You shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding (achuza) and each of you shall return to your family (mishpacha).
I have long felt that the Jubilee is misunderstood. It clearly cannot be about an economic or social agenda, since the reversion at the end of 49 years does not include any other assets besides restoring each man to his land, achuza, and to his family, mishpacha. No gold or sheep or businesses or ships are to be handed over. Just reversion to achuza and mishpacha.
So if not some form of social or economic justice, what is the Jubilee about?
Let’s look at the words themselves: achuza, and mishpacha.
The word achuza does not merely mean land, or even ancestral land. It has a very specific use in the Torah. Here are the first uses:
[G-d promises Avram] I assign the land you sojourn in to you and your offspring to come, all the land of Canaan, as an everlasting achuza. I will be their God.” (Gen. 17:18)
“I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial achuza among you, that I may remove my dead for burial.” … Let him sell me the cave of Machpelah that he owns, which is at the edge of his land. Let him sell it to me, at the full price, for a burial achuza in your midst.” … Thus the field with its cave passed from the Hittites to Abraham, as a burial achuza.(Gen. 23)
The meaning is clear – it is not merely land, or even ancestral or inherited land. The use of the word achuza for the Jubilee is specifically to reconnect us to the promise to Avram and his first land acquisition.
The underlying meaning is about the very origin of the word: that this land was promised by G-d to Avram.
As such, our following of the Jubilee is a way in which we pay tribute to that promise and acknowledge that, ultimately, the land we might otherwise think we own is only in our possession because of a promise that G-d made to our forefathers. More than this: ownership of the achuza is conditional on an ongoing and positive relationship between ourselves and G-d (which is why achuza is also mentioned with tzaraas – our relationship is always conditional on our behavior!)
“When you come into the land of Canaan, which I give you as a possession [achuzah], and I put the plague of tzaraas in a house of the land of your possession [achuzah]…” (Lev. 14:34)
And the connection to the burial place of Sarah is even more symbolically significant: Buying the cave as an achuza was the action of a man seeking to honor his wife, to invest to ensure that Sarah was the first of all Jews to actually receive the achuza that G-d had promised. And so in the Jubilee, we reflect and honor Avraham’s investment in his wife, as an echo back through the ages to our very formation as a people and their relationship between each other, and between them and G-d.
The second word is family unit, mishpacha. Even though the Torah later defines the commandment of the Jubilee as releasing a man from slavery, the initial command is nevertheless described as returning people to their family. Why?
I think it is because mishpacha is first used for an elemental formational experience of all living things – leaving the ark and starting life anew:
Every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that stirs on earth came out of the ark by families. (Gen. 8:19)
If we compare the idea of the Jubilee and a freed slave to someone who has emerged from the claustrophobic and miserable existence on Noah’s ark into the bright and promising outdoors, we might get a sense of what the Torah is trying to achieve when it commands that every man should return to his family.
So, parsing the verse once again: You shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding (achuza) and each of you shall return to your family (mishpacha).
The Jubilee does not hearken back a mere 50 years – instead, it is meant to reconnect us to the rebirthing of all life after the Flood, and the foundational relationships between man and G-d (and man and wife) that are the reason any of us are here. Through the Jubilee, we can understand that our lives are meant to serve a higher – and older – purpose.
P.S. Joseph may have committed a faux pas in that he grants his family achuza in Egypt – which was never meant to be ours.
So Joseph settled his father and his brothers, giving them achuza in the choicest part of the land of Egypt, in the region of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded. (Gen. 47:11)
Jacob may reprove Joseph for this, by including the otherwise-rare word:
And Jacob said to Joseph, “El Shaddai, who appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan, blessed me, and said to me, ‘I will make you fertile and numerous, making of you a community of peoples; and I will assign this land to your offspring to come for an everlasting achuza.’ (Gen. 48:4) and then instructing all of his sons:
the cave which is in the field of Machpelah, facing Mamre, in the land of Canaan, the field that Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite for a burial achuza (Gen. 49:30)
This might have been a subtle way to tell Joseph that the only achuza for the Jewish people was in Canaan – and never in Egypt.
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