YU TORAH SHIRA SMILES ON PARSHAT Behar 5774: Jubilee Jubilation

Parshat Behar is completely occupied with the laws that pertain to yovel, the jubilee year, the fiftieth year in the cycle of counting the years in Eretz Yisroel, from the basic laws to the tangential laws. The Parsha begins with instructions on calculating the jubilee year, “Seven cycles of sabbatical years, seven times seven, the years of the seven cycles of sabbatical years shall be for you forty nine years.” Then the Torah continues with instructions that on Yom Kippur “you shall sound the shofar throughout the land … You shall proclaim freedom throughout the land for all its inhabitants. … You shall return each man to his ancestral heritage and you shall return each man to his family.” What a complex, seemingly convoluted and, for the Torah, an extraordinarily wordy calculation. Would it not have been equally effective to say, “After seven sabbatical cycles, the jubilee year will begin in the fiftieth year? Sound the shofar on Yom Kippur of that year.” click here for Summary by Channie Koplowitz Stein.