hear an answer within myself. It is always the same answer, quietly animating so much of my daily life. Beneath the stress and anxiety, the endless striving and the running lists of things I need to purchase, accomplish, or adjust in my apartment, my wardrobe, my job, or my body. Never. You will never have/be enough.
And then, at the same time, once I realize I am striving towards an impossible goal of having and being an “enough” that will never come, something in me relaxes. I feel a sense of letting go. I realize the paradoxical truth exposed through the asking of the question. Right now I’m enough right now, exactly as I am. This moment – as it is– is enough.
This week’s parsha (as well as much of the book of Leviticus) includes laws that try to show us that having “enough” is not a quantifiable number or amount but a state of heart and mind. We can choose whether we want to view the world through a mentality based on scarcity or one based on sufficiency. The Torah urges us towards the latter.
Parshat Behar details the law of the “Sabbath of the land” – every seventh year, the Israelites are commanded not to plant or sow or reap harvest from the land.
God, anticipating our nervousness about such a proposition, explains that we will be taken care of during the seventh year through an extra large harvest in the sixth year:
19 And the land will then yield its fruit and you will eat to satiety, and live upon it securely.
20 And if you should say, "What will we eat in the seventh year? We will not sow, and we will not gather in our produce!"
21 [Know then, that] I will command My blessing for you in the sixth year, and it will yield produce for three years.
22
And you will sow in the eighth year, while [still] eating from the old crops until the ninth year; until the arrival of its crop, you will eat the old [crop].
– (Leviticus 25: 19-22)
Don’t worry, God is telling us, you will have enough. You can let go.
The laws for the land’s Shabbat are a challenge to a very basic human mistake when it comes to nearly everything we come into contact with: we grasp. My friend Shuli Passow, in her Senior Sermon at JTS Rabbinical School, noted that children, as soon as they learn to speak, often point around them and claim, “mine!” Passow argued that this tendency continues throughout adulthood for many of us, with “Mine! Mine! Mine!” remaining a constant strategy by which we try to gain control over our world. Of course, the problem with this strategy is that the more we grasp, the more we suffer. Our life becomes narrow and tight, and that which we cling to inevitably slips through our fingers. This is because, as God is quick to remind us in this week’s parsha, nothing in this life is really ours to own.
23 The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land belongs to Me, for you are strangers and [temporary] residents with Me.
It was never yours to begin with and you are not in control, God says. You can let go.
In the parsha from last week and two weeks ago, we receive another reminder that we often not only have enough, we have more than we need.
22 When you reap the harvest of your Land, you shall not completely remove the corner of your field during your harvesting, and you shall not gather up the gleanings of your harvest. [Rather,] you shall leave these for the poor person and for the stranger I am the Lord, your God.
– Leviticus 23:22
There is something curious about this verse, plopped in the middle of a section on the festivals, and seemingly a repeat of the very same law enumerated earlier in Leviticus (23:10). Rashi picks up on this, explaining that the repetition underscores this law’s importance, arguing that “whoever gives gleanings, forgotten sheaves, and the corners, to the poor in the appropriate manner, is deemed as if he had built the Holy Temple and offered up his sacrifices within it.”
Like giving the land a rest, offering up a portion of one’s property and/or earnings to the poor is critically important in Judaism. And it is very, very difficult It requires us to calm our fears and believe we have enough to give. Sometimes, the very act of giving to others is actually what shows us that we have enough. It literally opens our hand so that we don’t grasp so hard around what is “mine” and puts us in a spacious heart space – a “Holy Temple” of sufficiency and ease.
Take care of each other, God tells us. You have enough to do it.
Sufficiency mentality is not something reserved for the wealthy or even middle class, just as scarcity mentality is not automatically the fate of low-income people. A 2020 study that analyzed the charitable giving of 10,665 households across America from 2000-2016 found that high income and low income gave the same percentage of their income to charity across the years.
We can choose how we see the world and ourselves: as never enough, or as perfectly sufficient for what we need. We can let go, trust, give, and live in the enoughness.
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
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