Equality and the Fiction of Ideology

“Speak to the Israelites. You must say to them: ‘When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land must rest [an agricultural] Sabbath in honor of G-d.” [Leviticus 25:2]

Most of us know the commandment of Shmita as keeping the Land of Israel fallow every seven years. For six years, life went on as normal, but following that there could be no planting, pruning or reaping. The Jews would live off the produce planted in the sixth year and pray for the best.

But there is more to it than that. As we see in this week’s Torah portion Behar, Shmita marks a reset of society. The elite of yesteryear has taken a back seat.

[The produce that grows] during the Sabbath of the land will be yours to eat — for you, for your bondmen and bondwomen, as well as for your hired worker and resident alien who live with you. [Leviticus 25:6]

Shlomo Yitzhaki or Rashi weighs in with perhaps the most astounding commentary of the Torah. Rashi explains what Shmita is: During the seventh year, the landowners lose their property. For the next 12 months, they have no say on what grows in their field. There are no fences. Anybody can walk in and take what they see.

Even though I made [the produce] “forbidden” to you, I did not forbid eating it or deriving benefit from it, just that you won’t conduct yourself as its [sole] owner; rather, everyone must be equal with regard to it: you, your hired worker, and your resident [alien]. [Rashi on Leviticus 25:6]

In other words, society no longer contains the rich and the powerful. Everybody is equal. There are no landowners and sharecroppers. Everybody has access and rights to Israel — a scary thought for the landed gentry.

Rashi’s commentary is based on the Talmud and its offshoots. Indeed, in Verse 6, Rashi inserts four commentaries on the Torah. Three of them are sourced — coming from the Sifra, the halachic Midrash, or Talmudical explanations, of Leviticus. But Rashi’s commentary that contains the admonishment “everyone must be equal” is not accompanied by a source. It could be that Rashi, based on the Talmud, came up with the wording.

The Torah’s assertion that we are all equal can be understood as reflecting the life of Rashi. He was born in 1040 and lived in the northern French town of Troyes, located in the wine region of Champagne. His father was a winemaker and for a while Rashi took on this profession. France was the least likely country to imagine equality. Society was divided between the ruling class of landowners, called lords, and their vast collection of slaves. It was a feudal system in which the lords controlled everything and the serfs owned nothing. Christianity was spreading across Europe, and the serfs were sold to become the crusaders of the Catholic Church in its attempt to destroy the Jews of Europe and capture the Land of Israel.

The subjugation of the masses remains an axiom of history. That Rashi’s commentary was not censored as many of his words were by the church, can only be seen as miraculous. Indeed, the Christians were watching Rashi’s every move and monitoring his work — whether on the Scriptures or Talmud. For hundreds of years, the church’s leading scholars were quietly using Rashi’s elucidated commentary to understand the Five Books of Moses. One of them was Nicholas of Lyra, the leader of France’s Franciscan order who printed the first Christian commentary on the Bible in 1471.

Another follower of Rashi was Martin Luther, the founder of Reformation and perhaps the most infamous church leader whose advocacy of genocide of the Jews preceded Hitler by nearly 400 years. Luther used Rashi’s commentary in his treatise, On Jews and their Lies, in 1543. The book, highly popular in Nazi Germany, urged the burning of Jewish homes and property, the confiscation of their money, and the turning of Jews into slaves. Finally, they should be expelled and killed. In Luther’s words, “We are at fault in not slaying them.”

There is something defiant in the Torah’s commandment of Shmita: the realization that equality is the will of G-d, and that man can be rich and powerful one day and lose it all the next. The Torah’s version of equality is not that of Nazism or Communism, based on violence and plunder. Rather, the Torah stresses that once every seven years all Jews, regardless of their station in life, is confronted by the reality that this is G-d’s world and mankind doesn’t own it or even run it.

It is a lesson that has been lost on many throughout Jewish history. Some of us recently marked the 80th anniversary of the German defeat during World War II. But far fewer recalled the anniversary of the first and only Jewish-led regime in Germany. It was November 1918, days before Berlin signed its surrender that ended World War I. A group led mostly by Jews seized power in Bavaria, the largest state in Germany. The head of the so-called People’s State of Bavaria was Kurt Eisner, a journalist who denied any commitment to the Jewish people into which he was born. He angered the gentiles and even Jews by releasing documents that World War I was launched by “a small horde of mad Prussian military” men and their industrialist partners.

On Feb. 21, 1919, Eisner was assassinated on his way to parliament to submit his resignation as prime minister. His Cabinet colleagues and other government officials fled Munich. They were replaced by the Bavarian Soviet Republic, one of whose leaders was Gustav Landauer, close to the Zionist movement and himself assassinated on May 2, 1919.

Some 100,000 people attended Eisner’s funeral. One of them was a 29-year-old demobilized soldier named Adolf Hitler, seen in footage wearing a black armband. Hitler had been an elected functionary in the short-lived socialist regime. Soon, the ex-corporal crossed over and joined the German Workers’ Party, one of the most rabidly antisemitic political factions in Germany and the predecessor to the Nazis. A few months later, in 1920, the new Bavarian prime minister, Gustav von Kahr, began deporting Jews who held foreign passports. Eisner’s assassin, with reported Jewish roots, was hailed as a hero and served a brief sentence.

To Martin Buber, the Zionist philosopher who remained a Germanophile all his life, the Jewish socialist experiment was doomed from the start. He saw the futility of a Jew — regardless of ideology — trying to lead gentile society, and soon Buber would move to the Land of Israel.

As for Eisner, to be with him was to peer into the tormented passions of his divided Jewish soul; nemesis shone from his glittering surface; he was a marked man…The whole thing, an unspeakable Jewish tragedy. [Buber quoted in In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. Michael Brenner. Princeton University Press. 2022]