Parshas Behar
I once asked my children: “Suppose a father shops for his kids’ school snacks. Do you think the kids would rest easy if he purchased exactly the snacks needed for each day? Or would they prefer that he stock up for a week at a time?” My 10-year-old daughter answered: It depends on how trustworthy the father is. This week we read about the mitzvah of shemitah- working the land for seven years and letting it rest on the eighth. “And if you should say, ‘What will we eat in the seventh year? We will not sow, and we will not gather in our produce!’”
Why were the Yidden concerned about the seventh year? The crop of the sixth year would surely provide for the seventh. It was the eighth year that should have concerned them, being that they wouldn’t be planting anything during the seventh year. When we have pas b’salo, plenty of bread in our basket for the future, it’s much easier to enjoy the bread we’re consuming today. But when we have just enough to fill ourselves, even an abundance, but nothing waiting for tomorrow, it’s difficult to enjoy even that which we have today. This is the challenge of shemitah. Even though there’s enough for the seventh year, the fact that there’s nothing left in our basket for the eighth year makes it difficult to swallow during the seventh. Unless! Unless we have complete trust in our Father.[1] Like a child going for his school snacks, if he trusts his father, he’ll approach the pantry with full confidence that there’s snack waiting for him, even if when he took snack yesterday it was the last one. May we gather the strength to have full trust in our Father in Heaven during this shemitah year, and may we feel confident that He has only goodness in store for us, materially and spiritually. Gut Shabbos, Rabbi Mordechai Lipskier [1] Kli Yakar. SPONSORED BY The Flint family l’zecher nishmas Reb Avraham Michoel ben Yaakov Shimon Halevi a"h
The Moshe Group Moshe and Rivky Majeski