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How should we use our senses?
for Parshat B'har
i
I see the world from my own vantage-point.
But I hear your voice
from any direction;
sound calls me to you.
*
Consider:
Eve finds the Fruit
a pleasure to the eyes;
but she and Adam hear
the voice of God in the Garden,
and they know they have wronged Him.
Eyes are a gateway to your pleasure;
sound startles you
from yourself
toward another.
ii
We count out forty-nine years.
On the fiftieth
we blow the shofar,
the trumpet.
Debts are forgiven,
land reverts to ancestral families,
land goes fallow;
slaves go free.
To say:
your borrower
your land
your slave
have their own existence
apart from yours.
*
We come to this understanding
through the trumpet:
through listening.
iii
Of the slave who shall go free
in the fiftieth year,
God says:
he is owed freedom,
you shall not see him worked brutally
before your eyes.
To say:
train your eyes
to find brutality
to root it out.
*
For forty-nine years
you ready yourself to hear the shofar:
to listen,
to hear around you.
Learning to listen,
you learn to use your eyes.
Learning to listen,
you learn to see.
Genesis 3:6,8; Leviticus 25:8-28,53
Shabbat Shalom,
Abe