The Torah portion of Behar discusses the laws concerning the sale of land in the Holy Land. It discusses the sale of fields, homes located in unwalled cities, and homes located in walled cities. What is the spiritual meaning behind these laws?
SELLING YOUR CAREER, HOME, AND SOUL
Fields, homes located in unwalled cities, and homes located in walled cities symbolize three aspects of our daily lives. Fields represent a person's career and their day-to-day interactions and purchases in the outside world, in the "field." Homes situated in unwalled cities represent a person's internal home and family life, which are not exposed for all to observe. Homes located in cities surrounded by an additional wall of protection are symbolic of the most vulnerable and intimate space of a person's life, usually guarded by an additional fortress of privacy. This represents a person's inner relationship with his core-self, his core values, his soul. His G-d.
Here, the Torah gives us a blueprint of what transpires when we "sell" and dispose of our careers, homes, and selves.
GOODBYE INTEGRITY
When you sell your field, i.e., when you allow your career and your daily external encounters to become tarnished by dishonesty and selfishness, you can get away without noticing your moral degeneration for a full two years. Only after two years of moral and spiritual decay will you begin to sense the void in your life. The depravity caused by the "selling" of your integrity will begin to haunt you. Then, when you have become aware and frustrated, you can liberate your field and your life. Even if you don't, time and life's experiences are likely to do the job. In the 50th year, you will get back your field. But why wait so long?
GOODBYE LOVE
Then comes the far more serious situation where you "sell" your home, i.e., you lose touch with your loved ones, your wife, your children, and your closest friends. In your smugness, you enter into your private bubble and alienate the people closest to you. You give up your home.
And when you dispose of your home, you will sense the emptiness immediately. Your life will become far more shallow and artificial. Since the pain will be felt immediately, you are indeed capable of liberating your home right after the "sale." Here again, even if you don't possess the courage to change, time and life's journey usually will change you. But why wait? Who knows what can transpire till then? Will you still have the chance to repair broken relationships?
GOODBYE G-D
Then comes the third and most serious condition: when you "sell" your most intimate space, when you become alienated from your deepest sense of self, from your core values, from your inner relationship with G-d. In such an event, you can sense the extraordinary void immediately and thus, liberate your soul right away. But if you wait for more than a year, you will likely lose the chance to ever liberate your inner identity again.
When you allow the external pressures or enjoyments of life to rob you of your core self, when you no longer dedicate twenty minutes a day to speak your heart out to your Creator, when you have no time for the essence of it all, you will soon lose touch with the notion that you ever had any innocence to lose. You may no longer know that there was anything to liberate.
It is painful to lose things ("fields") in life. It is far more painful to lose people ("homes") in life. But the worst pain of all is when we lose our connection with the quintessence of life and reality, with G-d. We simply can't afford to lose our souls. None of us can afford to sacrifice our few intimate moments of prayer and communion with G-d because of other responsibilities or pleasures. For without this relationship, we might one day look in the mirror and observe a dead soul.
