Parashat: Behar-Bechukota

Parashat: Behar-Bechukotai
Torah Reading: Leviticus 25:1–27:34

“These are the commandments that the Eternal gave Moses for the Israelite people on Mount Sinai”

— Leviticus 27:34

This last line of Leviticus sums up the entire book, a fitting conclusion to a book that was almost entirely about the giving of law, with only two brief narrative passages. It is a reminder that the commandments of the book of Leviticus are not meant to be in abstract, but that they were given to us, the Israelite (now Jewish) people. We know, however, that many of the commandments in this book do not apply to today, whether they are laws of a long defunct sacrificial system, or they are laws that go against modern notions of jurisprudence or our modern understanding of what it means to be Jewish as a part of the larger society in which we live, rather than entirely separate from it. Our Reform forbearers in the 19th century said regarding many of these laws, “We recognize in the Mosaic legislation a system of training the Jewish people for its mission during its national life[.]” Today we recognize them as more than just some training period, but as laws that call us to examine how we live and to use for the sake of learning, even as we make our own judgements on how to apply them in our day to day lives.

— Rabbi Daniel Plotkin