Holy Crop Rotation! - Parshat Behar

I still remember learning at school about crop rotation one year you plant wheat the next barley or some other crop and and the third the field would be left to lie fallow and then the cycle would begin again you could think that the mitzvah of shmita the prohibition of working the fields in the seventh year as some kind of holy crop rotation but this just doesn't make sense first working a field for six straight years and then leaving it for one there's nothing to improve its yield and may even damage it second the Torah promises dire punishments for the non observance of shmita the 70 years of the Babylonian exile were a punishment for seventy unobserved Shmi tears during the four hundred and thirty years that the Jewish people dwelled in the land of Israel God always relates to us measure for measure if shmita was a matter of crop husbandry how is exile an appropriate punishment and furthermore 70 years of weeds and neglect isn't going to do anything for the land so how is this punishment measure for measure what causes a person to violate retain in the first place the great malaise in our own era is the compulsion to overwork the workaholic defines himself by his job when you meet someone socially the question what are you is usually answered by I'm a doctor or I'm an accountant or and a rabbi there's a fundamental mistake here what I do is not who I am in our society we've confused what we do with who we are the underlying belief here is that the more I work the more I become myself violation of the laws of shmita comes we relief that the more I work the more money I will make and the more I make the more I am the master of my own exile removes all the familiar comforting symbols of success from a person I realize that what I do is not who I am I realize of my survival my very identity our god-given gifts the insecurities of exile brings a person face to face with his total dependence on God it's from this perspective of Exile that I can rebuild my worldview so that I can see that Who I am is an expression of God's love for me and the only reason I exist is to reflect the Rays of his love [Music]