Social Revolution? Behar - On the Mountain From CG Workbook Five, Volume 3, Vayikra Are class systems Scriptural? Does the Torah encourage classes and castes, creating a system whereby people are arbitrarily assigned a value? At first glance, it may seem so. For the purpose of vows, men are valued at more shekels than women. Hebrew slaves have more rights (and obligations) than those from idol-worshiping nations. Levites, priests, and the high priest have more access to holier places in the Camp. Do the instructions of the Torah sanction a class system, or is there something deeper than the plain meaning of the text? “Moses is the prophecy, and the Prophets are his legs.” With this old rabbinic saying in mind, consider what the Prophet Isaiah envisioned from the seed of the Torah: Behold, the LORD lays the earth waste, devastates it, distorts its surface and scatters its inhabitants. And the people will be like the priest, the servant like his master, the maid like her mistress, the buyer like the seller, the lender like the borrower, the creditor like the debtor. (24:1-2) For thus it will be in the midst of the earth among the peoples, as the shaking of an olive tree, as the gleanings when the grape harvest is over. (13) This future gleaning devastation of the earth produces something akin to communism or socialism. The class system is completely destroyed with Divine violence, not with the Beast’s agenda of orderly social change or planned revolution. This devastation makes a social revolution sound like a skirmish. Based on the leveling of the classes described by Isaiah, the vision in the seed words of the Torah is not creation or perpetuation of class systems. Adonai promises eventually to destroy those systems created by hard-hearted human beings and to heal their sinful natures that make some distinctions necessary for purposes of management and ministry. In fact, other passages in Isaiah suggest that the food chain within the animal kingdom will be restructured, removing the predator/prey distinctions. Jubilees and the mini-Jubilee of the seven weeks of Shavuot are a key to the release from the beast.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 12:19:24 +0000
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