“I roamed and rambled and followed my footsteps/To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts./ All around me a voice was sounding/This land was made for you and me…”
To these infamous Woody Guthrie lyrics, Parasha B’har begs us to add a caveat: This land was made for you and me to dwell. That is, to dwell as God’s tenants, and not to exploit the land as false masters, at the expense of another of God’s guests suffering the indignity of life without a home.
In the midst of Leviticus 25, we receive the line which compels us to understand that my right to feel at home on the land is only as valid as yours:
וְהָאָרֶץ, לֹא תִמָּכֵר לִצְמִתֻת–כִּי-לִי, הָאָרֶץ: כִּי-גֵרִים וְתוֹשָׁבִים אַתֶּם, עִמָּדִי.
And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is Mine, for you are strangers, dwelling with me.
(Lev. 25:23)
Here, I read our “strangeness” to be a powerful unifying force, calling the entire community, as Rabbi Aryeh Cohen notes, “to feel obligated to ensure that everyone can access the personal safety and dignity inherent in earning a livelihood and having a land to call home.” It also feels like a communal call to creative environmental action, to repair and heal a land that has suffered from our species’ heavy footprint for as long as Torah has been in print.
The communal obligation to house and home all who seek to dwell safely, and to protect the land around us as if we were grateful guests, is an outlook I hope to embody more fully as my family puts down roots in Seattle. The 30% increase in homelessness in Seattle over the last three years is palpable when I walk through our neighborhood. I find myself lost for words when my toddler perceives that someone wrapped in a blanket on a bench near our house “needs help” or that the park has “so much trash.”
We are particularly blessed to be guests of the land of Seattle. All the more so, Parasha B’har reminds us that we are not masters, but temporary dwellers – beholden to one another, and to the land while we’re alive to enjoy it. True expression of God’s justice means that we must view poverty, displacement, and environmental degradation not as bad turns of luck, but as a brokenness in the relationship between God, land, and life that each of us must do our small part to repair.