Jubilees

[hatam_soferet]

Well, it’s my Queen’s diamond jubilee weekend, so I’m going to post about jubilees this week.

This is Bet Haverim’s fifty-year anniversary, their proper jubilee. The concept of jubilee comes from the Torah, from Leviticus. So when we were discussing which section of the Torah Bet Haverim would be writing as a community, we naturally came to the section describing the original jubilee.

On the visits I’ve made to Davis, we’ve been writing that section, letter by letter. Last time I was there, we also had a discussion session talking about the concept of jubilee from a slightly different angle.

The biblical jubilee features, amongst other things, the idea that everyone should go home, back to their family lands. But Bet Haverim’s jubilee features the fifty-year mark of a community. Some people have been at Bet Haverim right from the beginning.

I wanted people to explore that tension, between the idea of jubilee as homecoming on the one hand, and as home-creating on the other hand.

Here are the different texts we looked at. You might like to print the sheet and discuss it with family or friends.

This is one of the songs we talked about:

After the discussion, Elaine sent me this very interesting article, which adds a whole other perspective to the discussion.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Well, that's very interesting. I'd just confidently told Melody that jubilee derives from Latin iubilare to rejoice, and now I see that it might have a much more interesting and ancient derivation from yobel, with the Latin having borrowed from Hebrew. Or both being derived from a proto-Indo-European stem.

Does the state of Israel still believe that all land should be leasehold for 50 years max?