When Air BNB was founded, there was a buzz around the business concept of renting out your own private house for a short period of time. So many people saw dollar signs in their eyes and immediately made preparations to rent out their own places for a little income. Too many people found out the hard way that lending out something that’s yours to a stranger allows a usually repressed impulse to reappear. That impulse is the impulse to justify exploiting and, often, destroying what we’ve rented. The idea is that ‘it’s in front of me, I paid for it, it’s not mine, and ‘I can do whatever I want during my time with it. Let the next guy clean up after me.’ And so, in the AirBNB world we started hearing about destroyed houses, destructive guests and abusive renters. In other words, we once again had a lesson in human nature.
The Torah knows the propensity of people to over exploit what was given. In fact, the ultimate AirBNB is the very earth we depend on for our lives. And since the Torah knows how prone we are to abuse what we have been given, it reminds of something that should never be forgotten
וְהָאָ֗רֶץ לֹ֤א תִמָּכֵר֙ לִצְמִתֻ֔ת כִּי־לִ֖י הָאָ֑רֶץ כִּֽי־גֵרִ֧ים וְתֹושָׁבִ֛ים אַתֶּ֖ם עִמָּדִֽי׃
23But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with Me.
One line of text presented as a command that, more than anything else, reminds us how easy it is to forget that we are just tenants and not owners.
Parashat Behar opens on a mountain — Mt. Sinai — where God gives Moses the laws that surround the Jewish people with justice and morality. And this commandment is the expression of that moral law: instructions: for the land itself. Every seven years, the fields must rest. No planting, no pruning, no harvest for profit. The earth gets a Shabbat. It is called the Shemitah — the release. And every fifty years, the Jubilee, the Yovel, arrives: debts are cancelled, slaves are freed, and the land — whatever transactions humans have made — returns to its original state. It is supposed to be a full reset of what we have done and gives us a year to allow the earth to heal. The earth almost becomes a person, a partner and not simply a tool. Brilliant.
But before we can appreciate what Shemitah demands of us, we have to feel the force of that single verse: Ki li ha’aretz — the land is Mine. Not yours. Not ours. We are, as the Torah says in the very next phrase, gerim v’toshavim imadi — strangers and residents with Me. Guests. Temporary inhabitants. The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to it, in trust, on loan from the One who made it.
This is not a metaphor. The Torah is making a legal claim with enormous consequences. If you do not own something — if you are merely its steward — you cannot treat it as an inexhaustible well. You cannot draw from it endlessly and return nothing. You cannot mine it, strip it, burn it, and poison it without reckoning. The very concept of the Shemitah year encodes something our modern economy has forgotten: that even a productive system needs to lie fallow, to breathe, to recover.
“There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” — often attributed to Gandhi, but the Torah said it first, in law.
Then comes Bechukotai — and the stakes are raised with a frightening clarity. God says: if you walk in My statutes, the rains will come in their season, the land will yield its fruit, the trees their harvest. But if you do not — if you treat the land as your possession to exploit without limit — then the land will not give its yield. The skies will be iron. The earth will be bronze. And eventually, something devastating: וְהָיְתָ֤ה אַרְצְכֶם֙ שְׁמָמָ֔ה
— the land will become desolate. And only then, in its desolation, will the land “enjoy its Sabbaths” — the rest you refused to give it.
This is God telling us that if we don’t take care of the land, He will and we won’t like it one bit. God removes us from partnership and essentially makes the Earth BNB unusable for a generation.
This obviously has resonance this very day. A land stripped of nutrients, a climate destabilized, soil that can no longer produce, poisons being allowed – even encouraged to be spilled into the water and air — these are not ancient fears. They are, literally, today’s headlines. The Torah is not predicting punishment from on high in the abstract. It is describing, with extraordinary precision, the natural consequence of treating a finite system as if it were infinite.
It is for this reason that Jews, among others, created the concept of Bal Tashchit — do not destroy needlessly. From a single verse about not cutting down fruit trees in wartime, the rabbis built an entire ethic of conservation. You may not waste. You may not destroy what sustains life. And if this is true in a moment of war, how much more so in the quiet choices of ordinary life — in what we consume, what we discard, what we demand from the systems that feed and power us.
The world was not made for your profit alone, and not for your generation alone. The Talmud teaches that when someone destroys even a single soul, it is as if they have destroyed an entire world — because every person carries a world within them. Apply that logic forward in time. When we make choices today that will make the Earth uninhabitable for those who come a thousand years hence — for the children of our children’s children, for generations we will never meet but who are nonetheless our responsibility — we are not simply making a policy error. We are violating the deepest covenant of stewardship the Torah knows.
But Bechukotai also holds out a promise. It says, ‘Walk in My statutes and rain will come.’ In the mind of the Torah writer, good rain was the result of good deeds. Whether or not the world really works that way is debatable. What is not debatable is that a people who choose to live as guests rather than owners, who choose restraint over extraction, who honor the Shabbat of the soil and the Jubilee of the earth — such a people will find the world responsive, generous, alive.
We are those people. This portion is our inheritance. And the question it puts to us is as urgent as it has ever been: will we be the generation that finally learns to hold the earth lightly — as guests, as stewards, as grateful tenants — or will we be the ones who force it to take its Sabbath in our absence?
Ki li ha’aretz. The land is God’s. We are its guardians. May we guard it well — for a thousand generations yet to come.
Shabbat Shalom.
