By Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb
This week’s Torah portion is Matot-Masei: Numbers 30:2 — 36:13
This week’s double portion concludes the Torah’s main narrative. What’s the final note of this four-book composition, before Deuteronomy starts its retelling? What’s the last story about? Rights, land and Jubilee.
Last Shabbat ended with July 4 fireworks. This week’s Jubilee theme should ring a similar bell: The Liberty Bell, which sports the verse (Leviticus 25:10) outlining the biblical Jubilee. Every 50 years, we should “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land, to All the Inhabitants Thereof.”
Earlier, Tzlofchad from Menashe died, leaving five daughters and some land. Though only males then inherited land, these five questioned prevailing customs and asserted their rights. Moses took the question upstairs, and God let them inherit. Their holy chutzpah was so great that we say their names, twice: Mahlah. Noa. Hoglah. Milka. Tirzah.
Now, in Numbers 36, their male cousins invoke the social-economic-ecological “hard reset button” that is Yovel, or Jubilee. Press “Yovel” every half century and debts are forgiven, inequities eliminated and each dunam returned to the descendants of its putatively rightful “owners.”
(Why quotes around “owners”? In Leviticus 25:23, just below the Jubilee passage, God says “the land is Mine, and by Me, you all are strangers and sojourners.” The Kli Yakar, in the 17th century, cites this verse as Yovel’s very purpose: “to make known that there is a limit and boundary to all human actions; and that no person is the absolute owner of the field.” Note too: against the 18th-century term of art for rights, “life, liberty and property,” the framers wisely went with “pursuit of happiness.”)
The daughters of Tzlofchad had established women’s rights; their male cousins now claim property rights. If Mahlah-Noa-Hoglah-Milka-Tirzah marry from any other tribe, the mythic initial equity would shatter, with that land forever “lost” to them.
Numbers’ final ruling? These women can inherit, but must marry from a limited pool, just within their tribe.
Seen one way, Torah’s main narrative section concludes by reasserting women’s rights. Seen another way, it ends with backlash, clipping their wings. Both, perhaps, are true. But the Talmud tells us that once the ruling was overturned, on 15 Av, that became a day of rejoicing (Taanit 30b).
Who, then, has rights? Much of Matot-Masei lays out grandiose borders for Israel, urging transfer or extirpation of the then-indigenous Canaanites. This arrogation of rights solely to one “favored” group fails the test of history, and flies in the face of modern ethics. Thankfully, later tradition reversed those rulings too, even as calls to narrowness yet echo.
Tribal rights? Were those male cousins “right”? Really, we’re all cousins, and it just depends how many generations back you go. Before clans we were tribes; before tribes, a people; before that, Children of Abraham; and still earlier, all came from the mythic Adam-and-Eve, “so that none may tell another, ‘my ancestors were better than yours’” (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5).
Women’s rights? The biblical record is mixed, with setbacks aplenty on the millennia-long road toward true equality. In each case, the moral arc of history is long — but it bends, we hope and believe, if imperfectly, toward justice.
And might the Land, too, enjoy “certain inalienable rights?” Per Torah, yes. In the Liberty Bell’s Levitical verse, the Land itself deserves rest, along with servants, animals and others too easily overlooked.
Ultimately then, on Jubilee time scales of 50 or 250 years, what’s right? Future centennials might hinge on Aldo Leopold’s 1949 “Land Ethic” answer: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the stability, integrity and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Happy American Yovel; Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, emeritus at Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, is director of climate partnerships and advocacy for Adamah.
