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You Must Be Kind!

You Must Be Kind!

Oct 05, 2021

(This is part one of a train-of-thought. For part two, click here. )

After the intensity of Tishrei, and the new year celebrations, the new year begins with silence. We enter the month of Cheshvan, the month of no festivals, and actually have the time to feel what the boring, wonderful, real routine of life is like. What is it like? Do we have the quietude to reflect on where we're at?

This week I recorded a shiur about the Shemita year (I have some more on that, and will do a 'part 2' next week, bli neder). One of the first things we look at is the double commandment of debt cancellation:

1) You must cancel debts in the seventh year

2) You may not claim a debt in the seventh year (MT Shmita 9:1)

How do the two work together? Obviously, if you force someone to pay you back after the Shmita year, you've broken both commandments. But if you only don't claim any money - like most of us, probably - how do you keep the first commandment there?

We have other examples of positive-negative pairs of commandments. For instance, a well-known one:

1) You must rest on Shabbat

2) You may not work on Shabbat (MT Shabbat 1:1)

It's not enough to just not-work. You have to really rest. It's easy to understand what not to do, how to rest passively, but how can we see this positive commandment as something active? I think I instinctively know how to do this, but it's very subtle, hard to put into words. And the same with debt-cancellation, which is basically the only aspect of the Shmita laws that affects those who live outside of Israel - it's very subtle, but I think what we're being asked to do here is to be kind.

If you want to go on the exploration of the details and paradoxes and surprises of the Shmita laws, you can read the sourcesheet here, or listen to the 20-minute podcast here (or, as always, look for 58th Century Judaisms on Spotify or Apple or whatever directory you use). It's a rabbit-hole, I'll warn you!

In the episode I talk about Derrida's essay/lecture/book on the impossibility of a gift. That giving a gift that's not a transaction is what we aspire to and always fail to achieve. You can read the whole essay here, if you really want. At it's core, if you can say that about Derrida's slippery writing, is a short story by Baudelaire called La Fausse Monaie, about a man who creates fake, counterfeit coins and distributes them to the poor. His aim is, apparently, "to earn forty cents and the heart of God." Maybe that's the core of the question here in our shiur, can the heart of God be bought through keeping laws? Or breaking them? There is much to say about this.

The next shiur will be on a similar subject with a different aim. We'll explore whether this year is actually the shmita year, as people think. Get ready!

Let me know if you loved, hated or didn't care about all this. I wish you all a quiet, calm and healthy new month.

(Thank you to all who contribute coins to these episodes: counterfeit coins, impossible gifts, digital coffee funds or friendly text messages. All truly appreciated, these debts will probably never be repaid.)

Josh

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